Talk:Order of magnitude/Archive 1

This is an archive of past discussions about Order of magnitude. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Archive 1

Archive 2

Archive 3

Chains

Change of Units within chains

The use of units such as 'hour', 'day', 'year', is bad, because there are a number of different definitions of each of these units. For example, there are several different astronomically defined years, there is the calendar year (whose length varies from year to year, and depends on the calendar being used), there are fixed length years (e.g. the Julian year of 365.25 days used in astronomy.) Which one is it refferring to? Likewise 'day' can be defined astronomically, or on the basis of the calendar (in which case most days are 86400 s long, but a few are 86401 s long, and in theory they can be 86399 s as well), or conventionally as 86400 s.

Of course one could argue that the differences here are too small to make a difference, but I still think that the use of units with varying definitions and varying magnitudes is ugly. Which is why I'd say, stick to the SI second.

I'd admit some scientists still use microns and angstroms, but these units are ugly because they aren't constructed systematically. They are officially discouraged by BIPM, CGPM, national standards laboratories, ISO, and by many of the international scientific unions. They are the metric equivalent of feet and inches... -- SJK

Does that mean we should change the pages such as 1000km2 -- so the whole of that chain is in m² ? I would be in favour of that -- Tarquin

That was my plan. Everything should be in primary SI units. So km is out and m is in. --mav

I think that both SI units and SI prefixes (excluding 10^-2, 10^-1, 10¹, 10², whatever they are) should be used. We can say 1 Mm², 1000 km² or 1 x 10⁶ m². But we must be consistent across all the different orders of magnitude pages.

So hectares, antpower etc should not be allowed but m, km, etc should be allowed because they are really all SI units. Brianjd 07:47, 2004 Jun 15 (UTC)

Other Chains

Should we make a chain of pages for dimensionless & unitless numbers? eg "number of hairs on human hair", "number of stars in the mily way", "number of hairs on head of Yul Bryner" Any thoughts on names for full-chain pages: length comparison? -- Tarquin 02:19 Sep 2, 2002 (PDT)

Yup, I suggested dimensionless number comparisons on the top of this page. As to naming them, how about simply 1 E 20 and 1e20? AxelBoldt 08:55 Sep 2, 2002 (PDT)

Has the naming style in general been ironed out? Dimensionless numbers would folloe that style, but without a unit suffix. Is it "1 E 2 {unit}" or "1e2 {unit}"? -- Tarquin 09:01 Sep 2, 2002 (PDT)

I thought we decided on 1 E20 m and 1 E-20 m -- I just haven't had time to do the grunt work. --mav

Okay. I'm off to do some grunt work extending the volume chain so Hoover Dam can link in to it. Please could someone check I've changed the correct numbers on each page, I have a morbid fear of missing one! -- Tarquin

Suggestions for new chains

speeds

What about orders of magnitude for temeratures? In kelvin, obvisouly, with Celsius (and god forbid, Fahrenheit) equivalents in each decade article. Should not be as limited as one might imagine. Quite interesting things happen when approaching absolute zero, I understand. Tempertures required for nuclear fusion would make an interesting span (and I'm sure there are some Big Bang exotica that could make this even more interesting. -- Egil 17:17 Mar 31, 2003 (UTC)

good idea. but let's move this bit to Talk:Orders of magnitude (new chains) -- page getting too long -- Tarquin 17:24 Mar 31, 2003 (UTC)

OK. There is now a demo chain at 1 E2 K, extending in both directions. It has not been linked anywhere.

I think the concept is OK, but I'm not perfectly happy with the layout. The Celsius equivalents mess things up. I tried a table layout, but it was so-and-so too (see below). Perhaps there is some aligment that can make it better? -- Egil 18:57 Mar 31, 2003 (UTC)

Alternative style:

<100 K
100 K	-173.15 °C
125 K	-148 °C	Superconductivity point of Tl-Ba-Cu-oxide
234.32 K	-38.83 °C	Melting point of Mercury
273.15 K	0 °C	Melting point of water
293 K	20 °C	Room temperature
310 K	37 °C	Human body temperature
373.15 K	100 °C	Boiling point of water
600.65 K	327.50 °C	Melting point of lead
1000 K	728.85 °C
>1000 K

I can see maybe capitalizing the first word of each example, but I really don't think the names of elements & compounds ought to be capitalized. Any objections if I dash through and chop them down? -- John Owens 19:03 Mar 31, 2003 (UTC)

No, please do. It was my fault (I somehow had this idea that the names of the elements were proper nouns).

