User talk:Gene Nygaard

For older talk, see

• User talk:Gene Nygaard/2004Dec-2005Apr (Litre,Special Fraction Characters, Deletion, merge, do nothing?, Edit summary, Mass is not weight, Middot, Ansari X Prize, Unicode code pages, Welcome to the Wikipedia, Aquarium volume, Balsam poplar, Significand, Death Valley National Park FAC, Magnetar distance units, Bot to undo damage by bot putting in U.S. census places, Thank you!, Degrees symbol, cm for height of people, Continental United States, BC / BCE dating convention, Europa (moon) edit, Units and nbsp, mid dot, Cheddar, Villages in Hong Kong. The bot thing, Devil's Lake, helium nonbreaking spaces, template:Infobox_U.S._state, California State Route 57, SuperCroc revert, Second/seconds, what is the least ugly in-line math in Planck units?, mass flow meter, Sequoia, Specific impulse)
• User talk:Gene Nygaard/2005May-2005Jun (Sugar substitute, Trinity anniversary, Slrubenstein debate, USS Mississinewa (AO-59), Gustav II Adolf-vote, merge Tonne?, PA 103, lots of edits, not an admin, Pounds force, Aircraft loaded weights, Camel, Aluminium)
• 2005Jul-2006Jan | 2006Feb | 2006Mar-2006Apr | 2006May-2006Jul | 2006Aug-2006Oct | 2006Nov-2006Dec | 2007Jan pt 1 | 2007Jan-Oct| 2007Nov-2008Nov 2008Dec-2009Jul

This user is one of the 400 most active English Wikipedians of all time.

Broken Coord

Hi. I'm working on clearing out Category:Coord template needing repair. There's an instance of {{Coord}} in User:Gene_Nygaard/sandbox#Other_stuff:

{{coord|12|02|36|S|37|77|01|W|42}} too many elements

which has 77 minutes. Would you mind if I changed it to 7 minutes, or something?
—WWoods (talk) 13:51, 13 August 2009 (UTC)

Since you haven't been around since July, I did that. —WWoods (talk) 15:47, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

Sound level meter

In acoustics, the formal and correct plural of 'decibel' is decibel NOT decibels; please remove this change, putting an 's' on the end is American not British usage and IEC has decided that British English should be used.24malbec09 (talk) 12:36, 21 December 2009 (UTC)

What utter nonsense!

You would have several things to show in order to make your point.

• You need to show that this in fact is standard British English usage.
• In light of the fact that Wikipedia explicitly allows British English as well as the English spoken by most native speakers of English, you need to show that this would be in accordance with the house rules here on Wikipedia. Show me that what you are asking for would be in accordance with Wikipedia:Manual of Style rules.
• I don't care much about anybody else's house rules, but you also have not in fact established that anybody else really has such a house rule. You have not even made any claim that the IEC doesn't use "decibels"--you merely seem to be claiming that the IEC uses British English in its own publications, which has no relevance here where other varieties of English are used. But you are also trying to bootstrap this onto the unfounded claim that the -s plural is not a part of British English.
• You are going to have a damn hard time making your point in light of the fact that the national standards laboratory of the UK, the National Physical Laboratory, UK uses decibels. For example, here is

http://www.npl.co.uk/acoustics/sound-in-air/technical-guide-sound-measurements/51549

Technical Guide - Sound Measurements

Quantities and Units for Sound Measurement

...the physical measurement (e.g. sound pressure level (SPL) is the sound pressure expressed in decibels....

So it looks like you are just wasting my time. I'll listen if you have more to say to try to make your case, but it looks like you have a tough row to hoe.

• Now some homework for you: try a search of the iec.ch site for "decibels" and don't come back here unless you are willing to provide the results of that search and discuss it. Gene Nygaard (talk) 13:27, 21 December 2009 (UTC)

Temperature unit

The correct unit for an absolute temperature is kelvin, not kelvins. See IUPAC Gold book for the SI definition. I'm sorry if the Wiki article on units has it wrongly stated a kelvins. If you look at the definition it makes no sense to use a plural form for a temperature. A temperature is a single quantity. Petergans (talk) 09:43, 30 December 2009 (UTC)

Quote me exactly what that source says, please.

Wrong. It is kelvins. See BIPM SI brochure. See NIST Special Publication 811. See numerous other sources, such as documents from the BIPM like http://www.bipm.org/utils/common/pdf/its-90/TECChapter17.pdf

A temperature is not a single quantity.

Just look at the other units of temperature we use. It is degrees Celsius, it is degrees Fahrenheit, it is degrees Rankine.

And of course, when the degree Kelvin was the proper name for the unit, it was degrees Kelvin. We change the noun in the plural in English; we don't change adjectives whether singular or plural. The word "Kelvin" was an adjective then. But it is no longer an adjective; it is now the noun. It takes the plural just like other units of measure. We now stick that s at the end of "kelvins" rather than at the end of "degrees" as we used to in the old days. Pretty much puts the kibosh on your strange notion that using the plural doesn't makes sense, doesn't it?

Some people are just a little slow when it comes to understanding the English grammar rules involved here. Gene Nygaard (talk) 10:56, 30 December 2009 (UTC)

I asked you to quote the source you cited, not only so that you would read it yourself, and also so that anyone else reading my talk page would know exactly what it says. But rather than relying on you to do that, I'll do it myself. This is exactly what the IUPAC source cited by Petergans says:

kelvin

SI base unit of thermodynamic temperature (symbol: K). The kelvin is the fraction 1/273.16 of the thermodynamic temperature of the triple point of water.

G.B. 70; 1996, 68, 977

Note the salient points here:

• The cited source doesn't use the plural form; it is singular, and therefore it is naturally "kelvin" and not "kelvins".
• The cited source doesn't state any rules about the use of the plural.
• This isn't an IUPAC rule, either. Rather, it is a direct quote of the English version of the official definition of the kelvin by resolution the 13th CGPM of 1967-68 (from memory, might not have the number of the conference right; and that particular conference merely restated the older definition, under the new name "kelvin" assigned to this unit then); the CGPM is one of the three organizations established under the Treaty of the Meter of 1875 to keep our international standards (of the three, the CGPM is the highest ranking, making the broadest, most general rules). (added later 12:39, 30 December 2009 (UTC))

So stop trying to pull the wool over people's eyes, Petergans. Gene Nygaard (talk) 11:10, 30 December 2009 (UTC)

"Temperature in degrees Kelvin" does not translate into "temperature in kelvins". This is the fundamental error that you have made. Rather, it translates literally as "temperature measured on the Kelvin scale". I prefer to use absolute temperature which correctly indicates the temperature scale being used.Petergans (talk) 07:53, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

Degrees Kelvin and kelvins are indeed the same thing, except for the fact that for the last 40 years it hasn't been proper to call them "degrees Kelvin".

Calling it "absolute temperature" and linking to the kelvin article isn't right. "Absolute temperature" doesn't "correctly indicate the temperature scale being used"--it is a vague and ambiguous term, applying equally well to temperature measured in degrees Rankine. Of course, the old terminology "degrees Absolute" and °A was thrown out as well as "degrees Kelvin" and °K in that name change to "kelvins".

