Talk:Long and short scales

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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.

Article milestones
Date	Process	Result
September 25, 2009	Articles for deletion	Merged
June 15, 2010	Good article nominee	Listed
July 13, 2011	Featured article candidate	Not promoted
July 16, 2011	Peer review	Reviewed
Current status: Good article

The contents of Milliard was merged into Long and short scales. The former page's history now serves to provide attribution for that content in the latter page, and it must not be deleted as long as the latter page exists. For the discussion at that location, see its talk page.

History

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

??? Better match has long scale: bi=two => bi-million = two times million = million x million = 10e12 31.30.176.189 (talk) 15:28, 14 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

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)[reply]

Mix of English and international

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)[reply]

Rename

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)[reply]

Overly complicated formatting and noise

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)[reply]

Tables

The tables, charts, and graphs need to be restored. They provide an easy understanding as they list the number of "0"s per number. Many people are not familiar with the "10/\16" format.
Kenixkil (talk) 07:25, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]