Talk:Hectare

Purpose of Hectare (Explanation Section)
The article suggests that the hectare is used in place of the square meter where it 'would be cumbersome and unnecessarily precise' to do so (added here). But surely units could be given as 270,000 sq m. rather than 27ha which is equally precise and not particularly cumbersome. My view, on the basis of no hard facts at all is that the hectare is a historical hangover used predominantly in countries which transitioned from the imperial acre to the quasi-metric hectare. But I could of course be totally wrong? orizon 03:09, 21 June 2007 (UTC)


 * It's fully metric, just not SI. Jɪmp 05:58, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

Canadian usage
Google search shows (1) that both "hectare" and "acre" are widely used in Canada, (2) "hectare" is slightly more common, (3) "hectare" is almost universally preferred in official (government) publications and widely preferred in journalism and education, (4) "acre" is widely used in commercial contexts, notably real estate. Avt tor 23:33, 30 July 2007 (UTC)


 * While mkevlar's comment saying only hectares are official is probably true, I (in western Canada) have never once seen a piece of real estate advertised in hectares, and I think Avt tor's original statement is essentially correct. I don't think it's for any nostalgic reason - acres are much smaller, making it sound as if you're getting more land. (Similarly, stores here advertise their meat prices by the pound, even though it's weighed in kilograms - because the kilogram price sounds like more than double.) TooManyFingers (talk) 16:17, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

Not true! I am a Canadian who uses hectares every day in the measurement of urban parks. Officially no one used acres. mkevlar 30 January 2016 (UTC)

BIPM SI 8th ed
BIPM have moved on. The 8th edition of SI has brought the hectare in from the cold and includes it in a group of units that are accepted for use with SI. (Table 6). The article text as it stands reflects some of the 7th edition, has been edited several times and reads awkwardly. I intend to update the article to reflect the current standing of hectare in SI by BIPM. Bleakcomb (talk) 03:42, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

Last word
Square kilometers, as in square miles, are too large for such close resolution tasks in the needs of daily life, and square meters or square yards or feet too large.

Is it possible that the last word of the first paragraph should have been 'small'?

Muddyork (talk) 05:23, 26 June 2008 (UTC)

Merge from Decare
Please see Talk:Decare. ANDROS1337  22:30, 5 July 2008 (UTC)


 * I have proposed merging the articles are, decare and centiare into this article. The articles decare and centiare are so short that they should be merged into other articles, while the history of the are and hectare (which I am currently writing) are so tightly intertwinned that merging the two makes sense.  I propose that this article should be the "host" article as the hectare is the most widely used of the four units of measurement. Martinvl (talk) 13:05, 4 March 2010 (UTC)


 * I have not seen any comments on the merge proposal, so I am going ahead. It will be done gradually over the next few days.  Martinvl (talk) 16:23, 12 March 2010 (UTC)

Removed some weak sentences.
Areas less than one hectare are often expressed in square metres, and areas 10,000 ha and above in square kilometres. The number of significant figures is often limited to four digits. Several people have had a go at these sentences and they don't seem to be improving. The often is weak and borders on a weasel word. It is the equivalent of it often rains, which is quite true but very vague. And the reverse of the limits given is often true as well - areas less than one hectare and greater than 10,000 ha are often expressed in hectares. The problem is probably that the sentence is just POV. By the way here are some examples of hectares in use (even millions of hectares). and --Bleakcomb (talk) 09:48, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

When did the Metric System become Law in the UK
As one of the first year entry to college undertaking Building Construction we were amougst the first students to be educated under the METRIC ACT for the UK. We were told that this Act was past into law in 1972.

I do not have a copy of this law now, so many years on, but I know I had one and all my working life in Building Design within the Civil Service we used the METRIC SYSTEM.

So what's this talk about it coming into effect as late as 1995. This country has been metricated since 1972.

For verification see METRIC ACT 1972.

John McNamara —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.157.226.86 (talk) 10:29, 29 March 2010 (UTC)


 * It became law under EU directive 80/181/EEC to use hectares and square kilometres for all “commercial, public health, public administration and public health” purposes in 1986 with the proviso that acres could be used for “purposes of land registration”. This meaning of “commercial purposes” was that if I advertised land at £x per unit area, I had to use hectares, but if I advertised a piece of land of area Y, I could express it in acres.