Gene Nygaard (talk) 11:24, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

It is common usage in thermodynamics to refer to T as an absolute temperature. The point here is that it is a generic term not relating to any particular temperature measurement. It implies that in numerical calculations the Kelvin scale is to be used for temperature values. It is essential in thermodynamics that "absolute zero" should have a temperature value of zero. This discussion is now closed as far as I'm concerned. Petergans (talk) 16:05, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

That little article "an" speaks volumes.

When it matters which one you use (in many cases it doesn't, because various units will form consistent systems compatible with the formulas), specific identification helps. Gene Nygaard (talk) 16:13, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

I belive the ultimate statement can be found at NIST: http://physics.nist.gov/Pubs/SP811/sec06.html#6.1.3 Unit symbols are unaltered in the plural.--ZJ (talk) 10:00, 8 March 2010 (UTC)

Unit symbols. Not that difficult to understand, is it? Especially not when you already looked at the example given right after those words in that cited section:

• Example: l = 75 cm but not: l = 75 cms

Now look at §9.2 in the very same document for the section relevant to the discussion here on this talk page:

• Plural unit names are used when they are required by the rules of English grammar. They are normally formed regularly, for example, ‘‘henries’’ is the plural of henry. According to Ref. [8], the following plurals are irregular: Singular —lux, hertz, siemens; Plural —lux, hertz, siemens.

Guess which units come under the "formed regularly" category. All the rest (there aren't very many named units in the SI, none were overlooked), including kelvins. Gene Nygaard (talk) 10:44, 8 March 2010 (UTC)

Unreferenced BLPs

Hello Gene Nygaard! Thank you for your contributions. I am a bot alerting you that 3 of the articles that you created are Unreferenced Biographies of Living Persons. Please note that all biographies of living persons must be sourced. If you were to add reliable, secondary sources to these articles, it would greatly help us with the current 5 article backlog. Once the articles are adequately referenced, please remove the {{unreferencedBLP}} tag. Here is the list:

1. Jiří Kylián - Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL
2. Ruhul Amin (film director) - Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL
3. Misono - Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL

Thanks!--DASHBot (talk) 18:45, 2 January 2010 (UTC)

Talkback

Hello, Gene Nygaard. You have new messages at Tim1357's talk page.
Message added 19:54, 2 January 2010 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

Tim1357 (talk) 19:54, 2 January 2010 (UTC)

Talkback

Hello, Gene Nygaard. You have new messages at Talk:Brazilian battleship Minas Geraes.
Message added 00:33, 5 January 2010 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

You've been here for quite some time. Perhaps you could actually discuss this with me? I'd be much more inclined to listen to you if the sarcasm and cynicism in your posts, related to (I think?) FAs, is removed. Kind regards, —Ed (talk • majestic titan) 00:33, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

Carabane FAC

You're welcome to submit a more constructive comment in place of this one, which I've removed. Regards, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:51, 6 January 2010 (UTC)

defenceman

Feel free to actually debate on you know...the talk page. But the can/us spelling of these cats has been debated many times and consensus came down to the spelling the description should match the category name so as not to have POV wars such as you are having to change it back and forth. -DJSasso (talk) 15:13, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

From what I can see, the naming issue been debated once, poorly, with no conclusion—no consensus whatsoever. Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2008 March 1#Category:American ice hockey defencemen It's overdue for reopening.

And the text issue is separate from the naming issue, and Category talk:American ice hockey defencemen is totally empty in that regard. Gene Nygaard (talk) 15:34, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

Displacement

Hello Gene.

I came across some of the discussion on measures of displacement. I thought you may be interested in this prior discussion:

Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Ships/Archive_14#Displacement_figures_for_US_warships. (Also see this discussion, about halfway down, discussing displacement templates, and this followup on my talk page.)

Last summer an editor, operating under the assumption that displacement figures on US cruisers and battleships were stated in short tons, introduced dozens of erroneous conversions. I doubt the damage has yet been undone completely.

This is an interesting link. As mentioned here, this USN website is stating carrier displacement in short tons, as well as metric. It may well be in error; a table on page 8 of this source gives carrier displacements in long tons.

Regards, Kablammo (talk) 03:45, 10 January 2010 (UTC)

Thanks. Looks to me like the most important thing is that we never have unidentified tons in any of our articles. I think the USN website may well be in error; I would imagine that the clerical people who do websites would be prone to the same errors many other people make, assuming that the "tons" used without identification in the United States are always "short tons". Just like they might do if they see something about a 50,000-ton sale of wheat to Algeria in a U.S. newspaper, where those tons are almost certainly metric tons and not short tons.

Have you also considered the fact that in at least some of the cases where our articles state a displacement figure in tonnes-first (metric tons) or tonnes-only, those "tonnes" might well be long tons rather than metric tons? That's in addition, of course, to the likelihood that some that actually are metric tons are misinterpreted as long tons, in any strange system which uses long tons for some classes of ships and metric tons for other classes of ships.

We have far too many "tons" in shipping already, with the confusing volume measurements such as gross register tons. I don't think we should ever use short tons with regard to displacement of ships. If some riverboats or whatever give there displacement in short tons, we could express it in pounds with little distortion of the precision of the measurement.

Then, of course, there is "dived displacement" of submarines, another strange measurement that is also really a measurement of volume. (Archimedes' principle is used to measure mass for a floating object; for a submerged object what you measure is its volume, not its mass.) Gene Nygaard (talk) 05:32, 10 January 2010 (UTC)

Of course, it isn't just in "historic" ships nor just in infoboxes where the conversion-as-if-short-tons problems occur. It also occurs in 20th century ships such as USS North Carolina in this edit. Gene Nygaard (talk) 05:40, 10 January 2010 (UTC)

I'm also curious about one thing. Certainly that one USN site with "short tons" isn't the only source of information about the carriers involved there. And certainly with all the expertise among the people who participate in WikiProject Ships, a few of them could be followed out and compared with other sources, to see how likely it is that that particular website is simply in error. Has that been done? I didn't notice anything about anybody doing that in the discussions I saw.

Note in particular with regards to that website that many of the conversions there are carried to improper precision, with ludicrous statements such as "Approximately 97,000 tons (87,996.9 metric tons) full load". Note also that the original "tons" there are never specifically identified as "short tons". To me, the combination of those two things is a pretty clear indication that the conversions were not in the original article, and that they were later inserted by some clerical functionary, rather than by somebody with any real expertise in the subject. It looks like a series of related pages where the "metric tons" figures (and an only-implicit identification of the tons as short tons) can be totally discounted as unreliable. By the way, that's the way we need to treat many of the conversions on Wikipedia as well; just because somebody has made a conversion of some ambiguous unit based on one particular meaning, that doesn't mean the identification has been correctly made. Gene Nygaard (talk) 05:56, 10 January 2010 (UTC)

I agree with your thoughts.