Another thing: The temperatures are not inserted in the orders of magnitudes yet. I have no idea where they would fit. One suggestion (from temperatures) is to equate 1 eV to 11573 K (i.e. 1 E4 K) since this corresponds to the average kinetic energy at that temperature. Is that too weird?

-- Egil 19:24 Mar 31, 2003 (UTC)

Anyone have a good idea how small this should go? It seems to me that most of the really small powers are better expressed as energy, when you have reactions of individual molecules and such. I know some LEDs and such go at least down to microwatts, and there's the now-infamous (there's that word again!) antpower, albeit badly calculated. Anybody know any nanowatts or smaller that have any use? Perhaps the average power output of a single human cell, or something like that? -- John Owens 10:38 19 May 2003 (UTC)

Using the chain pages

There seem to be two ways to link the chain pages in use:

137 metres (link the number and the unit separately)
137 metres (joint link)

I see both as having advatages and disadvantages: I'm not sure type (1) makes it clear that the linked number will tell the reader about units and their values: it could be assuemd it's just about big numbers. (2) on the other hand doesn't give immediate information about the unit itself -- though that information is on the chain page, with a link to the unit there, and sometimes in the form of "100 km is x miles". Thoughts on this? It would be a good idea to stick to one type. mav seems to prefer (1). I lean towards (2), but I'm pretty much undecided. -- Tarquin

What I have been doing is using (1) upon the first occurrence of both a order of mag and unit and using (2) when a different order of mag using the same unit is found later in an article. That way we avoid having 137 metre, which at first glance looks like 137 AD. The reason I like linking to the units is because one of the main reasons we have the unit articles is for comparing and relating units. The orders of mag are, of course, here to compare the different sizes of things. Both are important and direct links to them where appropriate should exist in articles (first occurrence only -- unless there is a table. See atomic radius in beryllium). --mav

Sounds good to me. Once the shift to the new names is done, I'll write up the salient points of the chains, the name format & how to link to them on the Manual of Style pages -- Tarquin

Also, another thing I do when I don't know which orders of mag page to link is first link the unit, hit preview and then navigate to the correct orders of mag page (I might have to use the online converter to find the correct SI scale). --mav

I definitely think that #2 is better. The first time that I saw something like "137 metres", I had no idea what the heck was going on until I let my mouse hover over the links (and my browser told me what page was being linked to). Even after seeing that, I often do a double take when I see this strange thing happening — it looks so much like somebody has inadvertently linked to a year. On the other hand, "137 metres" (or "137 m", depending on whether or not you want to abbreviate in the running text) is perfectly clear. The link will surely discuss how long 137 m is, and you can reasonably expect to find a link to metre there if that's what you really want.

What you should expect to find behind the "137" is a mystery to the newcomer. — Toby 05:11 Sep 18, 2002 (UTC)

Hm - I just reset my prefs to show underlines and agree that the separate links do look odd. However I've already gone about linking many units directly without orders of mag links and many others with both linked. But the joint links should work just as well. The main function of the unit articles was for conversion purposes and there will be links to the unit articles in each order of mag article and there already are links to online converters. We will have to beef-up the order of mag articles a bit more to make this work, but I was planning on this anyway. --mav

I doubt that it's vital to fix each case so that it has the preferred linkage, at least not to fix the version 1 links, which may be confusing but do work. But version 2 is what I'd prefer, and what I've been making those few times that I've had call to. BTW, whatever is decided, when the time comes to do massive gruntwork like moving the order of magnitude titles to their canonical names, let me know here or on my talk page. I'm behind in my Wikipedia duties, but something that can be done for a short while between breaks wouldn't be a difficult way for me to earn my keep. — Toby 07:56 Sep 18, 2002 (UTC)

