Jc3s5h added a comment.
It needs to be decided if this will actually be implemented with three separate fields for each angle (degrees, arcminutes, and arcseconds of declination and hours, time minutes, and time seconds of right ascension) or if a single decimal number will be used for each angle. I suggest it should not be a goal of this support to allow a round-trip conversion, but rather, to approximate the precision of the source in the manner usually followed by engineers and scientists. For example, if a source gave a R.A. as 3h 10m, but the implementors decided to store it as decimal hours, it should be stored as 3.17 h to reflect the precision of the source, not as 3.16666666666667 h or the like. If a data consumer were to convert 3.17 h back to h m s, he/she would get 3 h 10 m 12 s, and the responsibility would be on the data consumer to realize that the value was only given to three significant figures and so 3 h 10 m 12 s should be rounded to 3 h 10 m. If we are storing decimal numbers, we should use significant figures and rounding in the manner customary among scientists and engineers. If our goal were to perfectly represent the source, we would keep it as an arbitrary string, but then we wouldn't be able to do computation with it. TASK DETAIL https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T127950 EMAIL PREFERENCES https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/settings/panel/emailpreferences/ To: Jc3s5h Cc: Jc3s5h, Swpb, Nikki, Aklapper, Micru, StudiesWorld, D3r1ck01, Izno, Wikidata-bugs, aude, Mbch331 _______________________________________________ Wikidata-bugs mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-bugs
