Jimmy Wales wrote:
One side note is that Tarquin changed 9,000,000 square miles to 23,000,000 square kilometers. This move was apparently uncontroversial.
Is that right? As an American, I frankly confess that the metric system is a curiosity to me. 9,000,000 square miles, I can grasp, because I know how long a mile is intuitively. The kilometer, on the other hand, is non-intuitive, just an arbitrary length from a textbook.
As a Eurpoean, I never touched miles, yards, etc. until I worked in the US for a few month. Always missed these highway exits ;-)
As a scientist, I have to insist that the metric system is to be the main system used on Wikipedia! (Of course, feel free to mention miles&co. somewhere too;-)
Magnus