 * On 1-Jan-2010 the law changed – the scope of the directive was widened by the removal of text which limited the purposes. The meaning of the new directive has yet to be clarified by the courts.  On the same day the acre ceased to be legal for purpose of land registration (in practice the Land Registry Office had stopped using the acre a number of years previously).
 * See European units of measurement directives. Martinvl (talk) 11:02, 29 March 2010 (UTC).

Removal of "citation needed flag" (16-Nov-2010)
I removed the Tomna form the list of synonyms for the decare as it is defined as being about 1124 square metres (see Maltese units of measurement. References for the other units of measure appear in the relevant Wikipedia articles.  Martinvl (talk) 13:24, 16 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Thanks Martinv1 for your good faith efforts to make Wikipedia better. Actually however, Wikipedia policy does call for any substantive claim in all articles to be verifiably sourced per WP:V; this is one of the very few core wiki-policies.  "Wikipedia itself is not considered an adequate source":  see the section Wikipedia and sources that mirror or use it in the WP:V policy.  The lone exception, where sources are not required, is disambiguation pages.


 * It is probably true that we need not cite every detail about any particular usage of hectare-related measurement units, but if a claim is made about the usage of some unit in this country or that (which is an assertion), then a citation should be provided that will source such claims. A very acceptable alternative is to make fewer claims in this particular article and leave the detail to be claimed, and then only sourced, in the article that covers the linked measurement.


 * It is no problem with me for a little more time to pass so this can be sorted out before deleting the unsourced claims, but the citation needed tags should stay until the sources are provided. Cheers.  N2e (talk) 15:16, 16 November 2010 (UTC)


 * By the way, thanks Martinvl for adding the citations which help support the claims for Norway and Bulgaria! Wikipedia gets better all the time, little by little.  N2e (talk) 15:27, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

Misleading image
The image http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hectare.png illustrates that one are is equal to 10m^2 and that a hectare is equal to 100m^2, when in fact an are is 100m^2 and a hectare, as the article states, is 10000m^2. I think the person who produced the image does not understand what m^2 means. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.38.204.141 (talk) 00:46, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

I get the feeling that there is a confusion between when something is x square metres and when something is x metres squared. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.38.204.141 (talk) 01:41, 27 March 2011 (UTC)


 * On the contrary - since one are has an area of 100m^2, it can be made up of 100 squares, each on 1m^2. These squares can be laid out in a larger square, that has sides of 10m. Martinvl (talk) — Preceding undated comment added 07:41, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

(Same guy from before). My bad —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.38.204.141 (talk) 10:23, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

Size comparisons from redirected article
I don’t know how useful this information is or how best (if at all) to incorporate it into this article, but this list was at before it redirected to here. To help compare orders of magnitude of different areas, areas between 1 hectare (10,000 m²) and 10 hectares (0.1 km²) are listed below.

—Frungi (talk) 04:27, 30 November 2012 (UTC)
 * Areas smaller than 1 hectare
 * 1 hectare is equal to:
 * 1 E+4 m² or 10,000 m²
 * 100 m &times; 100 m
 * 100 ares
 * 108,000 square feet
 * 2.47 acres
 * 1.2126 hectares -- Plaza Mayor of Madrid
 * 1.35 hectares -- Piazza del Popolo, Rome
 * 2.3 hectares -- Red Square, Moscow
 * 2.68 hectares—area of the RMS Queen Mary 2's passenger decks
 * 3.2 hectares -- Palace of Westminster
 * 3.76 hectares -- Castelmoron-d'Albret, the smallest commune of France
 * 4 hectares -- Fort Severn, the first campus of the US Naval Academy
 * 4.5 hectares -- Wenceslas Square, Prague
 * 5.5 hectares—base of the Great Pyramid of Giza
 * 5.7 hectares -- Plaza de la Constitución, Mexico City
 * 6 $2/3$ hectares—1 Chinese qǐng
 * 8.055 hectares -- Charles Square, Prague
 * 8.4 hectares -- Place de la Concorde, Paris
 * Areas larger than 10 hectares

