Erik Moeller wrote:
en.wikipedia.org is not us.wikpedia.org. I am not an American or even a native English speaker and I read the en.wikipedia a lot, for many different reasons. en certainly should accomodate US idiosyncracies, but not to the confusion of a more broadly defined target audience.
That's all completely correct. en should accomodate local idiosyncracies of any major population in contexts where confusion and difficulties are likely.
The right thing to do is to introduce Wiki syntax for formatting units, so that they can be converted on the fly. SI should be the default.
I don't agree that this is the right thing to do. Automatic conversion is a very bad idea in most cases.
The article that started this discussion is a case in point. "Europe added almost 23,000,000 km^2" or "Europe added almost 9,000,000 mi^2" are both approximate statements. An automatic conversion would give an unwarranted impression of precision in this case.
It's easy enough for people from around the world to work together on the articles to make sure that local idiosyncracies are observed, _and_ that the degree of precision and grammatical context are respected.
Never send a computer program to do a human's job.
--Jimbo