• The navy.mil website is wrong; an unfortunate example of an otherwise-reliable source being mistaken. I will contact them for clarification.
• Personally, on Wikipedia I would give only long tons or metric tons, whichever is appropriate, and link the appropriate term. (They are very close anyway; the difference is well-within what is consumed in an active day at sea.) If conversions must be given, it seems we should only give them once, and not repeat them in the text every time a unit of caliber, distance, or mass is used. That makes the text hard to read.
• I too have come across many other examples of merchant vessel tonnage (gt or grt) being conflated with displacement, both here and in exterior sources. In an effort to accommodate differences in measure, editors make assumptions as to what the sources mean. A recent example is a source which mentioned enemy tonnage sank, which was misinterpreted to be short tons, rather than what likely was the tonnage which is the measure of size of merchant vessels.
• It seems hard for naval aficiandos to understand, but displacement is irrelevant for merchant ships. (Who would purchase a house, or a warehouse, by weight?) Naval architects seek to minimize diplacement, and design the lightest vessel which can safely handle the desired capacity. (See this and especially this edits by a naval architect who has edited Wikipedia.) Although I am a past offender, it would be less confusing to simply eliminate the displacement field for merchant vessels which are not measured by that metric. Howver, I doubt that would be acceptable to many.

Regards, Kablammo (talk) 15:49, 10 January 2010 (UTC)

Battle of Nirim

Hi Gene Nygaard! You commented on the DYK nomination for the article Battle of Nirim. The nomination has neither been approved nor rejected for some reason. Can you please look at it again? Thanks, Ynhockey ^(Talk) 23:34, 12 January 2010 (UTC)

Long hundredweight

Hi. I noticed that you established the long hundredweight page as a redirect to long ton. I don't know much about Imperial measures, but surely it would make more sense to have it as a redirect to hundredweight? Cordless Larry (talk) 00:21, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

That was a long time ago. I don't know if there was any particular reason for it or not.

It really doesn't make much difference in this case; either one will give you the basic information you'd look for, though one might be better written than the other.

It might have depended then, and it should now, on the relative quality of the articles. There probably isn't a whole lot of good reason to have separate articles in any case, especially when now (unlike the situation when I created that redirect), a redirect can go to a specific section of an article (e.g., use {{Redirect|Ton#Units of mass}} to go to Ton#Units of mass. (When that redirect you found was created, even if you had put that into the redirect text, the redirect would only have taken you to the top of the article, not to the specific section.) So look over the possibilities, and see what you think is best.

It probably won't make one whit of difference in any case. If you find hundredweight used in a Wikipedia article, it's most likely going to be used by someone who thinks that hundred is written in digits as "112" and who doesn't have enough sense to realize that if they use hundredweight they need to identify which one they are using, so instead of saying "long" hundredweight, they're just going to add a link to hundredweight and the users will be left guessing which one was intended. Special:WhatLinksHere/hundredweight (you can get that at the side of the page too; if you go to a page, there is a "What links here?" link on the left of the page, or somewhere on it depending on how you have your preferences set up) has a couple of hundred incoming links to that page, and most of them should be disambiguated in the articles they come from by following the link back to them and fixing them. Unfortunately, there aren't enough editors who bother to check out things like that.

OTOH, Special:WhatLinksHere/Long hundredweight shows only two articles the article namespace using that redirect, and one page that looks like some kind of maintenance lists. Don't worry about what Talk: pages say, nor any in Wikipedia: namespace rather than articles. Gene Nygaard (talk) 01:41, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the detailed response. I realise that this may not be all that important (I hadn't checked to see how many pages linked to the redirect, but thanks for pointing that out). The reason I came across this was that I wanted to know what a long hundredweight was for a conversion template I was considering using. When I saw that long hundredweight redirected to long ton, I initially assumed that they must be equal. I didn't read the article in full and it was only when I came across hundredweight that I realised what a long hundredweight actually is. For that reason, I think it would be prudent to change the redirect to hundredweight. Please let me know if you object. I'll also do some disambiguating though, as suggested. Cordless Larry (talk) 08:42, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

Hello, Gene Nygaard. You have new messages at Cordless Larry's talk page.
You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

Query

I do not understand your point at Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/2008–09 Michigan Wolverines men's basketball team/archive1.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 18:46, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

Edit summaries

Your edit summary in this edit bears no resemblance to the actual changes you made. Could you be more careful about this in the future? --Carnildo (talk) 23:57, 20 January 2010 (UTC)

Sounds like an issue to take up with whoever put "add metric units" in the toolbox on the edit page, and such an inappropriate edit summary when you use that pretty much worthless "tool". I'd never used it before today, and am trying to figure out what it will and will not do. Obviously, it didn't provide much of the "assistance" it claims on that particular edit, so I did some of the ones it should have done. The edit summary itself isn't my doing; sure, I could have changed it, but for now I'm going to choose not to, until I can figure out why all that date nonsense and the like has been put into a toolbox like this. Is there even any place where we can discuss what is in that toolbox, and the way it works including the edit summaries it gives? Gene Nygaard (talk) 00:12, 21 January 2010 (UTC)

What toolbox are you talking about? Are you using a user script or something to get this? --Carnildo (talk) 02:12, 21 January 2010 (UTC)

Not knowingly. I remember somebody trying to talk me into doing something like that a long time ago. Maybe it is something I added; I do have a script page somewhere for other things, don't remember what. Guess I'll have to try to figure that out; I have only notices those things, which only appear in the toolbox after I go to the edit screen, recently.

Here's the list of what appears in my toolbox on the edit screen now; the first seven have always been there, as far as I remember:

Toolbox

• What links here
• Related changes
• User contributions
• Logs
• E-mail this user
• Upload file
• Special pages
• Delink common terms
• Add metric units
• Delink dates to dmy
• Delink dates to mdy
• All dates to dmy
• All dates to mdy
• Delink year-in-X dates
• Delink dates to dmy+common terms
• Delink dates to mdy+common terms
• Make dates bold

Now that you mention it, maybe it is something I've added; I don't remember having used any of them before. And it certainly doesn't ever give an edit summary appropriate for "Add metric units". If so, I think I'll try to figure out how to remove it, and figure out how to get other people to stop using it as well. Gene Nygaard (talk) 02:39, 21 January 2010 (UTC)

It was that &^&^%%%$ User:Lightmouse; I must have added his script to see how it worked. I've removed it now. Gene Nygaard (talk) 02:52, 21 January 2010 (UTC)

Twiggy (hill)

Thanks for the idea! First I will start by compiling a list of all hills in England less than 100ft high. Saga City (talk) 16:05, 21 January 2010 (UTC)

Hidden Articles

Sorry, I am not quite clear on the context of your question:

Why is Elizabeth Hight a redlink? Have you done other articles like that?

but the article is actually Elizabeth A. Hight. Where did you see the redlink Elizabeth Hight? Mhjohns (talk) 14:09, 23 January 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, Gene, but I am not confused about redlinks. Go ahead and create a redirect to get to Elizabeth A. Hight - wikipedia can be edited by anyone and your contributions are appreciated. Mhjohns (talk) 14:22, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

Gene, the "creator" of the page did not "refuse" to create a redirect. You seemed to want to change the way some pages are named, and, since wikipedia is open for editing, you can do that. Being irritated because I did not do it your way to begin with is not very helpful. Here is a clearer way to express yourself in the future:

I noticed that you named a page Elizabeth A. Hight, but, since there are no other notable people named Elizabeth Hight and someone who types this simpler name will get a redlink, it is more appropriate to name the page Elizabeth Hight and use a redirect from Elizabeth A. Hight. If another Elizabeth Hight should surface, a disambiguation page could then be created. I have made these changes - you might want to use this technique in the future.