File:Comparison_land_area_units.svg
Referring to Martinvl's reversion of the graphic on the right on the grounds of "Doesn't add anything to the article apart from overload the graphics", I beg to differ that it helps the reader to compare the unit with other units of area. I agree that there are perhaps already too many pictures on the page, but I think some of them are less useful, e.g. the Statue of Liberty one. Does anyone have any opinion on this? Thanks, cm&#610;&#671;ee&#2927;&#8202;&#865;&#176;&#160;&#814;&#1583;&#8202;&#865;&#176;&#8201;&#2669; 19:05, 21 August 2013 (UTC)


 * My screen is 1920 pixels wide. I set Wikipedia in a floating window and reduced the screen to 960 pixels.  The new image overran the bottom of the section into the section "Visualising a hectare" and blocked out part of the image of the pitch sizes in the subsection "International rugby field".  It is unacceptable to position images where they interfere with other images.


 * While the image itself is a genuine attempt to incorporate all areas up to one hectare in a single presentation, the author has been over-ambitious - Unless I blow it up, the image does not tell me whether a square yard is larger, smaller or the same as a square metre. Furthermore the square yard and sqiare metre are so small compared with the hectare, all that the image tells me is that the hectare is much larger than these smaller areas.


 * When you present an image you have about three seconds to catch the reader's attention. In the case of this image, the reader will ask himself "What is this?".  The very small text does not draw people's attention.


 * In short, the amount of information contained in the image is poorly presented and the way in which it distorted the exiting article by overflowing detracted even more from it. Martinvl (talk) 19:52, 21 August 2013 (UTC)

What does an hectare measure in "practical" terms ?
Although a good article, I could not find here an answer to my question: how is a piece of land REALLY measured in hectares? What I mean is that all the examples you give are "flat"; what would be appreciated is an example of a non-flat surface: what happens there? Is an "hectare" of flat land equal in terrain size to an "hectare" of slopped land or not? A.R. (alainr345) If it's not clear, for an example of what I mean, I could find this sentence on a website which seems to point to the answer being "No, it would be different in terrain size", but that applies to the term Acre: "The acre is not a measure of surface area on the actual surface of the earth, but on an imaginary, hill-less, standardized ellipsoid. That result comes from using only strictly horizontal dimensions in calculating acreage." — Preceding unsigned comment added by 205.151.119.119 (talk) 22:56, 16 March 2014 (UTC)


 * The definition of the are and hectare are strictly in terms of square meters on a plane. I don't believe that the application of these measures to the legal measurement of actual land is in scope for this article, as the issues are the same whether the unit is the square meter, the hectare, the acre, the square mile, etc. I'm not sure where this issue belongs -- perhaps surveying or geodesy? --Macrakis (talk) 15:02, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified 2 external links on Hectare. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20091001100650/http://www.bipm.org/en/si/si_brochure/chapter4/table6.html to http://www.bipm.org/en/si/si_brochure/chapter4/table6.html
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20101022061357/http://www.bnr.bg/sites/en/Economy/Pages/0510Marketofagriculturalland.aspx to http://www.bnr.bg/sites/en/Economy/Pages/0510Marketofagriculturalland.aspx

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot  (Report bug) 23:50, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified one external link on Hectare. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20130515190933/http://www.agrifoodconsulting.com/ACI/uploaded_files/project_report/project_46_364535920.pdf to http://www.agrifoodconsulting.com/ACI/uploaded_files/project_report/project_46_364535920.pdf

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot  (Report bug) 20:55, 4 June 2017 (UTC)

The view from Google calculator
As of May 2018, Google calculator recognizes "ha" in calculations with explicit units, but does not recognize ha with any metric prefix (e.g. k, M). This article doesn't seem to indicate that metric prefixes are accepted with ha, either. Coincidence, or French conspiracy? &mdash; MaxEnt 20:51, 21 May 2018 (UTC)
 * 1 ha = 1 hectare = 1 hect(o)-are. Get it? Komischn (talk) 17:15, 30 June 2020 (UTC)

Why no examples?
Today, User:DeFacto made a number of edits to this content page, the first of which deleted practically all examples with the mention "Removed illustrated examples per WP:NOTTEXTBOOK". Well, under WP:NOTTEXTBOOK I find, among others, the following sentence:
 * Some kinds of examples, specifically those intended to inform rather than to instruct, may be appropriate for inclusion in a Wikipedia article.