If we choose (2) for link style, it'll get a metnion on the Manual of Style -- in other words, all the links will eventually be fixed. No rush though. For a progress report on name canonization, see Orders of magnitude/Temp. Mav and I have done m, m^2, m^3 chains. About a third of the way through the kg chain. -- Tarquin 11:13 Sep 18, 2002 (UTC)

I also prefer (2) over (1) since (1) is simply illogical. Every link should be self-explanatory and we shouldn't force people to "try out" links. Since the order-of-magnitude pages have links to the units, that's only one click away anyway.

Personally, I sometimes use

(3a) 137 metres (see 1 E2 m for a list of objects of comparable size)

This is crystal clear, if more verbose. AxelBoldt

(3b)I like your idea Axel but instead of all the extra text why not simply write; 137 metres * or 137 m *? Then at the bottom of the page or table have your statement once. Although if there is only one orders of mag link in the article then the verbose option would be best. --mav

Format (2) is definitely better than format (1). With a link like "137" on its own, you expect it to give information on the number 137 (Wikipedia has articles like that I believe?). Brianjd 07:53, 2004 Jun 15 (UTC)

Creating this page with talk from Talk:Orders of magnitude to get it below 32k. -- John Owens 23:09 Apr 1, 2003 (UTC)

Chain page names

Exponential notation in page names

I think I might be guilty of the 1e-15 notation, so I'd better give a comment. The reason that I started to name pages like that is because there were pages named 100000000km² and it was very hard for me to count all those zeros. Yes, introducing commas might have solved the same problem. Furthermore, however, km² (for square kilometres) might be useful for the sizes of countries, but not for the sizes of paper sheets, so it was clear that a consistent system that spanned the entire range of sizes could not be based on km². One idea, as has been mentioned here, is to use different units for different parts of the spectrum, but this makes knowing/guessing the page name for a given size even harder than the "e" notation. I think that most Wikipedia contributors restrict their contributions to their own field of speciality (religion, science fiction literature, physics, medieval music, ...) and that those who find joy in arranging these order of magnitude pages will know the "e" notation. Those who merely read these pages, really need not worry about the page names. I think it shows now that the expansion of this system into m3, kg, J, s, and perhaps other units proves that it is useful. However, I'm not stopping anybody from renaming the pages or creating redirect aliases. I have no hard feelings about this. I think this was a funny game, an interesting new invention. It wasn't there until somebody invented it, and nobody told us how to do. I'm a strong believer in the try-watch-learn-redo approach. The current system is a try.--LA2, November 27, 2001.

The use of the lowercase "e" in these entries is completely wrong. Lowercase "e" is the notation of the natural logarithm -- Capital "E" is the correct shorthand used in scientific notation to denote the × 10^ in n × 10^y. I will move these to the correct capitalization in the next few days unless somebody can convince me that this is not a good idea. --mav

Go for it. I'll put links back to metre from each 1e-11 m-type page -- Tarquin 09:13 Aug 5, 2002 (PDT)

OK, I have fixed all the links and edit links and will be working on that version at Orders of magnitude/Temp. --mav

I've just noticed that --April uses lowercase e on her Simple Science wiki: http://www.renaissoft.com/april/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Exponential_Notation

Maybe that is where this came from. Anyway capital "E" is far better even if some people do use lowercase "e" for this; otherwise there is confusion as to whether e is a shorthand for × 10ⁿ or if the e stands for e which is the base to the natural logarithm. In either case, the lack of spaces between the characters is just plain wrong no matter what and m3 is not nearly as clear as m³. --mav

Aha, I've found your evil hidden plot, Mav! Ahem. I was under the impression that including spaces was incorrect. Certainly it looks very very wrong to my eyes. --Brion

Looks fine to me -- is there a ref. for how this is supposed to be done? I've just been expanding on the example Axel placed in scientific notation (which conforms to the way I've always seen the shorthand notation). --mav