Gene, I think you will get a better response by using this technique, and I hope you find it helpful. Best regards Mhjohns (talk) 18:20, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

Iowa class battleship

Sorry, didn't know you'd be active at this time of the night, otherwise I'd have stuck a man at work tag on the article. How's the rebuilding look? I tried to address the issues, but I would like your opinion on the matter. TomStar81 (Talk) 09:04, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

Haven't seen much yet; first one I looked at had removed a link and left the ]] behind at the end, and had a "gun guns" redundancy, typo or whatever, and repeated "anti-aircraft guns" three times in one sentence. Guess you must have figured out where I am, to know that I'm working "at this time of the night"; given the way that one section looked, maybe we both should get some rest. I'll look at it more tomorrow. Gene Nygaard (talk) 09:27, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

And, of course, you don't know that it is "this time of night" for everybody who might be interested in this article. See time zone or something like that. Gene Nygaard (talk) 09:41, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

thanks for your help and advice

thanks for your help with Johann von Klenau, which was promoted to FA yesterday. Auntieruth55 (talk) 19:57, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

Sea levels and dam volumes

On Rehberg (Harz) and other articles you have changed links from Normalnull, the specific datum at Amsterdam from which the heights in those articles are measured from to sea level, a general article on the subject which doesn't even mention it. This may be because someone has incorrectly changed the redirect of 'Normalnull' to 'sea level', stating they are synonymous - they are clearly not. I have reverted the redirect so it points at Normaal Amsterdams Peil which is the Dutch name for this datum. However, I have also added 'sea level' to the See Also section of 'Normaal Amsterdams Peil'. In most cases I write it as [[Normalnull|sea level]] so the layman sees a generic term he recognises, but those who click on the link go to the specific datum from which heights in western Europe are measured.

Turning to the dam etc. volumes, using the Sylvenstein Dam as the example, the original German article gives the volume as "1 Mio m³" which means "1 million cubic metres" i.e. 1 x 10⁶ cubic metres. My sense is that although a hm³ (hectometre cubed i.e. 100m x 100m x 100m) is the same as a million cubic metres, the unit is not widely or readily understood by the average English reader, whereas "1 million m³" (with the equivalent in imperial if necessary) is much clearer. --Bermicourt (talk) 08:30, 30 January 2010 (UTC)

after an edit conflict as I was doing this, I see you figured the first part out on your own. That's the only really legitimate, justifiable use of the prefix hecto- anywhere; all in all we'd be better off if the CGPM had gotten rid of all the prefixes which are not powers of 1000, and consigned them all to the same fate as the now-obsolete myria-.

No, you've gotten mixed up somewhere. A hectometer is 100 m, not 10 m. And 100×100×100 = 1,000,000. Using {{convert}}, 1 hectometer (100 m). More with that conversion template:

1 cubic kilometer (1,000 hm³)

1 cubic hectometer (1,000 dam³)

1 cubic dekameter (1,000 m³)

1 hm³ (1,000,000 m³)

1 cubic meter (1,000 dm³)

1 cubic decimeter (1,000 cm³)

1 cubic centimeter (1,000 mm³)

1 cubic meter (1.0×10⁹ mm³)

1 cubic megameter (1.0×10¹² hm³)

and outside the template, since there isn't enough call for Mm³ conversions for it to handle them,

1 cubic megameter (1,000,000,000,000,000,000 m³)

1 cubic megameter (1,000,000,000,000 hm³)

A "hectare" got its name because it is a hectometer squared, (100 m)(100 m) = 10000 m², and then "are" was backformed from hectare.

Normalnull is just the German term for mean sea level, which really should be the article name rather than a redirect on English Wikipedia as you can see from the introduction. That, "mean sea level", is what is almost always meant when someone says "sea level" in English. It's just the details about getting to a "mean" level that vary somewhat. The stub article under the Normalnull name certainly didn't have any reliable, useful information at the time it was redirected to sea level; we can look at the history and see that. It would be better to put any specific datum into the sea level article, and to include as well the information at above mean sea level and at your Dutch datum article and any others in one comprehensive and comprehensible article. Note that redirects can now go to a specific section of an article, too (for a long time after I started editing here, using #REDIRECT[[Sea level#Normalnull]] would only take you to the top of the article, even if a Normalnull section existed in the article. Now redirect works like links in an article: using [[Sea level#Aviation|Normalnull]] gives you this link to Normalnull, click to see where it takes you.

Using "million" with a unit symbol rather than the spelled out name of the unit, especially for SI units, isn't "correct". It might squeak by in Wikipedia's house rules, but it is not in accordance with the rules of measurement standards organizations. Gene Nygaard (talk) 11:22, 30 January 2010 (UTC)

Besides, most Americans won't even admit they know what a "meter" is, as a unit of measure—and a good share of them really do not know what a "metre" is. So let's just get rid of those units, too! Some probably do know that the Canadians use those dinky little "litres" where it takes over 4.5 of them to make a gallon, rather than American "liters" where it only takes 3.8 to make a gallon. Gene Nygaard (talk) 11:32, 30 January 2010 (UTC) Just kidding about the gallons, of course. I do know the liters are the same and gallons different. Gene Nygaard (talk) 17:58, 30 January 2010 (UTC)

By the way, there's a whole lot more to it than to have a benchmark, too. You still need to compare that datum to a geoid, and there are numerous ways that can be done, to use it for the elevation of a lake in Germany, for example. That isn't explained at all in the Normaal Amsterdams Peil article. Gene Nygaard (talk) 11:47, 30 January 2010 (UTC)

Victor Hernández Cruz

Thank you for rectifying my mistake.--Lawrlafo (talk) 17:02, 30 January 2010 (UTC)

USS Congress

I was wondering if you could look over USS Congress (1799) when you have a few minutes free? I will soon be taking the article to FAC and have been impressed with your attention to detail during the FAR on Iowa class battleships. Please discuss any issues on the article talk page. Thanks. --Brad (talk) 01:12, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

Loktak Lake

In Loktak Lake, I must admit I didn't consider the |abbr=on parameter as the culprit. I tried several combinations - but all were with |abbr=on - and the only ones that didn't error were the simple conversions, not the ranges. Since seeing your subsequent edits, I have tried getting a copy of the version that I edited from, and simply removing the |abbr=on - ie {{convert|0|to|35|C|F}} which yields 0 to 35 °C (32 to 95 °F). Do you want me to paste that in as a replacement for the non-converted form currently there? --Redrose64 (talk) 15:03, 2 February 2010 (UTC)

If you like; it won't make any significant change (it will throw in those mostly useless nonbreaking spaces which aren't worth adding, and which clutter up edit pages needlessly and make them difficult to read for no good reason when added individually). Conversions don't have to be done with any particular template (and there are others that work better than this one for some purposes, e.g. {{height}} for human heights with its half-inch conversions from heights in meters)—and I run into as many problems or more of them with editors using the various conversion templates properly than I do with problems in conversions not using the templates. In addition to {{convert}} being incredibly complex (it takes well over 1000 pages of templates to work), with a steeper learning curve than most editors are willing to endure, there are a whole lot of bugs and glitches in addition to the problem of "abbr=" giving a problem with ranges when it doesn't give any error message (though it also doesn't work) for a single temperature:

