Talk:Long and short scales
| This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Long and short scales article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
Article policies
|
| Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
Archives: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5Auto-archiving period: 3 months  |
 | This article is rated GA-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||
| Long and short scales has been listed as one of the Language and literature good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it. | |||||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||
 | The contents of the Milliard page were merged into Long and short scales. For the contribution history and old versions of the redirected page, please see its history; for the discussion at that location, see its talk page. |
Population numbers
[edit]Using the most recent numbers in the Wikipedia articles on each country, I've compiled the following. Of course, most totals are at best correct to nearest million only.
Australia.... 21 855 016 Hong Kong 7 008 900 Ireland Rep 4 422 100 New Zealand 4 315 800 Phillipines.. 91 983 000 Singapore.. 4 737 000 UK............ 61 113 205 USA.......... 307 293 000 English language-speaking countries and regions, total 502 728 021 Brazil........ 191 241 714 Bulgaria..... 7 605 551 Estonia..... 1 340 415 Indonesia... 229 965 000 Iran........... 74 196 000 Israel......... 7 411 000 Latvia........ 2 231 503 Lithuania... 3 555 179 Romania.... 21 498 616 Russia...... 142 008 838 Turkey....... 74 816 000 Wales....... 3 004 600 (counted in UK too) Other short scale languages and countries, total 758 874 416 Grece........ 11 257 285 Short scale use but with other terminology, total 11 257 285 Short scale countries, total 1 269 855 122 (counting Wales only once) Andorra..... 84 484 Argentina... 40 482 000 Austria...... 8 356 707 Belgium..... 10 665 867 Bosnia+Herz 4 613 414 Chile......... 16 928 873 Colombia... 44 982 970 Costa Rica 4 509 290 Croatia...... 4 489 409 Czech Rep 10 476 543 Denmark... 5 519 441 Dominican Rep 10 090 000 Ecuador.... 13 625 000 El Salvador 5 744 113 Finland...... 5 342 344 France...... 64 303 482 Germany... 82 060 000 Guatemala. 14 000 000 Hungary.... 10 020 000 Iceland...... 319 756 Italy.......... 60 088 880 Liechtenstein 35 446 Luxembourg 493 500 Mexico...... 111 211 789 Monaco..... 32 965 Netherlands 16 500 156 Norway...... 4 833 665 Paraguay... 6 349 000 Peru.......... 29 132 013 Poland...... 38 130 302 Portugal.... 10 707 924 Serbia....... 7 365 507 Slovakia.... 5 379 455 Slovenia.... 2 053 355 Spain........ 46 661 950 Sweden..... 9 236 872 Switzerland 7 739 100 Uruguay.... 3 361 000 Venezuela. 26 814 843 Long scale countries, total 742 741 415 Canada..... 33 766 000 Puerto Rico 3 994 259 (counted in USA too) South Africa 49 320 000 Both long and short scales countries, total 87 080 259 Long or short scales countries, total 2 098 687 137 (counting Puerto Rico only once) People's China 1 345 751 000 India.......... 1 198 003 000 Pakistan.... 180 808 000 Bangladesh 162 221 000 Nepal........ 29 331 000 Burma....... 50 020 000 Japan........ 127 590 000 South Korea 48 379 392 North Korea 23 906 000 Neither short nor long scale countries, total 3 166 009 392 Total population accounted for 5 261 691 929 Total world population 6 781 000 000 Population unaccounted for 1 519 308 071
— Preceding unsigned comment added by Noe (talk • contribs) 2 September 2009
References
[edit]The last remaining peer review comment is that there are too few references for an article of this length. Can any followers of this article, particularly with foreign languages, add further references from reliable sources, please? - Ian — Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.105.123.238 (talk) 7 June 2012
Thousands separators
[edit]Somebody needs to change the thousands separators to conform with ISO-Standard. 2001:2043:7C4E:8200:548D:A650:22ED:4ECE (talk) 07:07, 29 May 2024 (UTC)
- Per wp:DIGITS, e.g. 1,000,000 is fine (as is 1 000 000, or rather 1000000, where the latter is written wit the "gaps" construct). Nø (talk) 18:41, 29 May 2024 (UTC)
History
[edit]Why did the short scale start to exist in the first place? 2001:2044:126E:E000:74FE:6A38:D431:9B0C (talk) 13:50, 7 December 2024 (UTC)
- Educated guess: To better match with the prefixes of the names. The "bi" in billion sounds like two and the "tri" in trillion sounds like three. So, it makes sense to think of million, billion, trillion as sequential (1, 2, 3). The long scale has the weird -iard guys in there to mess up the sequence. The long scale could make sense if -iard was commonly understood to mean super-sized or something, but it is not a common suffix. Big Maciard. Stevebroshar (talk) 14:29, 27 December 2024 (UTC)
- Your question begs the question: what motivated the definition/use of the long scale? I'd love to know the answer for both scales. Stevebroshar (talk) 14:37, 29 December 2024 (UTC)
Positive n
[edit]@Burzuchius Changing the formula from non-negative n to positive n is good. But... Please describe every (non-trivial) change. Why the change. What value it offers.
