Talk:Q11573

material measure (Q1329540)

+Property? --Fractaler (talk) 07:04, 20 October 2016 (UTC)

English label

The SI unit of length is the 'metre'. Source: https://www.bipm.org/en/publications/si-brochure/

That is the correct label in English by reference to the source. There is a us-en variant, "meter", but that is not the one used by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (Q229478) which is the definitive authority. --RexxS (talk) 17:54, 28 October 2018 (UTC)

@RexxS: There is no en-US field, which implies that the en field is for American English. I think fixing this could be a good proposal for m:Community Wishlist Survey 2019, but I'm already planning to submit four proposals and hope someone takes ownership of one of them. Jc86035 (talk) 18:35, 28 October 2018 (UTC)

@Jc86035: Unfortunately, for anyone actually using the data, for example in English Wikipedia, there is a requirement that units match the format within the document and there is no implication that the default should be en-us. The spelling of "metre" is normal in almost all English-speaking countries, so I'm not particularly keen to have to define labels for every other English variant for every affected unit of measurement simply to accommodate one country. The property/qualifier language of work or name (P407) is happy to accept American English (Q7976) as a value for items/properties but not labels, so it does seem that this is an omission that needs to be rectified. --RexxS (talk) 19:09, 28 October 2018 (UTC)

@RexxS: Yeah, that was the issue I was getting at (see also this discussion; nothing really came from it though). Jc86035 (talk) 19:15, 28 October 2018 (UTC)

Proposed as part of m:Community Wishlist Survey 2019/Wikidata/Improvements to the Wikidata data model and user interface. Jc86035 (talk) 16:46, 30 October 2018 (UTC)

Thanks, Jc86035. It's also true that you can't set a value of datatype monolingual text to "en-us", either. In fact, you can only set "en-gb" and "en-ca", so most English users will fallback to "en", whatever that means. --RexxS (talk) 16:59, 30 October 2018 (UTC)

Help:Label says to use the most common name. The international name is "metre" and the English Wikipedia page uses "metre", so our label should be "metre". It's true that we don't yet have "en-us" available, but that doesn't mean we should force "en" to be "en-us". - Nikki (talk) 12:40, 8 November 2018 (UTC)

I corrected "kilometer" back to proper English (en not en-us or en-au or...) "kilometre" this afternoon, and then found that it was defined as 1000 "meters" - a meter is a device for measuring things, not a unit of measure. I fear starting an edit war if I unilaterally go through and correct the English-language wikidata labels of SI units to match the names of the relevant Enwiki articles, but it is plain to anyone that the English label of a wikidata entity should (apart from disambiguation) be the name of the English-language wikipedia article about that item. --ScottDavis (talk) 09:01, 3 January 2019 (UTC)

I agree and as we're not getting en-us as an alternative from this year's wish-list, I'll go ahead and change the English label here to match the English Wikipedia article. --RexxS (talk) 15:21, 3 January 2019 (UTC)

As a result, the kilometre is now defined as 1,000 metres. You might want to have a look at decimetre (Q200323) and millimetre (Q174789) as well. --RexxS (talk) 15:28, 3 January 2019 (UTC)

Unfortunately, that did not last long, and User:Abián has protected all of them with the variant "-er" spelling. I have contacted Abián on his/her talk page. --ScottDavis (talk) 03:46, 10 January 2019 (UTC)

If we change two of them, we should change them all. And maybe we should also change "liter" back to "litre" then. Check this page. Robin van der Vliet (talk) (contribs) 12:19, 11 January 2019 (UTC)

Yes, I believe they should all be ...metre and ...litre. A "meter" is a measuring instrument (such as a water meter and a liter is ...ummm... a mis-spelled lighter? I don't think of a litre, as that has been the spelling I was taught in primary school 4 deacades ago. --ScottDavis (talk) 11:49, 14 January 2019 (UTC)

Not sure if enwiki is of much help for this, as it tends to use just the spelling people first created it with. If you change en for any of them, please make sure the other spelling is an alias for en. --- Jura 12:12, 26 January 2019 (UTC)

Listing plural forms for units

Hello @Jura1: Are you suggesting that we should list plural forms for all units? How about other grammatical cases like genitive? I'd stay that all of those variations should be modeled with lexemes. Best wishes. Toni 001 (talk) 23:48, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

No, I'm just reverting as I don't think we should delete useful search terms, such as the most frequent form. --- Jura 23:50, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

Defining Formula (P2534) for Conversion Between Multiple Measurements to Unit of Multiple Sub-Units

I think it might be useful to use defining formula (P2534) to define the relation ship between units like metre (Q11573) and metre per second (Q182429) or square metre (Q25343), the relation ship could be described as x = y / x where x represents metre (Q11573) and y represents square metre (Q25343). -- I is chan (talk) 15:21, 22 August 2022 (UTC)

Display plural forms for height above sea-level

I'm having trouble displaying this item as plural when fetching height above sea-level values on the Icelandic Wikipedia. Any numbers ending with 2-0 should be listed as metrar (example 138 metrar) and any value ending with 1 should end with metri (131 metri). Ho can I do that? Steinninn (talk) 15:57, 26 August 2024 (UTC)