• {{convert|27|C|F|abbr=off}} giving you the form with symbols nonetheless: 27 degrees Celsius (81 degrees Fahrenheit) (compare that to {{convert|2700|N|lbf|abbr=off}} → 2,700 newtons (610 pounds-force) where the first term is spelled out)
• {{convert|2.9|t|lb|sp=us}}, even with the spelling parameter set, gives us a spelling more foreign to American English than "litres" are: 2.9 metric tons (6,400 lb)
• and not even any rudimentary dimensional analysis, letting stupid things like this slip through: {{convert|2.57|km|lb|sp=us}} → 2.57 kilometers ()

• There are, of course, a number of cases where someone using the black box like this, and not seeing the output on the on the edit screen, will do reasonable-looking (on the edit screen) conversions such as a {{convert|12|oz|ml}} soft-drink can or the battleship has a range of {{convert|11700|nm|mi km|sp=us}} and end up with garbage in the article if they don't carefully review the results. I leave it an an exercise for you or other readers to remove the nowiki and preview these to see what happens.

So, though I do use {{convert}} quite often, there are cases when it should not be used. One of the biggest problems, of course, it that it has improperly introduced British spellings into thousands of articles written in American English, because of its improper default rather than making every editor specify the spellings. Gene Nygaard (talk) 15:48, 2 February 2010 (UTC)

Convert alt spellings

Gene, instead of constantly complaining about alternate input/output spellings that don't exist, as you most recently did here, why don't you simply create them yourself? It is only a redirect to the main one! You don't have to understand the code at all. It would save us all a lot of time, rather than demanding someone else do it. — Huntster (t @ c) 02:28, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

In that particular case, even the "F-change" is undocumented. It isn't clear that that is the most appropriate way to accomplish it. It isn't clear that it should become documented, even. It was never discussed; it is just something some editor decided to throw in there. So it isn't clear that making redirects is the best way to fix it.

But as far as why I don't do that most of the time, it is

1. Largely because we need to get some understandings by the people who edit this template that we need a consistent look and feel—and we aren't going to get that unless the people who add new conversions start to understand what that look and feel should be, and do what they can to achieve it.
2. As a consequence of a lack of a consistent look and feel, adding a redirect won't always be consistent what we already have. For example, Template:Convert/km/l does not redirect to Template:Convert/km/L, nor vice versa. They are two different template pages, despite the fact that they are used to convert the same unit. That is due to the stupid practice of using the input unit parameters to affect spelling and capitalization issues.
3. I understand it well enough so that I could actually add those which are more than redirects, if I took a little time to make sure I was following the conventions myself.
4. But I generally cannot fix the ones that already exist, even when the solution is obvious. Output spellings I cannot fix, for example. Making "sp=ca" and "sp=sv" and "sp=tur" work right are probably beyond what I can do as well.
5. In some cases it is because the real solution is not to add the "missing" ones, but rather to delete the useless, befuddling, unnessary ones already there, the ones which accomplish nothing other than steeping the learning curve for using this template.

But I'm not going to do any of that, unless and until I see some evidence of a real attempt to clean things up. Business as usual won't get me to help out. If it starts working better than it has in the past, I could well jump in and help fix some of those things and to clean up the documentation mess.

As it stands now, {{convert}} remains a dangerous weapon in the hands of most editors who add it to articles. I still need convincing that the best solution is not to delete Template:Convert and all its subpages in their entirety. Gene Nygaard (talk) 03:20, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

My best suggestion would simply to be don't use it. It's been around a very long time, and it isn't going away. If it can be improved upon, that's fantastic, but I am deeply disturbed by the handful of editors who seem hellbent on attacking those who created it (I'm not one) because it doesn't do everything they want it to do. It's a bloody static template...it isn't intelligent, and I don't understand why folks think it should somehow clairvoyantly know what the editor is wanting it to do, or, as you say above, thinks it is somehow dangerous to the community. That really boggles my mind.

As to my original question, your response leaves me even more puzzled. In your first paragraph, you say that a redirect isn't the clear way to proceed. What? It's a redirect between "°F-change" and "F-change". Between "A·h" and "A.h". Between "hp.h" and "hph". Etc etc. There is no "fix" other than a simple redirect or rename (which itself will involve a redirect), which is *specifically* what you complained about. Your bullet point 1 above, I believe, points to the critical problem here: this is a collaborative effort, and it is simply *wrong* to demand action from others when you refuse to take simple actions yourself.

I want to be clear that I'm not attacking you or anything, just pointing out the inconsistencies of actions here. I think you have some fantastic ideas, some that would be great to implement and others that may be beyond what we're capable of doing (such as accounting for every spelling variation on the face of the earth, like your sp=sv and sp=tur (tr) examples above), but the way you go about suggesting those changes turns all but the already converted (like Wikid) against you. I'm serious about my earlier comment regarding honey and vinegar...it may not always work, but the batting average will still be better than if you try to bludgeon other volunteers into doing what you want. — Huntster (t @ c) 03:41, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

Further to this, there's no need to convert American English spellings to International English spelling as you did [[1]] and change a link to a page that results in a redirect no different than the one that was in place just so you can have an International English spelling. It's completely unnecessary. I would revert them, but that too is unnecessary, but please stop. --Walter Görlitz (talk) 17:50, 16 February 2010 (UTC)

It's usually "advertise" in American English, and advertise in any other variety of English, as far as I know. Advertize might be an acceptable spelling, at least in American English, but it is far less common than advertise in the U.S. or anywhere else. In any case the spelling there does not appear in the article; it appears only in a comment to editors. My American English spell-checker here underlines the "advertize" spelling; it is an "also" variant in Webster's Third New International Dictionary, meaning that it sees some use but is not common.

Removing an unencyclopedic colloquialism abbreviation isn't a national varieties of English issue either. The redirects are also more specific to a section in the article, rather than just ot the top of the article. The units are amperes in American English, in Australian English, in Canadian English, in any English; for what its worth, they are "ampères" in Canadian French, but I haven't run into any problems with that being used on English Wikipedia.

If you want to deal with those varieties of English issues, go complain at Template talk:Convert about the impropriety of that template defaulting to British English, and making us jump through hoops to get American English. That has resulted in thousands of articles improperly using "metre" and "litre" spellings; I've fixed a few hundred of them and haven't made much of a dent in the problem. But unless more people complain about it at the template talk page, as I have done in the past, we aren't likely to get that changed. Compare

• {{convert|7|m|ft}} with no spelling parameter → 7 metres (23 ft) can be
• {{convert|7|m|ft|sp=us}} → 7 meters (23 ft) if and only if the editor adding the conversion knows that you need to jump through hoops to get American English, and knows what you need to do to achieve that. You don't see the results on the edit page; many editors adding that template probably are unwitting accessories to this crime, not even realizing that they are throwing British spellings into an articl using American English. Don't you think that instead the convert template should require everybody to specify the spelling to be used? Do your part by making that point at Template talk:Convert. Gene Nygaard (talk) 01:43, 17 February 2010 (UTC)

