It's definitely pedantic beyond reason; it also gives far more importance to the unit of measurement than the actual quote warrants. But of course I'm sure people will crawl out of the woodwork if one implies that if someone really needs to know how large 1,000 acres is precisely (the implication from the sentence itself is that it is pretty large for a farm, that's all you really need to know) that they can convert it on their own time (which Google makes pretty easy these days).
FF
On 10/31/06, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
I just found this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truman_Capote#In Cold Blood
Apparently some time ago, someone added a metric conversion (4 km^2) to the term "1,000 acres" in the quoted New York Times article.
That's a direct historical quote - is an in-line metric units conversion appropriate within the quote?
It seems to me like we shouldn't be doing that.
-- -george william herbert george.herbert@gmail.com _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l