Template talk:Unit sq mi

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[edit] Abbreviation for square miles mi2 vs sq mi

Hi Caroig,

The reason that I changed the abbreviation from mi² to sq mi is because of a discussion that we had a while ago over at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (dates and numbers). Some people wanted to change square kilometres to sq km and some wanted to change square miles to miles², sq. miles, etc. It was kind of agreed that metric abbreviations would take the scientific method: km², m², m³, and that imperial abbreviations would take the traditional method: sq mi, sq yd, cu yd. The discussion never when as far as making it a strict rule or anything. So if mi² is what you want, that would be acceptable but sq mi would be preferred. Otherwise, great work on the templates. —MJCdetroit 18:57, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

I'm afraid I only checked the main page of Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (dates and numbers), not the discussion. I'm not particularly in favor of neither of these styles for imperial units, I just opted for the superscript variant as it seemed shorter. I would prefer keeping it this way because its coherent with the other unit converison templates that I created (if there's a consensus I'll switch to the other style in all of them) and these templates are, as of now, only used in the three infoboxes from the Category:Geobox, which accept both metirc and imperial values, the one which is filled in is then printed first and the other one is calculated automatically and put in brackets, so there's no need for the a 'metric_first' switch. This method can be copied to the Template:Infobox City too. – Caroig 19:36, 28 January 2007 (UTC)