[WikiEN-l] Excessive units converstion?

[Andrew Gray]

On 31/10/06, George Herbert <george.herbert at 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.

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 at dunelm.org.uk