Community Wishlist Survey 2021/Archive/Option to Switch between Metric and Imperial Units Site-wide

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Option to Switch between Metric and Imperial Units Site-wide

NoN Does not require engineers

  • Problem: Current implementations of unit measures in Wikipedia are inconsistent at best and confusing at worst.
  • Who would benefit: Any users trying to get consistent units for things such as climate data, distance information, etc. One would not see imperial units preferred for articles in the United States or targeted at Americans or metric units preferred for non-American articles.
  • Proposed solution: Offering a site-wide option to switch between metric and imperial units in settings or in articles themselves.
  • More comments:
  • Phabricator tickets:
  • Proposer: Benjamin (talk) 14:48, 19 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

I wonder how this would be implemented: currently someone may simply type 'this stuff has a length of 200m' ... How to identify for sure that the notation 200m is a length unit, or if the editor want to say something else? Maybe add some sort of tag, mentioning an amount and an unit ? Something like 'this stuff has a length of \[\[unit amount:100 unit:meters\]\]'? AlexanderPicoli (talk) 16:31, 19 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

A lot of instance go through en:Template:Convert which could add metadata to help with this.
This is really only relevant to en.wikipedia.org, which unfortunately is the largest site. Maybe there should be an autogenerated variant at en-us.wikpedia.org for non-metric use. Crissov (talk) 10:54, 20 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
My thoughts on utilizing an en-us vs an en-uk, etc to denote unitary measurements wouldn't be very helpful for someone like me, who is an American who uses metric over imperial, although I like the idea of splitting the Wikis up by dialect. For a feature like this it might just need to be slowly implemented over time as people update articles with a new formatted text like AlexanderPicoli mentions above. Benjamin (talk) 16:10, 22 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
There are also UK people who use imperial units: our road signs show miles rather than km. One implementation might be for Convert, when showing the same value in both metric and other units, to wrap them in different classes, and to create a gadget allowing a reader to hide either of them easily with CSS. Certes (talk) 01:53, 23 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I considered this in the past. It will be helpful to be able to define certain user preferences (currency, unit system, etc) so a template like that will be better targeted (i.e. I may want to only use kilometers whilst an american may want miles. Default users may be shown both). I see no need to integrate the conversion in text parsing. It may only provide a variable to templates. It will be human work (or bot work) to put the {{Convert}} when needed.--FAR (talk) 09:54, 29 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • This is a good idea, although it would require semantically tagging all instances of quantities in article text. However, it would be immediately useful for data that's pulled from Wikidata. Silver hr (talk) 02:02, 1 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • We discussed this as a team and feel that while the problem statement is valid, the solution is to use templates like en:Template:Convert. A one-size-fits-all solution as proposed is very unlikely since there are situations where showing a certain format is intentional. There could also be false positives in detecting what is a unit of measurement and not just something that looks like one. The easiest solution is to use the template, and usage of it should be left to editorial discretion. As such we're going to archive this. Thanks for participating in the survey! MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 18:06, 4 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
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