Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers: Difference between revisions - Wikipedia

Line 1,522:

::: If Wikipedia was around in the 1960s then I'd expect it to reflect the real world consensus as my Physics and Mathematics textbooks do from that period of time and they use feet, inches and pounds. I can say it is more accurate not to use IEC prefixes because as I have shown before IEC prefixes can be confusing and mistaken that they are using decimal and not binary. Therefore to state the exact number of bytes is completely unambiguous. Stating the number of bytes need not mean writing out all of the numbers because it is common to use power notation instead. This is shown in the binary prefix conversion table. '''[[User:Fnagaton|Fnag]][[User talk:Fnagaton|aton]]''' 16:51, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

::: Fnagaton, I wonder why you insist on using the term "real world" as if it was something in strong support of your position. As other people already wrote and you know: "The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth." The word "reality" is synonymous to the word "truth". Therefore "real world" is no valid argument. So it doesn't even matter that some people apparently have a different perception of reality than others. --[[Special:Contributions/217.87.90.29|217.87.90.29]] ([[User talk:217.87.90.29|talk]]) 17:11, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

::* Jeh, terms like ppb and ppt are ambiguous so IUPAP proposed adoption of the “uno”. Thus, ppm would be 1 µU and ppt would be 1 pU. Notwithstanding that the uno was absolutely unambiguous and was a great idea, it didn’t catch on. What point would there be to using the unit of measure here on Wikipedia if the reader is expected to remember a unit of measure that will likely only ever be encountered here on Wikipedia? Manufacturers of memory don’t advertise “2 gibibyte SODIMM card” and general-circulation magazines don’t use the IEC prefixes either. No matter how meritorious and wonderful a new unit of measure is, encyclopedias and dictionaries ''never'' add them to their lexicon until they achieve a certain level of ubiquity in real-world use. There are sound reasons for this: to communicate with the intended readership with minimal confusion. Wikipedia is not immune from this common-sense rule. [[User:Greg L|Greg L]] (''[[User_talk:Greg_L|my talk]])'' 16:41, 27 March 2008 (UTC)