User talk:Lensovet/Archive/2007/Oct

Dumb idea with conversion templates
What were you thinking of in this edit of the Richmond, California article, which you posted with the edit summary of "Geography - please use these templates instead, regardless of units, see Category:Conversion templates for reverse direction"? I don't think that is a good idea in this particular instance; it is both a waste of resources and more likely to decrease rather than increase the accuracy of the conversions.

There are some conversions on Wikipedia which could benefit from the use of templates such as that.

However, the demographic data from the U.S. Census included in U.S. cities and towns and some other enumeration units are not among those. These were all originally input en mass by a bot using data from a U.S. Census database which included the conversions, done on a consistent basis by the census rather than the bot, correctly calculated for the actual metric units as well as the actual English units (sometimes on a basis of more precise original numbers than those shown).

Have you done this in a bunch of other articles? A few? or just this one? I think all of them should be undone, when done on this specific data. There may be some census department figures which are overprecise or underprecise (they were done to a consistent number of decimal places rather than to an accuracy appropriate for the input), but they can be handled on a case by case basis. Gene Nygaard 12:51, 1 October 2007 (UTC)