I've never seen em with spaces. My experience of E-notation is overwhelmingly no spaces, and usually with an explicit + sign for positive numbers. I've been looking for some kind of official standard either way, all I can find is notes about number formatting functions in computer languages and spreadsseets (invariably without spaces), or notes for people taking standardized tests that they should not use spaces in their scientific notation. Proper scientific notation, of course, would use superscripts, but we can't put those in titles. --Brion

Hm. Knowing that others do not use spaces would have been useful info back when I started this process. However its a bit late now. Besides, not having the spaces doesn't work at all for me for negative exponents; 1E-10 m looks way too crowded; gives the impression that "E" is a variable and that "-" indicates subtraction. What do you think? --mav

Had I known you were going to blindly rename a gazillion pages on dubious grounds, I would have squealed earlier. ;) 1E-10 m looks fairly normal, though 1e-10 m looks even better. *cough cough* On the other hand, 1 E -10 m looks... bizarre. It looks like there were supposed to be more characters and somebody accidentally deleted them. --Brion

As was stated before the lowerecase e is wrong. Thus the change. Everything else really is more of a matter of personal taste. I will stop moving additional entries for a while and concentrate on improving the content. --mav

[[10E^-10]]? Guess not. It would be interesting to see how that parsed in a browser's location bar.... --KQ

If we could use superscripts, we'd just use [[1×10^-10]]... --Brion

I frequently miss the obvious. --KQ

Me too! We should invite it over more often. --Brion

That's a good one. --KQ

I just asked Axel to weigh-in on the issue here. If Axel agrees with Brion that the spaces should go then I move the articles myself and fix the links. --mav

Well, so much pressure! I definitely like E better than e, mainly because most calculators use E, and everybody else uses exponential notation anyway. Regarding the space issue I don't have strong opinions and could live with both solutions, but If I were completely free to choose, I'd tend towards writing them without spaces. AxelBoldt

I just found this from Axel's talk page. I use a lowercase letter, no spaces, and no plus sign. (Does that mean that I liked them how they were originally?) I don't see any grounds for calling any convention wrong; they're all just half assed attempts to do without superscripts, and we should have every likely format, with redirects. — Toby 16:03 Aug 21, 2002 (PDT)

Hm. What to do. Over half of the articles and links are in the [1 E n unit] format. It also appears that there are several valid ways to express this notation which includes the now dominant form. Since Axel doesn't think the spaces should be removed (only has a highly qualified preference) I say that I should continue with the format I was working with (this represents far less work). That is unless somebody feels strongly enough about the no space notation to help with the moving. --mav

I don't think it matters so much what the article title is, since I find them all acceptable. My big deal is that redirects should be made for all of the notations that have been tried in the past (and are thus likely to be tried in the future). I'll help with that; let me know what I should do. — Toby 21:02 Aug 22, 2002 (PDT)

That'll be messy. We should agree on one format for these, and edit links to be in that format as and when we find them: consistency. A page on dates and numbers in the wikipedia:Manual of Style, maybe? -- Tarquin

Messy though it may be, I think that it (bunches of redirects) is necessary if we want Wikipedia to work proprerly. Casual users won't read Wikipedia:Manual of Style first and may not notice the subtle difference (as opposed to naming conventions about, say, royalty, which aren't very subtle). This certainly doesn't mean that we can't also edit links when we find them, to help copycats do it right the first time. We should use every tool that we have available. — Toby 11:34 Aug 24, 2002 (PDT)

I think Tarquin just wanted to have consistency in what we name each order of mag main article. I for one will make sure redirects exist for reasonable capital E spacing variants (the only redirects that I will maintain for the lowercase variants are the old page titles -- the only reason is for backwards compatibility for external search engines and visitors who may have bookmarked the pages). However I will also change each and every current link to the orders of mag articles to point directly to whatever we decide is the best syntax (see below). --mav

I may have found a way to do this that will satify everyone: Why not have a space after the first number and no space after the E. For example; 1 E4 m. Compare this to 1E4 m and 1 E 4 m Here is an example for negative values; 1 E-13 m. Compared with 1E-13 m and 1 E -13 m. I for one actually prefer the newer syntax becuase it is nicely balanced and easy to read. Brion is right, having spaces between everything is distracting and looks odd -- this new syntax look much better to me. --mav

I'm reasonably satisfied with the negatives, but now the positives look unbalanced. :) I'd recommend considering 1 E+4 m, but +s don't work in titles. (Probably hearkens back to the days of raw URLs, since a + is a special character in a URL; however this can be fixed with escaping, so I suspect it could be changed.) But if nobody likes that enough to fix the software, go ahead with your plan. --Brion

Just for reference (stuff got lost a bit in the refactoring of all this talk), the final consensus is: "1 E2 {unit symbol}" and "1 E-2 {unit symbol}". For example: "1 E20 m" and "1 E-20 m". I plan on doing some grunt work bit by bit. I'll set up a template too. -- Tarquin 21:04 Sep 9, 2002 (UTC)

Mav's evil suggestion

Evil question; Would the syntax E11 m be better? That way one could simply say that 1 AU is equal to 150 E11 m. Yes, I know this is ultra evil but I just thought of it. At this point I guess I will have to settle for redirects since so much work has been done moving these articles around twice already. :) --mav

... yes, that's ultra evil. But I don't think many readers will understand what "150 E11 m" means in the text. I'm tempted to say "sure, we'll combine it with an effort to convert all the floating tables to full-width." ... ;-) -- Tarquin

Not to add evilness on top of evilness, but isn't 1 E11 m just one of E11 whole number values within the E11 order of magnitude range? I'm starting to get a bad feeling about the "1 E" syntax and I volunteer to spend an entire day fixing this myself but I won't do so unless you agree that it would be a logical thing to do. Otherwise I will just make a bunch of redirects (But I have no proplem with spending the time to fix this if it is in fact best for the articles). But I do think we should have the least ambiguous and most informative syntax as the place where the articles reside. Again, I am sorry for the evilness of this, but this has been something that has been confusing me ever since I first saw these pages back in Feb '02. Until yesterday I couldn't put my finger on exactly why the syntax was confusing me other than the obviously ambiguous lowercase "e". I think I have already mentioned that I have a math dyslexia. Unless numbers and equations are very clear I get lost. The E11 m syntax just seems to be the most logical and easy to work with to me. What do you think? --mav

This is one to ponder... I'm innumerate so between us we're maybe not best suited to working on these pages. (seriously. within 6 months of starting my maths degree I had clean forgotten my multiplication tables: being a mathematician, the only numbers I ever need are 0, 1, e, pi and infinity.) I've been unsure about the "1 E" too. Another point is that "1 E11" is numbers from 1E11 to 1E12, not including the 12, but I think we really don't want to start thinking of "1 E11 m - 1 E12 m", it'll be difficult to work with, and besides, thinking about it, the adding of an extra digit is the obvious cut-off point, and that's what we currently have -- so scratch that particular can of worms before we even open it.

Removing the "1" would allow "transparent" links in pages if we wanted them, like "138 E13 m" -- do we want those? Some extreme siszes maybe, but for everyday stuff like the surface area of Lake Titicaca, it's best to use SI multiples like MegaWatt, Hectare, etc.

The other point you raise is a clean, clear page title. I agree, the "1" bugs me in some way I can't quantify. I think we need to hassle the scientist Wikipedians who actually use this notation in real life (again). -- Tarquin

Yeah, you are probably right about having to bug Axel and crew again (their eyes are going to role, I know it). Since I'm not working as a real scientist right now I can't say I use the E or even standard scientific/engineering notation in real life but I have been using it in the elements articles. In fact I have been using the E notation often lately since doing so saves a lot of horizontal space (the element tables are mostly in SI so use the same standard units we are using here). The more I think about it the more I like the E11 m notation. Most importantly I can see myself easily using this in many articles (granted, most of the time it will be sublinked under prefixed units like kilometers, but having the option of creating direct free-links where appropriate is nice). If I only thought of this a month ago. Fixing all these pages twice already was a great deal of work, but simply removing a "1" and a space from each shouldn't take me nearly as much time as it took both of us to do the previous conversions. --mav