Sorting diacritics in the Slovene municipal template

Please provide a relevant argument supporting your recent "fix" of the Template:Municipalities of Slovenia (after reading mine) so that this doesn't become an edit war. Thank you, — Yerpo ^Eh? 08:32, 17 February 2010 (UTC)

Windmill articles

Re your recent copyedit, as the creator of lots of windmill-related articles on Wikipedia, the preferred conversion is from ft.in to m.cm - I've tweaked the conversion back to where it was so that the article conforms with the hundreds of others. Articles on mills in Europe give the measurements in m.cm, which are then converted to ft.in. Mjroots (talk) 07:00, 19 February 2010 (UTC)

I have no idea what you are talking about. In my recent edit, I merely fixed the conversion template that was there so that it would use properly use the adjective form. It is a "10-foot wheel" not a "10 feet wheel". You didn't tweak anything "back"—it never included inches, and it still doesn't after your edit. That's the really baffling part about your complaint. So I could help you out, if that's what you want. In the particular example given here, it might be undue precision to add inches, however. Do you know how precisely that measurement, which was originally just in feet in this case, was expressed? Is it to the nearest inch? If it isn't, you shouldn't be converting it as if it were. And if it isn't, you don't have centimeter precision either. It isn't a matter of what "windmill" articles use. Is is a matter of the precision of a particular measurement. Gene Nygaard (talk) 13:20, 19 February 2010 (UTC)

Well, 10 foot and 10 foot 0 inches are the same, aren't they? I generally prefer not to add the "0 inches" bit if the measurement is an exact number of feet, but I'll not revert the addition in the conversion as it's really not worth warring over. I'm just trying to keep the conversions consistent across all windmill articles. Your edit changed the precision of the conversion. I think that conversion to 0.000m is a little too precise, whereas a conversion to 0.0m gives an approximate 4" step (not precise enough). 0.00m is a good compromise between the two. Mjroots (talk) 13:32, 19 February 2010 (UTC)

No, they aren't the same. The 10 feet might be accurate to the nearest foot, in which case if it were expressed to the nearest inch it would be somewhere between 9 ft 6 in and 10 ft 6 in. OTOH, "10 feet 0 inches" should mean that it is somewhere between "10 ft ½ in" and "10 ft 1½ in". For this measurement, we can presume that the final zero in 10 feet is significant; however, in other measurements, you might have "10 feet" meaning "10±5 feet". Though if it is designed to be 10 feet 0.0 inches with one-tenth inch tolerance, it might still be referred to as ten feet. We don't always need to use the most precision we could use.

The precision of the output depends on the precision of the input. For something like a wheel that is designed to be a nice round number in some units, like this, it is okay to assume that it has enough precision to convert it to the centimeter level, and knowing it to the millimeter level isn't helpful. But when you have something in the same article that is a measured quantity rather than a design quantity, then only assume the precision expressed.

Note that in most conversions, you generally have at least two defensible options for the precision of the result, one a little bit more precise than the input, and one a little bit less precise. The less you know about the precision of the input, the more choices you need to pick from. In this case, as long as we don't use vulgar fractions or rounding decimally but to the nearest 5 cm or 5 mm or whatever, our choices for the results of the conversion are 3.0 m and 3.05 m. I wouldn't have changed the precision if I weren't already editing the "adj=on" parameter. I don't mind your changing it back to the other defensible option, 3.05 m. And I won't even insist that it include the "0-inch" on the other side if that is used. Gene Nygaard (talk) 13:55, 19 February 2010 (UTC)

Actually, a "10-foot (3 m) wheel" is also a third acceptable option here; like the 3.05 m, I might change that if I'm already editing something for another reason, but not in an edit by itself. Gene Nygaard (talk) 14:08, 19 February 2010 (UTC)

McCormick Tribune Plaza & Ice Rink FAC

I have responded to your concerns at Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/McCormick Tribune Plaza & Ice Rink/archive1. Could you strike resolved issues and consider whether you are ready to support this nominee.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 23:52, 24 February 2010 (UTC)

I don't know if you are watching the article, but it was copyedited today. I thought you might want to reconsider supporting it.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 05:55, 27 February 2010 (UTC)

Zinc smelting clarification tag

Please see my response at Talk:Zinc smelting. Wizard191 (talk) 16:02, 25 February 2010 (UTC)

"micron" vs "micrometer" for 10^-6 meter

Regarding the Gene Nygaard edit of Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer on 3 March 2010. This edit removed "microns" and replaced them with "micrometers", with an edit note "microns were thrown out in the '60s". I assume this refers to "Resolution 7 of the 13th meeting of the CGPM (1967/68)" http://www.bipm.org/en/CGPM/db/13/7/

So "microns" have been officially thrown out, but I note they are still in popular use, and the original WISE document that is referenced from the Wiki article at the end of the edited sentence, [4] http://wise.ssl.berkeley.edu/documents/WISESPIE_SanDiego05.pdf by Mainzer et.al. (2005), does use microns. To quote from the abstract of that document, "[WISE...] will survey the entire sky in four bands from 3.3 to 23 microns". So the term is in current use. In the body of the paper, the unit is written µm using the lowercase Greek letter mu.

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micrometre which mentions: "NOTE: The American spelling of "micrometer" is rarely used (micron is typically used instead), due to the existence of a measuring device of the same name."

So should a Wikipedia article aimed at the general public use the common, typical usage, or the scientifically approved, but rare usage? Bealevideo (talk) 20:44, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

Just because it still sees some use doesn't mean we should be using it. I can show you a lot of dinosaurs still using degrees Kelvin as well, but so what?

Even before my edit, that article already used the symbol for micrometers (µm), right up there in the second sentence and in the infobox, rather than the symbol for microns (µ). And that symbol for micrometers is just thrown out there, in the first usage, without either spelling out the unit, nor including a link to the micrometre article. So let's not have any nonsense about "general public use" in any case. We were already assuming that our readers are numerate enough to understand that first use of micrometers even though they are only in symbol form, not spelled out and not linked. Since we assume they already understand that form, why would they have any problem understanding it when it is spelled out later in the article.

The prefix micro- is well understood, no matter what unit of measure it is applied to. More people are going to understand "micrometer" than are going to understand "micron". When you see the numbers in front of it, some readers will do a double take but it shouldn't take long to figure out that if we are talking about 3.3 micrometers, we aren't talking about three working instruments and pieces of another broken one. At most "micron" might serve better as a "comfort word" (something they are familiar with, even if they don't understand it) for the readers who grew up in the days when "microns" were acceptable units.

The use of "micrometers" as a unit of measure is not rare. (And Wikipedia isn't a reliable source in any case, in either the Wikijargon sense or in a more real-world sense of the accuracy of claims such as that one.) It is quite common, as any search engine will show you quite easily. In the U.S., some people who don't like the ambiguity choose instead to use the "micrometres" spelling for this unit, even if they don't use the -re spelling for any other lengths. But most of the people who avoid using "micrometers" simply do so by sticking to its symbol instead, and not spelling it out.

