On Wed, Jul 27, 2016 at 9:18 PM, Stas Malyshev <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi! > > Right now, quantities with units are displayed by attaching unit name to > the number. While it gives the idea of what is going on, it is somewhat > ungrammatical in English (83 kilgoramm, 185 centimetre, etc.) [1] and in > other languages - i.e. in Russian it's 83 килограмм, 185 сантиметр - > instead of the correct "83 килограмма", "185 сантиметров". For some > units, the norms are kind of tricky and fluid (e.g. see [2]), and they > are not even identical across all units in the same language, but the > common theme is that there are grammatical rules on how to do it and > we're ignoring them right now. > > I think we do have some means to grammatically display numbers - for > example, number of references is displayed correctly in English and > Russian. As I understand, it is done by using certain formats in message > strings, and these formats are supported in the code in Language > classes. So, I wonder if we should maybe have an (optional) property > that defines the same format for units? We could then reuse the same > code to display units in proper grammatical way. > > Alternatively, we could use short units display [3] - i.e. cm instead of > centimetre - and then plurals are not required. However, this relies on > units having short names, and for some units short names can be rather > obscure, and maybe in some language short names need grammatical forms > too. Given that we do not link unit names, it would be rather confusing > (btw, why don't we?). Some units may not have short forms at all. > > And the short names do not exactly match the languages - rather, they > usually match the script (i.e. Cyrillic, or Latin, or Hebrew) - and we > may not even have data on which language uses which script, in a useful > form. So using short forms is very tricky. > > Any other ideas on this topic? Do we have a ticket tracking this > somewhere? I looked but couldn't find it. > > [1] > http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/22082/are-units-in-english-singular-or-plural > [2] > https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9E%D0%B1%D1%81%D1%83%D0%B6%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B5_%D0%92%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%BF%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%B8%D0%B8:%D0%9E%D1%84%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%BC%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B5_%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B0%D1%82%D0%B5%D0%B9#.D0.A1.D0.BA.D0.BB.D0.BE.D0.BD.D0.B5.D0.BD.D0.B8.D0.B5_.D0.B5.D0.B4.D0.B8.D0.BD.D0.B8.D1.86_.D0.B8.D0.B7.D0.BC.D0.B5.D1.80.D0.B5.D0.BD.D0.B8.D1.8F > [3] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T86528
The discussion about how to do this is happening in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T86528 The basic problem is that we do use items for the units. I think this is the right thing to do but it does make this particular part a bit tricky. Cheers Lydia -- Lydia Pintscher - http://about.me/lydia.pintscher Product Manager for Wikidata Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 10963 Berlin www.wikimedia.de Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V. Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter der Nummer 23855 Nz. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/029/42207. _______________________________________________ Wikidata mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata
