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

Population numbers

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

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

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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]

Positive n

@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)[reply]

n-illion

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)[reply]

Parts of the words

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)[reply]