The article also uses "microjanskies", for Pete's sake—though of course it was in a weird hyphenated, camel-case, non-plural "micro-Jansky" monstrosity. That usage might also found in the real world; being found there is no reason for us to accept it, any more than we should accept the microns which were thrown out in the 1960s. Gene Nygaard (talk) 22:06, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

To see the nonsense of that Wikipedia claim that "The American spelling of "micrometer" is rarely used", just look at examples you can see in this Google search:

Google	hits
"20 micrometers" -wikipedia	52,900

Gene Nygaard (talk) 22:14, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

Case sensitive section links

Well, this link to the section #Query does not work for example with Firefox 3.5.8, Google Chrome 4.0.249, Firefox 3.0.6, Firefox 0.9 and Safari 4.0 for Windows. What kind of Firefox are you using? -- Basilicofresco (msg) 22:49, 9 March 2010 (UTC)

It does not work also with Firefox 1.5 on Windows, Firefox 2.0.0.4 on Windows, Konqueror 4.3 on Ubuntu 9.10 and Firefox 3.6 on Ubuntu 9.10. -- Basilicofresco (msg) 23:39, 9 March 2010 (UTC)

FAC

Hi Gene, have we resolved your concerns? If not, could you list any other concerns you have at the FAC? Thanks! ceranthor 20:39, 14 March 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for reminding me--I did intend to get back there. Gene Nygaard (talk) 21:36, 14 March 2010 (UTC)

R-R Merlin and Spitfire specs alterations

Would you please discuss your alterations to these articles on the talk pages before implementing your changes, and before you go through other articles to correct them? You are altering measurements which are given in the source material - if a respected engineer like Cyril Lovesy describes boost pressures as eg "+15 lb/in²" for a WW II aero engine he does so for a good reason; it is not up to you to alter such information without providing references; without references your conflicting changes can and will be removed. Secondly, please don't add kPa - again, this is your unilateral addition to accepted practice in these and similar articles (why not then add all possible conversions?). Other people have worked extremely hard to bring the Rolls-Royce Merlin up to Featured Article status, please respect their work by at least discussing your changes. Minorhistorian (talk) 23:35, 14 March 2010 (UTC)

You are missing the point - you are altering units which are used in the source material cited; they may be "silly...colloquialisms" to you but why should we believe you rather than an engineer like Stanley Hooker, who helped design the Merlin's supercharger, or Cyril Lovesy who was involved in many aspects of the Merlin's development (read the article cited)? Are you intending to go through every such article "correcting" them without providing source material and without at least some discussion as to why these changes are so suddenly and urgently needed? Statements such as "silly notion that ambiguous, technically improper and unencyclopedic colloquialisms have any place on Wikipedia....Those are just a scratching of the surface of the problems so badly in need of attention in articles like this" have no place in Wikipedia - it simply says that us poor, unscientific, silly, plebs, who have gone to a great deal of time and trouble to create or edit these articles, should stand back and let scientific experts such as your good self (who, up to the last few days, didn't bother to advise or assist in the process) take them apart again. If you want to help by all means do but for goodness sake don't take such a top-lofty attitude with other editors. Minorhistorian (talk) 20:51, 15 March 2010 (UTC)

Crow Butte revision

Hello Gene, I undid your edit to add conversions to this article as per mining conventions. For the first, total ore, converting 1.4 million metric tons to pounds, this is unnecessary. Total ore grades do not need to be converted to pounds, ounces, etc as this number has no real value. For the second, contained metal, the source states 4.1 million pounds of uranium oxide. I guess we could do a conversion on this number to get a metric ton equivalent, but as the values quoted from the source are rounded (millions for pounds, thousands for tonnes), we need to use those as the starting point. Cheers, Turgan ^Talk 02:18, 22 March 2010 (UTC)

Stop and think for a bit, Turgan. Does it make any sense whatsoever to measure proven reserves of ore in kilograms, and resulting product in pounds? No, it doesn't, whether or not one or both of them is expressed in any of the various tons instead. They aren't even in the same highest-level system of measurements. One is metric, the other English.

Of course they are rounded. That's part of the basic rules of arithmetic. When you multiply two numbers together, you cannot gain any precision. In that multiplication, it is the least precise number that is controlling. A rough rule is that you should round the result to the same number of significant digits as the least precise multiplicand. For our numbers here, the proven yield of 1,461,800 metric tons has been multiplied by a guessed-at concentration of 0.13% kg/kg, or 0.0013.

So lets assume for the sake of argument that the numbers given are accurate to the precision stated, so we have 1,461,800±50 and 0.0013±5

Result before rounding: 1461800×0.0013 = 1900.34 metric tons

Highest possible: 1461850×0.00135 = 1973.4975

Lowest possible: 1461750×0.00125 = 1827.1875

Thus, the best we can do is to say that it is 1900 metric tons. In fact, even if the original assumptions are accurate, it might really round to two significant digits as either 1.8×10³ or 2.0×10³ metric tons, but the highest probability is that it would be 1.9×10³ tons.

Rounding to thousands or millions or whatever doesn't matter; what matters is the significant digits. It doesn't matter if you call it 123 million metric tons, or 123 billion kilograms, or just plain 123 teragrams or 123 thousandths of a petagram. These are not counting numbers in any case; they are physical measurements, or here estimates of what the physical measurements could be in the future.

You also don't seem to have a very good grasp of the reason why we include conversions. We are doing so to increase the chances that our intended audience will understand what we are saying. Most of the world doesn't really understand pounds; they will use kilograms and their multiples (including metric tons, 1000 kg) for not only for uranium ore but for uranium oxide or uranium as well.

Another factor you don't seem to be considering is that when dual measurements are included, most readers are going to totally ignore one of them. It doesn't slow their reading down much to have the conversions; their brains simply don't bother even processing one of them.

However, when you have something like ore in metric tons multiplied by concentration gives product in pounds, that's jarring to everybody. Nobody is satisified. Nobody gets all of the information in familiar units. Having one of the units in metric units and the other in English units slows down their reading, it destroys their ability to understand what is being talked about. None of the readers get the information they need to connect the two measurements together, to figure out how they relate to each other. The will also wonder what the hell that "0.13%" has to do with anything; nobody is going to see that x pounds is 0.13% of y kilograms.

Note also that the "proven reserves" number here is way over-precise, too. You wouldn't even be able to measure the amount you actually took out of the ground in a given year at one particular mine to five-significant digit precision. Making a guess as to how much could possibly be taken out in the entire future cannot be done with nearly as much precision. In most cases like this, the overprecise numbers result from adding together several subcomponents. In addition, the rounding rules are different. They don't depend on the number of significant digits, but rather on the location of the decimal point. For example, if you add together 37,000 tons and 5 tons, you should still get 37,000 tons, not 37,005 tons (of course, if you have a whole bunch of small numbers, you don't do the rounding until after all of them are added up). But a lot of bean-counters who come up with numbers like this do not properly round their results. Gene Nygaard (talk) 11:57, 22 March 2010 (UTC)

Proposed deletion of Lewis Herreshoff

The article Lewis Herreshoff has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

no link to this redirectpage at present. Furthermore, Lewis Herreshoff should not be confused with Lewis Francis Herreshoff, his nephew.

While all contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, content or articles may be deleted for any of several reasons.

You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{dated prod}} notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the article's talk page.

