On 31/10/06, George Herbert <george.herbert(a)gmail.com> wrote: Would we not give a conversion if a historical quote gave a distance in furlongs? Maybe not inline, but somewhere on the page. -- Oldak Quill (oldakquill(a)gmail.com)

On 10/31/06, George Herbert <george.herbert(a)gmail.com> wrote: In quotes, I think that units conversion should be a footnote; I'd rather keep the integrity of the quote. However, a conversion should definitely be there. People constantly complain about metric conversions, but they're useful to the fairly large proportion of the world's population with no conception of US traditional units (or UK Imperial units). 1000 acres means absolutely nothing to most EU residents, for instance. Conversions should be rough approximations when the original figure is an approximation, of course, as this one clearly is. As to why km^2 instead of hectares, that was a long flamewar; suffice to say that hectares, as a non-SI unit, are to some degree deprecated and thus disliked by the SI-unit advocates that do most of the unit conversion work. There was broad consensus to use hectares in instances where they are an officially-sanctioned unit (e.g. France) but km^2 conversions are also used in most of those. -Matt

On 31/10/06, George Herbert <george.herbert(a)gmail.com> wrote: I confess I'm one of the real hardliners who says we shouldn't even wikilink in quotes! One of my real bugbears is people helpfully correcting unusual date formats without checking to see if they're in a direct quote, or in the title of a cited source, or something... really we shouldn't be altering or muddying the text of a quote any more than we have to. With the exception of rectifications to make something actually parse better - changing "all the underaforesaid shall" to "[they] shall" - I'd personally feel happier with using footnotes to annotate the quotation, if you feel the need to annotate it at all. And even that should be done sparingly unless it's truly confusing to the average reader... and, if at all possible, not a mindless numerical conversion. [Going beyond the example a little...] In general, don't give us more numbers to explain numbers! This is only really helpful when the original is a highly familiar concept but expressed in an unusual system. Turn "Ivan was stranded in the forest and had to walk twenty versts in the snow to reach shelter" into miles or kilometers, sure. But for something less immediately recognisable, like "The Earl was granted twelve thousand acres of desmene land", annotating it with (almost half the cultivated land in the entire county) or (easily large enough for twenty manors) is much smarter than to just quote a modern number that is equally meaningless to most readers. Giving a "familiar" number looks helpful, and in some ways it is - but in some ways, where concepts have changed over time or across cultures, it can obfuscate as much as it clarifies, and we should be alert for those so we can provide a useful and meaningful context. The farmland example I quote above... well, twelve thousand acres of cultivable land meant a very different thing in medieval England than it would mean in contemporary Kansas, and any explanatory note should try to explain the former rather than just quoting a number and leaving the reader to try to guess what it means. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk