Community Wishlist/Wishes/Metric or Imperial unit selectability
Metric or Imperial unit selectability
Description
In the English language Wikipedia, there very often appears both metric and imperial measurements, with one or the other appearing in parentheses. This is to make the article more accessible to a wider international audience, which is a very desirable goal, and one that I support. However, it also detracts from the readability of the article. Especially in articles of a technical topic, including both systems of measurement can make the article excessively cumbersome to read, and also imposes an extra burden on authors and editors to do the conversions and type the text.
I suggest that since computers are excellent at math, a function could be created to allow users to select their preference of Metric or Imperial units, and the Wiki computers can do the conversions in the background and insert the results into the article text, so the article can be read smoothly.
I admit that this is a somewhat American-centric wish. Nearly all the world except North America uses metric. I wish we could switch to metric and be done with it, however, the US government is so dysfunctional it apparently doesn't even have the issue on its radar, we seem to be stuck with old English units for the foreseeable future.
If such an inline metric-english converter was created, then it would need to be followed up with some kind of automatic "bot" function to search out articles containing heavy mention of units of measurement, and insert the selectable units into them.
Apologies if such features have already been created, and I just dont know about them.
Assigned focus area
Unassigned.
Type of wish
Feature request
Related projects
Wikipedia
Affected users
English language readers, mostly