Talk:Community Wishlist/Wishes/Metric or Imperial unit selectability

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In relation to Template:Convert

This feature exists in a more primitive form! The Convert template is widely used across English Wikipedia (thankfully)

However, I don't think convert fully fills your wish. Convert allows editors to specify what units get displayed, which means users have to break out a calculator if they want a unit that the editors didn't choose to convert to.

I think it would be interesting if Convert was modified to display the user's primary unit set (Imperial/Metric) initially, while giving users the ability to select the exact unit they want any individual number converted to. For example, should the distance between the earth and the sun be in kilometers? miles? light-seconds? inches? Sure, an American user might prefer to see "Miles" first, but we don't really know what they actually want to see in the end.

I love this idea though! I think this would be a great thing that users wouldn't even know they wanted :) Mooshberry (talk) 19:08, 1 August 2024 (UTC)

I don't have much to add, but if such a feature is going ahead, why only Wikipedia? Wikivoyage and Wikibooks could do with a similar feature. --SHB2000 (t • c) 23:55, 1 August 2024 (UTC)

Support

Countries using the metric (SI), imperial, and US customary systems

 Strong support – I hope it won't be too long until this US customary system can be put to rest (it doesn't have any benefit and just makes everything more complicated and nonstandardized) but until then the multiple measures in articles makes them cluttered and harder to read. Moreover, enabling to select which one of these should be displayed would make it much easier to produce podcast audios of articles (one e.g. needs to replace m with meters in the text to read) or help when using screenreaders where you don't want to have the speech flow interrupted by having every measure converted into other measures or when machine translating articles. Regarding the thread above, Convert allows editors to specify what units get displayed seems to be false – I could not find any such option in the preferences. Prototyperspective (talk) 11:18, 10 May 2025 (UTC)