Ok Domas, you’re just not getting it here. Try going to this example page…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Greg_L/val_failure_example Do you see all those numeric equivalencies in high-precision scientific notation? Those types of numbers appear in science articles all over Wikipedia. Do you see the ones that are generating error codes? Suppose they didn’t do that when you wrote the article but it randomly happens to others that view the page. Robert is saying that if there is a software setting to make the servers perform the same way, then we should make them the same. Why? Because, imagine that editors use {val} and check (twice, or thrice) to make sure all looks good. But then 20% of the time—purely randomly based upon the server—a couple of numbers with 13 digits will generate error codes like shown in the article. That’s what’s happening here. Roughly 80% of the time, 13 and 14-digit numbers are rendered properly. But 20% of the time, they don’t. Why not just advise editors that they should limit {val} for 12 digits? The issue is that 12-digits is just barely cutting it. Ten years ago, there were few numbers in physics that were measured to this precision. But the are becoming increasingly common—particularly anything related to time or length. That’s why editors should care. If you don’t that’s fine. But please don’t suggest that others shouldn’t care either. Greg L On Feb 11, 2009, at 1:13 PM, Domas Mituzas wrote: Hello! > Yes Domas, haha, because no one would ever want to write about math or > high precision scientific measurements in an encyclopedia. Since when you need floating point math in presentation language, when you're writing about floating point math? There're plenty of topics that our encyclopedia is about, that don't have tools (like physics/biology simulators) inside wikitext. Damnit, we write about all these people and we don't even have tools that would evaluate their genome and provide probabilistic matching and evaluation of article text based on that. > Am I wrong in thinking that the server admins should care when > different machines produce different output from the same code? This is exactly my point, you don't give a single valid reason for us to care, except some random "oh no, 12 numbers, oh no 14 numbers". Why should we care? -- Domas Mituzas -- http://dammit.lt/ -- [[user:midom]] _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