IMHO, the above-mentioned deletion went too far, removing many examples meant more to inform than to instruct. I'm reminded of the sentence which Pierre Larousse wrote on the half-title page of his dictionary: Un dictionnaire sans exemples est un squelette ("A dictionary without examples is a skeleton"). — Tonymec (talk) 11:25, 13 October 2019 (UTC)
 * IMHO they dominated the article and were excessive. Perhaps one would be ok, but I'm not sure even that is necessary as using a unit of area to measure area is not a very challenging concept to grasp. -- DeFacto (talk). 11:42, 13 October 2019 (UTC)
 * I notice you left only the example mentioning Trafalgar Square, and removed, among others, the Statue of Liberty and the athletics field. Wasn't that, shall we say, a little anglo-centric? I'd give long odds that the Statue of Liberty is better known to the average American than Trafalgar Square, and OTOH, the athletics field is a more international example, IMHO more appropriate for an encyclopædia addressed de facto not only at native anglophones, but at people having a certain minimum mastery of English anywhere in the world. — Tonymec (talk) 20:46, 13 October 2019 (UTC)

First legal definition of the metric system of units
The History section of the article cites a source which contains the text of the law from 1795 (in French). That law from 1795 explicitly extended the deadline for the usage of the system of units to become mandatory, which was given by the decree from 1 August 1793. Therefore the first legal definition was in 1793. But most units defined on the 1795 law differ from what was defined on the 1793 decree, particularly on pages 6 and 7.

Notably, the meter was already the key unit, so it was a metric system, but the names of several other units were different and while the are was defined as a unit of area, it was defined as 10000 m², or 100 larger, but there was an inconsistence in the conversion factor to square feets which would effectively divide it by a factor of 100.

Is the 1793 system considered to be a different system or already the metric system, but later modified? Does any one knows more about the subject or has another source which comments on the differences? And lacking that, is it still possible, or relevant to mention any of this? Nativeblue (talk) 23:15, 9 October 2022 (UTC)

The Too many photos tag on the article
While some deletionist editors have a problem with "too many photos" in this article, I can't see any problem, because, according to me, there are no too many photos here, and the border between "enough" and "too many" is vague, subjective and arbitrary. All those "too many photos" help many readers, including me, to understand the comparison between different units of area, so please, do not delete photos just because of phobia of "too many" (too many photos, too many planets in the Solar System, too many chemical reactions, too many examples, too many clarify tags, too many sections, too many list entries, too many table rows, too many tables, too many information, ...), truncating the important information on Wikipedia. Bernardirfan (talk) 15:57, 25 September 2023 (UTC)


 * I agree that the tag is not warranted. There is no sandwiching, and the number of photos and illustrations is not excessive. Indefatigable (talk) 17:05, 25 September 2023 (UTC)
 * Not only are images useful to understand this kind of subject, IMHO in this case there are certainly not too many of them; I would even say that there might be too few pictures to illustrate the subject at hand, but opinions vary. I'm going to remove that tag — if someone puts it back the three of us might have to find someone having the authority to arbitrate. — Tonymec (talk) 04:50, 4 October 2023 (UTC)

Unicode
The symbol ㏊ redirects to this article. Can someone add a paragraph about the Unicode usage please?

Simon de Danser (talk) 11:53, 8 October 2023 (UTC)


 * The character ㏊ (U+33CA SQUARE HA) is part of the block U+3300 – U+33FF "CJK Compatibility", in subsection U+3399 – U+33DF "Squared Latin abbreviations". IIUC those characters are meant to represent Latin abbreviations as wide-CJK glyphs to be used in CJK text. See page https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U3300.pdf for details. — Tonymec (talk) 01:25, 12 October 2023 (UTC)


 * Done --Macrakis (talk) 11:02, 24 November 2023 (UTC)

Decimilliare
I added a non-metric approximation for the decimilliare; its use of two prefixes is confusing. TooManyFingers (talk) 16:03, 26 October 2023 (UTC)