Talk:Metric time

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Archived of this talk page restored at Talk:Metric_time/archive1

Contents 1 note to contributers in the USA: 2 Asimov units 3 metric v. decimal 4 Alternative Units 5 Moved from article space: "In computing" 6 In computing 7 The O'Harian Calendar 8 Metric time in fiction? 9 Date metric system was introduced

[edit] note to contributers in the USA:

the use of non ISO standard seperators in articles should be avoided.

96% of the world uses a comma (,) as a decimal seperator ex: (0,864) and a period (.) as a thousands seperator, ex: (1.000.000 = 1 million) the ISO standard is to leave a space between thousands, and to use a comma as a decimal point.

American date format (MM DD, YYYY) is also unique in the world (used only in the USA) and should also be avoided. the world standard date format being: (DD MM YYYY), and the ISO standard (YYYY-MM-DD). ISO standard time format: (00:00:00)

the term Billion also causes problems when used in the American definition (1.000.000.000) since the rest of the world uses the chuquet system where 1.000.000.000 is a Milliard (1000 million) and 1.000.000.000.000 is a billion.

American Standard measures, based on obsolete English Imperial Units, should also be avoided, since the USA is the only remaining country still using this system.

you will cause a great deal of confusion to those outside the USA (which accounts for only 4% of the world's population) by using standards unique to the USA.

Please see Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style_dates_and_numbers for the current en: wikipedia policy on this. If you feel that this is incorrect, or should be changed, please discuss it there. Specifically, dates should follow the guide lines in that document, (i.e. <no wiki>Month-name-in-full Day-Number Year--number</no wiki>) as this allows local user cutomisation.

Iainscott 13:13, 20 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I am delighted by the (apparently) sudden and passionate interest in decimal and metric time, since the posting of the articles, and more than happy to discuss the subject/s, and additions to the articles here..The Author

This is not an addition. It is a reversion to material that is formatted incorrectly as per the Manual of Style, not to mention grammatically incorrect and HTML-using. If you wish to make actual useful edits, please do, but don't continue your crank-like obsessions with keeping your version of the article. -- Grunt (talk) 14:37, 2004 Aug 20 (UTC)

make whatever corrections you feel are needed, however any US standard formatting will be reverted to international formatting

If you would like to change formatting, please do so without reverting everything else too. -- Grunt (talk) 15:03, 2004 Aug 20 (UTC)

This is the english wikipedia. Formatting of numbers (and especially dates) should be in the style detailedhere.Iainscott 15:09, 20 Aug 2004 (UTC)

sorry, next time I will only edit the formatting, many of your links were not active Wiki links, were you planning on writing articles for these?

No, but other people might be. :) -- Grunt (talk) 15:16, 2004 Aug 20 (UTC)

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Your statistic of 96% is patently false, and irrelevant to the English Wikipedia. Our conventions are based on what is most agreeable to the majority of the English-speaking world, which almost universally uses periods and commas to delimit decimals and thousands, respectively. On the French Wiki, Continental punctuation conventions are observed, as this is what the majority of French speakers expect. This is as it should be.

The so-called "American" convention for millions and billions is that used throughout the scientific community, and commonly avoided by enumerating such large numbers anyway. As for your apparent hatred of dual-standard measurement systems, I invite you to peruse, at your leisure, our manual of style, in addition to our excellent article on metrication.

Hope this helps.

Austin Hair

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this time I have only edited the formatting and not the text, shall we agree to leave it as it is, until more useful material can be added? :-)

btw. The current world population is 6400 Million - the current US Population is 4,6% of the world total (300 Million) - the Population of the EU is 450 Million - which includes Great Britain (an English speaking state) - English is not defined as "American".

I'm English. Here we use a period as a decimal seperator and a space as a thousands seperator. [[User:Theresa knott|]] 15:34, 20 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I am not a native english speaker, but in english I use the period as a decimal separator and a space or komma as a thousand separator (different from my native language) -- Chris 73 Talk 15:56, 20 Aug 2004 (UTC)

here in Germany (and the rest of the continent), we use komma (,) as a decimal seperator, and punkt (.) as a thousands seperator, which makes reading English sites quite confusing %-(

Well I find reading french or german websites quite confuseing... I dont, however, go to the french or german wikipedias and insist that they change their style conventions. Perhaps you could extend the same curtosy to the english wikipedia? Iainscott 16:17, 20 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I would first like to apologise for my persistant reverts and header removal, I give you my word as a gentleman that no such edits will occur again. it was not my intention to be disrepectful, nor uncooperative. I would prefer to work with all of you in working out an positive solution which is acceptable to everyone.

in reply to Iainscott - I understand, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with american standards, I am simply suggesting that ISO formatting (which is a global standard, comprehensible to anyone - americans, europeans, asians, etc..) would be a practicle compromise solution. do you agree?

While I can't speak for Iainscott, I certainly do not agree. The ISO convention is perfectly suitable for ISO standards, but encyclopedias are written in common language using common conventions. The English-speaking world, and for that matter the entire Western Hemisphere, is accustomed to seeing the period used as a decimal point; to suddenly usurp this in the name of "Internationalism" is unacceptable. One of the first things learned in the course of studying another language is its punctuation conventions, and swapping around the marks we use to delimit numbers would serve only to confuse, not disambiguate. (At any rate, you're on the wrong page for this discussion—if you want to effect policy change, take it up at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style.) Austin Hair 02:33, Aug 22, 2004 (UTC)

Yes, I see that the English-speaking world is quite unified in this standard, however The Entire Western Hemisphere is not, since I also live in the Western Hemisphere, along with those in other non English speaking European countries, all of which use a comma to signify a decimal place, and a period to signify thousands.Metrische Zeit 31 August 2004 - 16:00 (UTC)

[edit] Asimov units

The Asimov proposal had names fot the units. I don't remember them, and anyway the essay was translated. Probably one of them was the while or something like that.

