[WikiEN-l] Re: Announcing a policy proposal

[Matt Brown]

On 5/16/05, Tony Sidaway <minorityreport at bluebottle.com> wrote:
> Wouldn't it be cool to have some kind of macro system for pint,
> liter/litre, kilogram/kilogramme, foot, and whatnot--something not unlike
> the date conversion system we use, that enables me to see 8 October, 1988
> where an American would see October 8, 1988.

Is this the season for dead-horse resuscitation?

Unit conversion is not necessarily very well done in automated ways. 
Yes, you'll get a conversion, but without a huge amount of
parameterisation for preferred units, precision, and the like, it will
provide a much poorer conversion than a manual one, where human
judgment can be used to provide a good conversion.

And if you're willing to go to all that work to parameterize a
conversion operation, isn't it easier to just do the conversion
yourself?

-Matt (User:Morven)

P.S. so long as [[User:Bobblewik]] is active, we don't need such a
system; he seems to be quite willing to ensure that all Imperial and
US measurements in Wikipedia get a SI equivalent ...