In this case, positive n does seem easier to understand than non-negative. And it highlights a long scale simplicity: 6n for illions. One might guess that this is why long scale is structured as it is.
Also, I guess my recent change broke the formula for iliard. So, your change fixes that. Thanks for moving the ball forward rather than reverting.
I think there is still work to be done in this space. I'll add separate items below... Stevebroshar (talk) 13:28, 29 December 2024 (UTC)
n-illion
[edit]Although I get the point of "n-illion" I think it could be confusing to some. It's not oneillion, twoillion, .... We're expecting the reader to make the leap to million, billion, .... But, maybe we can be more rigorous while also being less mathy. I think it's good to include formulas (math), but to minimize math-speak since it's off-putting to most readers. Stevebroshar (talk) 13:29, 29 December 2024 (UTC)
Parts of the words
[edit]The recent change from n-iard to n-illiard and addition of n-illion are interesting. Earlier in the article, it says "word ending "-ion" by "-iard"." I wonder what is considered the parts of the words. Which is more correct way to separate the parts?
m-illion, mill-ion, m-ill-ion, mi-llion
b-illion, bill-ion, b-ill-ion, bi-llion
Consider that "bi" and "tri" are a common prefixes in English. I think that indicates that the suffix is not really "illion". Or maybe I'm trying to reverse engineer something that can't/shouldn't be. We can say the words (excluding the intermediate long scale guys) all end in "illion". Of course one can also say they all end in "llion", "lion", "ion", "on" and "n".
One way to handle oddities like this is to avoid the issue. With careful editing, I think the n-suffix terminology can be eliminated. Stevebroshar (talk) 13:34, 29 December 2024 (UTC)
Mix of English and international
[edit]The article tries to cover the international aspects of a numbering system. Or is it two number systems? Or many? This either covers variations of one thing or covers multiple things that are similar due to a shared history. Ignoring that for now...
The article talks about names of numbers, but all names are presented with no mention that the names are different in other languages -- ignoring the long/short thing. IMO this implies that either the names are the same in each language (which they aren't; for example "billion" in German is "milliarde" ... which is similar to but not exactly "milliard") or that the names given are in English (since this is an English wiki). But, don't all English speakers use the short form? That means they don't use the -illiard forms. That means there are no English -illiard names! So, what is the article talking about?
Maybe English speakers used to use long form. Maybe some did. So, maybe there are antiquated and obsolete -illiard English words. Also, I find that "milliard" is French. So, maybe for long form, the names in the article are French; not English. IDK.
I don't know how to clarify this, but I think it should be. Stevebroshar (talk) 14:29, 29 December 2024 (UTC)
Rename
[edit]I think the main point of interest for the numbering system (both long and short scales) is that it assigns special significance (yes names) to every third order of magnitude (as well as 1, 10, and 100). Additionally, the names given to these magnitudes are similar across the languages that use the numbering system ... plus additional wonkyness due to the long/short aspect. This article, as titled, is about the long/short wonkyness. But, it actually describes the entirety of the numbering system ... which is not bad since there is no article for the numbering system. This article is IMO about the numbering system in general even though its title indicates it's only about long/short wonkyness.
Consider that this article is about the long and short scales. The scales of what? There is a numbering system that has two scales, right? What is that numbering system? Where is its article? IMO, this article should clearly focus on the numbering system with scale one aspect of it. In fact, I think it already covers the important aspects of the numbering system. But, what is that numbering system called? It doesn't have a name! It's the numbering system we learn as children. No one gives it a name. Do they? So, a problem with focusing on the numbering system is that there's no good name for the article :) :( ... There are articles titled with a non-notable term/phrase: lists, comparisons; even "long and short scales" (never heard of before last week!).
Note that there is Indian numbering system. Using that as a pattern I recommend Latin numbering system. Some other ideas: Standard numbering system, Numbering system (Latin).
So, this article should be renamed to refer to the numbering system. If only it had a name... Stevebroshar (talk) 14:35, 29 December 2024 (UTC)
Overly complicated formatting and noise
[edit]I have already removed some columns from tables that were overly complicated and contained noise (off topic info).
The history section table is over-tablefication. I plan to de-tablefy it.
IMO the usage section is overly complicated; too clever. It should be restructured to be easier to consume. Stevebroshar (talk) 15:30, 29 December 2024 (UTC)