Slight problem: E1, E2 are already redirects, and one possible plan was to do a chain of dimensionless numbers. (There's also an EEC thing called the E111, but I don't think it exists anymore.) I think we should wait a while to get all the sciency wikipedians' opinions. -- Tarquin 23:42 Oct 6, 2002 (UTC)

Waiting to form consensus seems to be the best thing to do -- we aren't the only ones that will be using these articles. Since I don't even pretend to be a mathematician I'm not sure what the value would be about having dimensionless number articles. What more can you say about E12 other than it is a range of numbers from 1,000,000,000,000 and 999,999,999,999,999.9999.....? The redirect examples are just cases of disambiguation. In my opinion E1 and E2 are way too ambiguous for their current purpose and can be taken over by us if we place disambiguation blocks at the bottom of the resulting orders of mag articles (fixing the current links of course). --mav

OK I see. Number of human hairs type of thing. Yes that would be neat. --mav

Since there is talk about renaming the articles again, here are my thoughts: pretty much everything can be accomplished with redirects, except for the actually displayed title of the article. So that one should be as descriptive as possible. In that light, I think "E10 m" is worse than "1 E10 m", but both are pretty bad. The optimal title would be "Lengths between 1 E10 m and 1 E11 m". That would explain it completely. You'd link to it via redirects such as "E10 m" or "1e10 m" or what have you.

Oh, and one thing about the "E10" notation: a link such as 53 E10 m is not correct, since we want to link to "E11 m" in that situation. And readers have probably more trouble with the E's than with powers of 10. AxelBoldt 04:46 Oct 7, 2002 (UTC)

Lengths between 1 E10 m and 1 E11 m is a bit wordy but this is the least ambiguous title. Howver, since this is a long name I don't forsee that systax being linked directly much (except from unit articles). Redirects should work fine in most cases. I will try to think of something better than your idea and if that isn't successful then I can start moving the articles and fixing any double redirects. Hopefully we've got this right this time. --mav

You could at least shorten the words a bit. Say Lengths from 1E10 to 1E11 m, or even Lengths 1E10 - 1E11 m?

What was it about that can of worms that didn't say "don't go there"? *sigh* It's maybe clearer to call them "Lengths from A to B", but it's more technically correct to say "1E1 m", since the way the system works is up from a new power of ten. Axel's absolutely right to correct me: "53 E10 m" is incorrect. You can only use numbers from 1 up to 9.9999 for each slice, so I think it makes sense to name the page after the base number. I'm feeling terribly ambivalent about it now. Wish I hadn't brought it up! (BTW, I like Lengths 1E10 - 1E11 m if we do go for that style) -- Tarquin

Lengths from 1E10 to 1E11 m would be fine with me; Lengths 1E10 - 1E11 m seems a little less self-evident, and since nobody will use these links directly anyway, a bit of wordiness in the interest of clarity cannot hurt. After all, the title of the article is what Google and our search engine indexes and displays. AxelBoldt 18:42 Oct 8, 2002 (UTC)

Lengths from 1E10 to 1E11 m gets my vote too. Not too wordy and not too vague. --mav 19:04 Oct 8, 2002 (UTC)

Actually I think the current page titles are fine. They could still be moved to Lengths from 1E10 to 1E11 m format but I now don't think this is that important given the amount of work involved. If however, double redirects could get automatically fixed then a move might be in order if somebody is so inclined to do so. We should go live with what we have now, me thinks. --mav

"1 En m" → "1 E+n m"

In the scientific notation, often explicitly mentioning the plus sign is being preferred. Hence the article names were changed, while of course the former names redirect to the new ones. All redirects that existed were appropriately modified. The shortest range, which used to end at 1 E-13 m, was extended till 1 E-24 m (the yoctometre, being the shortest subdivision of the metre in the SI system), and the Order of magnitude table now also shows that shortest range. Kind regards. — SomeHuman 25 Mar 2007 11:32 (UTC)

Template

To the templates below, between "Less" and "More", actual entries are added, one bullet point for each entry. The entries should be according to the following format:

102 g -- small apple, see joule

A double dash separates the value from the explanation, and the explanation is not capitalized.

