On Jul 28, 2016 3:27 AM, "Lydia Pintscher" <lydia.pintscher@wikimedia.de> wrote:

On Wed, Jul 27, 2016 at 9:18 PM, Stas Malyshev <smalyshev@wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> Right now, quantities with units are displayed by attaching unit name to
> the number. While it gives the idea of what is going on, it is somewhat
> ungrammatical in English (83 kilgoramm, 185 centimetre, etc.) [1] and in
> other languages - i.e. in Russian it's 83 килограмм, 185 сантиметр -
> instead of the correct "83 килограмма", "185 сантиметров". For some
> units, the norms are kind of tricky and fluid (e.g. see [2]), and they
> are not even identical across all units in the same language, but the
> common theme is that there are grammatical rules on how to do it and
> we're ignoring them right now.
>
> I think we do have some means to grammatically display numbers - for
> example, number of references is displayed correctly in English and
> Russian. As I understand, it is done by using certain formats in message
> strings, and these formats are supported in the code in Language
> classes. So, I wonder if we should maybe have an (optional) property
> that defines the same format for units? We could then reuse the same
> code to display units in proper grammatical way.
>
> Alternatively, we could use short units display [3] - i.e. cm instead of
> centimetre - and then plurals are not required. However, this relies on
> units having short names, and for some units short names can be rather
> obscure, and maybe in some language short names need grammatical forms
> too. Given that we do not link unit names, it would be rather confusing
> (btw, why don't we?). Some units may not have short forms at all.
>
> And the short names do not exactly match the languages - rather, they
> usually match the script (i.e. Cyrillic, or Latin, or Hebrew) - and we
> may not even have data on which language uses which script, in a useful
> form. So using short forms is very tricky.
>
> Any other ideas on this topic? Do we have a ticket tracking this
> somewhere? I looked but couldn't find it.
>
> [1]
> http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/22082/are-units-in-english-singular-or-plural
> [2]
> https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9E%D0%B1%D1%81%D1%83%D0%B6%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B5_%D0%92%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%BF%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%B8%D0%B8:%D0%9E%D1%84%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%BC%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B5_%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B0%D1%82%D0%B5%D0%B9#.D0.A1.D0.BA.D0.BB.D0.BE.D0.BD.D0.B5.D0.BD.D0.B8.D0.B5_.D0.B5.D0.B4.D0.B8.D0.BD.D0.B8.D1.86_.D0.B8.D0.B7.D0.BC.D0.B5.D1.80.D0.B5.D0.BD.D0.B8.D1.8F
> [3] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T86528

The discussion about how to do this is happening in
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T86528 The basic problem is that we
do use items for the units. I think this is the right thing to do but
it does make this particular part a bit tricky.


Cheers
Lydia

--
Lydia Pintscher - http://about.me/lydia.pintscher
Product Manager for Wikidata

Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.
Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24
10963 Berlin
www.wikimedia.de

Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V.

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