https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=235
--- Comment #38 from tahrey <[email protected]> 2011-10-17 13:23:02 UTC --- I'm sorry... what? The converter, because I happened to feed it a number that happens to be a multiple of ten units, is arbitarily then assuming that it's being asked to convert to an accuracy of +/- 5 units rather than +/- 0.5, even though I'm writing the figure the same way as I did the ones either side? So if I have a series of numbers from 1 to 100, I will have to make the required accuracy explicit for 10% of them? I'm having a lot of trouble seeing how this can be considered correct, or even acceptably wrong. So if I entered some data on a set of vintage cars, that one had a recorded top speed of 68mph, and another that had a recorded top speed of 70mph, coming to the edit wiki not knowing of this abberant behaviour, or of what the actual km/h equivalents were, but having seen the Convert tool used elsewhere, may well copy and paste said thing into my article and thereby tell metric-using readers that these cars achieved the same top speed? No. This is dumb. The sensible way of approaching these things is that if a number has been entered with no decimal point, then you convert to the nearest whole-unit equivalent in the target units, unless there is a huge enough difference that there would be a serious loss of accuracy (e.g. one set of units is 200x smaller than the other, in which case you insert a couple decimals). If it is entered with a certain number of decimals - including 70.00, for example - you convert to match that number (again, adjusting if the target is hugely different). For large non-decimal numbers where standard form is not used, then the user should then have to specify the accuracy they wish to display. Reduced accuracy should not be the default, because then you have a problem - as in this case - of the unwitting user having written a multiple-of-ten (or multiple-of-100!) figure without a decimal, but meaning it to be unit-accurate... as is the case with the arabic numbering system... and not having a way of making that explicit... but your system goes and assumes that it's one significant figure instead of two or three. There's a place for assuming how many sig figs are used depending on what number you use, maybe even for assuming ludicrously low ones (like... one! which is your suggestion... i'm pretty sure my own math and sci teachers recommended never using less than 3 if it could be at all helped; so 70 becomes 113, 55 becomes 88.5... that's not OTT, now, is it?), but this ain't it. We're not in a science lab or using some degree level maths tool, but putting out a relatively simple and easy to understand webpage editing interface for the world's laypeople to update a general knowledge repository with. The option should be left there, but the default behaviour should be different. Alternatively, explicit definition of accuracy within the convert tag should be made mandatory for all conversions and a sensible default retroactively applied using a bot to all the existing ones where it isn't. Please reconsider. -- Configure bugmail: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are the assignee for the bug. You are on the CC list for the bug. _______________________________________________ Wikibugs-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikibugs-l
