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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by MiszaBot III (talk | contribs) at 16:52, 15 October 2011 (Archiving 1 thread(s) (older than 5d) to User talk:Lightmouse/Archives/2011/October.). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Which is right?

When an article has an existing conversion, how does the bot decide which value to believe? See Ledston. " 4km (3 miles)" (introduced in 2006) was altered by the bot to use the convert template and read "4 km (2.5 mi)", and has now been manually changed by another editor (still using {{convert}}) so that it reads "3 miles (5 km)". I don't know which is correct (though miles-first is certainly correct as it's a UK village). The bot can't tell which of the two figures is from the editor's source, as various factors will have affected their decision on which units to place first and which in brackets (existing style of article / convention for geog area / personal choice).

In hindsight it might have been wiser for the bot to concentrate on unconverted measures and delinking, and perhaps to flag up conversions which appear to be inaccurate for human attention. Some will be real mistakes, some will be approximations in situations where exact accuracy is not expected.

In some cases, I suspect that the bot has changed an article so that it no longer reflects the source from which the data is obtained - I looked at one of the examples cited above, , and I guess that in the first change "over 2,000 miles" was Forrest's own estimate of the journey ("by Forrest's reckoning" as it says), so that the bot has damaged the article by converting this to 2,200. PamD 08:12, 5 October 2011 (UTC), expanded 09:58, 5 October 2011 (UTC)

• Another example of damage done along these lines is this edit to Plymouth. Of the two changes that the bot made there, the first has an immediate citation confirming a figure of 7,978 hectares. The editor apparently put the converted square miles figure first to match the article style, thus: "30.8 square miles (79.78 km)". Lightbot then applied {{convert}} to the square miles figure resulting in a metric figure that does not agree with its reference "30.8 square miles (80 km)".
• But much more dramatic than this was a range of edits done on 29 Sept, such as this one which resulted in the mangled
  "12Stone purchased 69 acres (280,000 m) additional adjacent to the donated property." (the word additional has slipped from its place before acres)
  or this one that has left us with
  "...and 490,215 acres (1,983.83 km) surface of water."
  That these and the dozens - maybe hundreds - of similar blunders haven't been corrected shows the power of standard innocent-sounding edit summaries - nobody bothers to check, not even the bot owner.  —SMALLJIM  00:21, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. Many of the word moves were done by me, by hand. I did it to add a conversion for the benefit of metric readers. In some cases I did rearrange the words but in others I didn't, I agree that some look a little odd. Lightmouse (talk) 15:48, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

"Some look a little odd" - more than some, I'd say! In most of these 500 edits the modifier has been moved after the noun so we have 'acres statute', 'acres peaceful', 'acres fertile', 'acres contiguous', 'acres skiable', even 'acres vineyard', and so on. Don't you see these edits as damage that you ought to repair, per WP:BOTACC?  —SMALLJIM  21:59, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

Hmm. No reply. I've asked at Template_talk:Convert#Subtemplate_request for a possible fix to make the repair simpler. —SMALLJIM  23:35, 11 October 2011 (UTC)

(which I hope your monitoring for comments re: its unblock) (talk→ BWilkins ←track) 14:00, 6 October 2011 (UTC)