[Wikipedia-l] Re: Metric v. English

[Daniel Mayer]

On Friday 03 January 2003 07:34 am,  tarquin wrote:
> The [[Orders of Magnitude]] group of pages should help with this --
> wherever units are given they should link to one of the "chain pages"
> that give comparisons & conversions.

IMO it is a fallacy to think that your average American can really can get 
their brain around what 9,000,000 square miles (sic) is in the real world or 
the average European can really get their brain around what 9,000,000 square 
kilometres (sic) is in the real world. They both just /think/ they know what 
that is because they are familiar with what the base unit is. 

IMO numbers that size combined with the fact that areas and especially volumes 
get numerically larger faster than what most people intuitively expect (a 
circle with a diameter of 20 units has an area of 314 sq units; a sphere with 
an diameter of 20 units has a volume of 4,190 cubic units) tends to render 
such large numbers relatively non-comprehensible without some frame of 
reference other than familiarity with a base unit.   

That is why the Orders of Magnitude articles are so useful: A list is given 
with examples of things in the same size range and if that size range 
includes an Imperial unit then a conversion factor is presented. In addition 
to this, links to an online converter are provided for most of the order of 
mag /and/ unit articles. See

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/1_E6_m²
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_kilometer

> Besides, the metric system is really not hard to grasp. There's one
> basic unit for each type of measurement that can be used for anything.
> and the same multiplying prefixes apply to all units.

Very true. This is one of the reasons why the WikiProjects 
have standardized on metric/SI while linking to either the unit 
articles (such as N,NNN [[square kilometre|km²]]) or the order 
of mag articles (such as [[1 E9 m²|N,NNN km²]]). The unit 
articles have conversion factors in them, the order of mag 
articles have examples of things in the given size range 
and both article types have links to an online converter. 
(NOTE: We toyed with the idea of having Imperial in parenthesis 
but this makes the tables too fat for users with 800x600 displays). 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

WikiKarma Payment. Have you had your Wiki today?
http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=January_3&diff=555047&oldid=554745
(along with updating almost all articles linked from that page)