Erik Moeller wrote:
I have no opposition to including the metric system, and especially in scientific articles. But in many articles, Americans will have a hard time understanding unless English equivalents are given.
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.
I tend to agree with that :-)
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.
How about extending the variables? {{10|m2}} would be 10 square meters {{50|ft}} would be 50 feet etc.
Display would be dependent on * which wikipedia you're using: de has only metric units, en shows metric with us (like this) * can be overridden by a user option
Should be easy to implement.
Magnus