Please consider improving the article to address the issues raised. Removing {{dated prod}} will stop the proposed deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. The speedy deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and articles for deletion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion. Nuttyrave (talk) 21:34, 24 March 2010 (UTC)

Efficiency and redirects

Gene, wouldn't it be more efficient -- when you find a page whose title has diacriticals and the equivalent non-diacritical redirect doesn't exist -- to simply create the redirect rather than bitching about it on the talkpage? DS (talk) 14:36, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

No. Whenever I run across some of these, the people involved with them are often involved in several similar articles which also do not have redirects. Every once in a great while, somebody takes the hint and a whole lot more get fixed than if I did it myself.

Note further what when I do create the redirects, nobody involved with the article ever knows either that it needed to be done, nor that it has been done. Creating redirects doesn't show up on the history of a page. Sure, I could tell them that I had done so on the talk page--but then all that supposed efficiency you mentioned vanishes, since I need to do both the talk page and the redirect itself--and nobody else is ever going to pick up the ball and fix any of them.

As far as "efficiency" goes, the simplest way to do that is with a page move. That does a much better job of getting peoples attention, but then they start bitching at me. I'll start doing that, if you get people to stand behind me if I do so. Gene Nygaard (talk) 15:16, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

How about making the redirect, then saying on the talk page "I just made this redirect - if anyone knows of similar articles which could use redirects from unaccented spellings, please help" or something. That way it gets fixed even if no-one reads your message, and if they do the explicit request might make them more likely to do something about it. Olaf Davis (talk) 15:39, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

Or post a request on WP:BOTREQ. DS (talk) 16:25, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

Pondemaat

I've replied at Template talk:Convert. I'm not in the habit of requesting conversions unless I have a need for them. Mjroots (talk) 07:13, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

Category talk:Given names

I added a fourth possibility for a name's not appearing in the category. It is the reason the names in question do not appear in the category. In addition to addressing the specific issue, I have tried to avoid a condescending tone. JimCubb (talk) 16:53, 3 June 2010 (UTC)

thrust to weight

in the thrust to weight article you suggest that the ratio needs units. if its the ratio of two of two forces it has no units. if its the ratio of a force/mass then it would be an acceleration and would have units of ft/s² or m/s² which is it --208.54.14.122 (talk) 06:05, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

The measurement you have for weight is mass, not force. That's what "weight" usually means in any case, despite what your science teacher may have told you. The ratio has units; many people like to pretend that they aren't making an error when they divide pounds force by pounds mass (or kilograms force by kilograms) and end up with a unitless number. But as you point out, it really does have units of acceleration. Gene Nygaard (talk) 08:11, 7 July 2010 (UTC)

Magnus von Wright alphabetised incorrectly

Your edit to the article Magnus von Wright in December 2006 alphabetised him incorrectly. If that alphabetisation would be used, his name would be "Magnus von Von Wright". JIP | Talk 14:58, 16 October 2010 (UTC)

Happy, happy

Happy New Year, and all the best to you and yours! (from warm Cuba) Bzuk (talk) 15:30, 1 January 2011 (UTC)

Request for comment

This message is being sent to you because you have previously edited the Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English) page. There is currently a discussion that may result in a significant change to Wikipedia policy. Specifically, a consensus is being sought on if the policies of WP:UCN and WP:EN continues to be working policies for naming biographical articles, or if such policies have been replaced by a new status quo. This discussion is on-going at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (use English), and your comments would be appreciated. Dolovis (talk) 16:57, 19 May 2011 (UTC)

Attaboy!

	Continually Excellent Work
	Thanks, Gene, for your clear and useful upgrade of my small introduction to "Cran (unit)"..-GreggEdwards GreggEdwards (talk) 20:03, 31 July 2011 (UTC)

Merge discussion for Ducati 800SS

An article that you have been involved in editing, Ducati 800SS , has been proposed for a merge with another article. If you are interested in the merge discussion, please participate by going here, and adding your comments on the discussion page. Thank you. Sincerely, SamBlob (talk) 02:49, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

Season's tidings!

To you and yours, Have a Merry ______ (fill in the blank) and Happy New Year! FWiW Bzuk (talk) 15:59, 23 December 2012 (UTC)

Nearly three years later...

Hello, Gene Nygaard. You have new messages at Template talk:Miles-chains.
You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

Apologies for the tardiness of the reply!  An optimist on the run! 11:44, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Vasile Avădanei

Hello and thanks for tagging this for notability back in 2008. It's still tagged 5 years later. You may want to take it to the Notability Notceboard or AfD to get it resolved. Best wishes, Boleyn (talk) 08:54, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

Request to take part in a survey

Hi there. I would very much appreciate it if you could spend ~2 minutes and take a short survey - a project trying to understand why the most active Wikipedia contributors (such as yourself) may reduce their activity, or retire. I sent you an email with details, if you did not get it please send me a wikiemail, so that I can send you an email with the survey questions. I would very much appreciate your cooperation, as you are among the most active Wikipedia editors who show a pattern of reduced activity, and thus your response would be extremely valuable. Thanks! --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 11:35, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Hello, Gene Nygaard. Please check your email; you've got mail!
It may take a few minutes from the time the email is sent for it to show up in your inbox. You can at any time by removing the {{You've got mail}} or {{ygm}} template.

A historical perspective on moment in physics and mathematics

I have posted a comment in your article/discussion on 'moment'. Please consider my request to elaborate the historical perspective on the issue. Bkpsusmitaa (talk) 16:38, 23 May 2014 (UTC)

Talk:Space_Shuttle_main_engine#Requested_move3

As a significant contributor to that article, you are invited to participate in a discussion about its title. All input welcome. Thank you, ^walk victor falk ^talk 14:39, 20 June 2014 (UTC)

Global account

Hi Gene! As a Steward I'm involved in the upcoming unification of all accounts organized by the Wikimedia Foundation (see m:Single User Login finalisation announcement). By looking at your your account, I realized that you don't have a global account yet. In order to secure your name, I recommend you to create such account on your own by submitting your password on Special:MergeAccount and unifying your local accounts. If you have any problems with doing that or further questions, please don't hesitate to ping me with {{ping|DerHexer}}. Cheers, —DerHexer (Talk) 10:53, 30 December 2014 (UTC)

ArbCom elections are now open!

Hi,
You appear to be eligible to vote in the current Arbitration Committee election. The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to enact binding solutions for disputes between editors, primarily related to serious behavioural issues that the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the ability to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail. If you wish to participate, you are welcome to review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. For the Election committee, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:54, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Old business: Section (land)

Hello, Gene! I happened to come across a very old discussion you started at Talk:Section (United States land surveying), which apparently resulted in a consensus to move back to the generic title. I don’t know much about the topic, aside from having spent most of my life in a part of Canada that’s surveyed according to a very similar scheme, but I think there should be at least some mention beyond the USA, noting the differences. I was wondering if there was some reason the move didn’t proceed. I suppose another option would be to start an article on the Canadian equivalent, but because there’d be a lot of redundant overlap I’d rather see a combined article, even with a large American section and a small Canadian one. I realize you haven’t been very active here recently but, as they say, there’s no deadline …—Odysseus1479 05:34, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

Requested move: Pączki → Paczki

Greetings! I have started a requested move discussion at Talk:Pączki#Requested move 2 January 2018, regarding a page relating to this WikiProject. Discussion and opinions are invited. Thanks — Kpalion^(talk) 16:25, 8 January 2018 (UTC)