To help compare different orders of magnitude we list here (dimensions) between 10 (units) and 10 (units).

External link

Conversion Calculators

To help compare different [[orders of magnitude]] we list here ([[dimension]]s) between 10<sup></sup> (units) and 10<sup></sup> (units).

* [[1 E|(Less)]]
* [[1 E|(More)]]

== External link ==
*[http://www.ex.ac.uk/trol/scol/index.htm Conversion Calculators]

(copied from Talk:Orders of magnitude) -- John Owens

Linking to external unit converter

Permission to massively link to convertion calculator pages at: www.ex.ac.uk/cimt/res2/calcs/calaindx.htm

I asked:

Thank you for providing this great resource!

I have been adding links to your converters from various pages at
http://www.wikipedia.org which is a free on-line, not for profit encyclopedia
that is built by hundreds of volunteers.

I know I should have asked permission to do this first and I apologize for
not doing that -- but your calculators are so perfect that I started linking
them right away.

If this is not to your liking I will remove or modify the links as you wish.
Here is an example of how I am linking your pages;
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Density

Our website is an open wiki so you can edit that page and its link to your
page to however you like (if you edit the external link, I will follow that
style for the other links I have made to your website -- space, Wikipedia
style and reason permitting of course).

F.Tapson who is the author of each page responded:

No problem.
I always welcome links (isn't that what the Web is all about?)
It is copying that I object to. I fail to understand how so many people
feel it is OK to build their own Website using other people's material!
I have just had a look at the Wikipedia. Very nice idea which I have now
bookmarked.
Thanks for letting me know.

The converter is a very useful resource to link to. But wouldn't it be safer to only link from one Wikipedia article, in case the URL changes in the future? -- Tarquin

That notion did cross my mind. But since I have notified the author about our extensive linking to his pages he will probably set up legacy links when/if he reorganizes or moves. Besides I plan on being here for some time so if links get broken I will fix them. I think that having these links wherever they are appropriate will be most useful. For example, the country template now only lists square kilometres for area in order to save space. However since there is a link to that article via km² that in turn has an external link to an area converter, then all is well with not including square miles. --mav

I think that links to Conversion of units (which of course should have integrated links to the unit converter) would be easier to maintain and more informative to the readers. AxelBoldt 08:55 Sep 2, 2002 (PDT)

http://www.ex.ac.uk/cimt/res2/calcs/calaindx.htm has moved to http://www.ex.ac.uk/trol/scol/index.htm so I've changed all the links I could find. -Wikibob | Talk 15:04, 2004 Sep 5 (UTC)

Maybe we should just remove it from the various pages or place it on a template .. -- Oddly it's allover. -- User:Docu

Creating this sub-page to cut down on the size of Talk:Order of magnitude. -- John Owens 22:56 Apr 1, 2003 (UTC)

Question of style

The various "nn Enn xx" pages seem to use at least two different styles of capitalization (approx 50-50 distribution):

Style 1:

Lighter masses
102 g -- Small apple, see joule

Style 2:

lighter masses
102 g -- small apple, see joule

For consistency, I think we should decide one of these styles, but which one? Or has this been decided somewhere. -- Egil 08:41 Apr 9, 2003 (UTC)

Probably this would be the right place for this, so I copied it here. I agree it should be consistent, no strong feelings one way or the other, but I guess I would actually prefer an intermediate style:

Style 3:

Lighter masses
102 g -- small apple, see joule

but maybe that's just me. -- John Owens 08:50 Apr 9, 2003 (UTC)

I agree that style 3 has merit in terms of being logical (if we assume the "sentence" starts at "102"). I will change to style 3 as I add new entries (don't have the time to go through all articles, I think). -- Egil 07:00 Apr 13, 2003 (UTC)