[edit] metric v. decimal

This article seems to be more about Decimal time of day than about the metric system.

There seems to seems to be some confusion here between metric and decimal, and between time interval and time of day. The modern metric system (SI) defines units of time interval, while the time of day is defined by various time scales, some of which are based upon the metric base unit of time interval. Time of day is like, "We will strike the enemy at 0800 hours." Time interval is like, "The battle lasted 8 hours." You measure time of day with a clock or watch, and time interval with a stop watch. The stuff about French clocks and Swiss watches should probably be moved to the Decimal time article.

But then, if this article was really about the metric system's definitions of time, then perhaps it should just redirect to the existing article on the Second. The only reason I can think to keep it would be if there were other metric time units in use or seriously proposed. Although "millidays" sound intriguing, does anyone actually use them? I see that there are a lot of web sites about individual proposals for "metric time," but most of them are really about decimal time of day, and many seem to have little to do with the metric system. -- Nike 07:00, 19 Dec 2004 (UTC)

-- Now the Decimal and Metric articles point back and forth to each other. The historic version of this page was better in that respect.

Someone has added a heading "Alternate Meanings" which repeats information already in "Alternate Units". I don't object in principle to this section, but the two sections should be distinct from each other if they are going to both be there. -- Nike 07:55, 23 Dec 2004 (UTC)

"Better" how? Please be specific. I tried to make the two articles complementary, rather than contradictary. Of course they point to each other, since they cover similar topics, and are often mentioned together, or confused with each other. Of course, there is always room for improvement, so if you think that something could be worded better or added, please go ahead, anonymous one. -- Nike 11:58, 23 Dec 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Alternative Units

I made some changes to this section. I reverted the line about "notable acceptance", because lack of familiarity isn't the only reason people haven't all changed base units for time. Much of the rest of the last paragraph was repetitive or just very poorly written, and I removed the last line:

A quarter that was current in China for a couple of millennia before the Jesuits had the ke redefined.

because it doesn't make any sense at all. FireWorks 06:09, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

Lapidary, admitted, but I envisaged the interested and clever reader to follow the ke-link for clarification. As for acceptance, it is a well tested fact in office and home environments with decimal clocks that it was lack of feeling for how long new franctions of minutes and hours were that made people most uneasy with the new units. / Kurtan 23:08, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Moved from article space: "In computing"

I wanted to point out, that most computer operating systems use (at least internally) metric time for timekeeping and assigned date/times to objects like files (in contrast to using seconds,minutes,hours,day,month,year, as for example DOS did). I therefore added the paragraph:

This was just reverted. Perhaps other editors may want to voice their opinion. --Pjacobi 12:27, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

I don't think that Unix time is usually considered any more "metric time" than UTC is, since they both use whole SI seconds to track civil time, rather than measuring time interval using metric prefixes. Unix time is decimal expression of time, which some people call metric time, but strictly speaking, it's not.

However, metric time submultiples are used on computers, e.g. milliseconds, microseconds and nanoseconds. Unix time is usually stored in binary as an integral number of seconds; milliseconds, etc., are stored as a separate number. Network Time Protocol is another application using nanoseconds. I would like the article to elaborate more on the use of metric submultiples (and multiples) on computers. --Nike 11:05, 22 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] The O'Harian Calendar

I doubt this is worthy for inclusion in Wikipedia, but it might be. Anyway, I just found this page [1]. Its about an alternative system of times and dates. Best of all though, it is actually going to be used - on asdfjkl;.com I just wondered what other Wikipedians thought of the idea?--Bjwebb (talk) 10:09, 24 June 2006 (UTC)

This seems to have nothing to do with the subject of metric time, and Wikipedia does not allow original research. Try a calendar reform forum, such as CALNDR-L. --Nike 19:52, 24 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Metric time in fiction?

Might be worth to make such section. E.g. I know that Vernor Vinge used kiloseconds and megaseconds in his novels. 80.201.199.103 17:40, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

And that one episode of The Simpsons. Principal Skinner moves Springfield to a version of Metric Time. It's that first one with Stephen Hawking.--The Sporadic Update 00:23, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Date metric system was introduced

The article states:

When the metric system was introduced in France in 1795, it included units for length, area, dry volume, liquid capacity, weight or mass, and even currency, but not for time.

Someone changed this, with the note "exact date: 24 November 1793 (4 Frimaire of the Year II)". This is incorrect. That was the date that the full Republican Calendar was introduced, along with decimal time. The Republican decimal metric system of weights and measures was introduced by the act passed on 18 Germinal an III (April 7, 1795). There were earlier acts passed relating to the metre in 1793, but it was the 1795 act which finally established the entire system, including the metre, litre, gramme, are, stere and franc, along with the metric prefixes. Decimal time was also indefinitely suspended in the same act. See A History of the Meter for more information. --Nike 22:43, 3 January 2007 (UTC)