Talk:Power Macintosh 5500

Apple Inc. Mid‑importance

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Only in the rarest of instances should ambiguous units be used, often in direct quotations to preserve accuracy to the quoted material.

and

For bits and bytes, specify whether the binary or decimal meaning of the prefixes kilo (k, K), mega (M), giga (G) and tera (T) is intended. See Binary prefixes

Both from WP:MOSNUM

If you must use ambiguous units, the least you can do is disambiguate them. Thunderbird2 (talk) 09:51, 8 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Clearly you haven't read the whole thing. The MOSNUM is quite clear about how binary and IEC prefixes are used in a computing context:

IEC prefixes are not to be used on Wikipedia except under the following circumstances:

when the article is on a topic where the majority of cited sources use the IEC prefixes,
when directly quoting a source that uses the IEC prefixes,
in articles specifically about or explicitly discussing the IEC prefixes.

and,

Editors should use the conventional prefixes, such as kilobyte (KB) and megabyte (MB), and disambiguate where necessary.

That's what the MOSNUM says, and you should stick to it. Please just accept this and don't edit-war over it; you have better things to worry about. -/- Warren 12:50, 8 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Since this seemed like the first shot in a war over how to bring articles into compliance with the new MOSNUM guidelines, I took the liberty of intervening here to stop the war before it started. I’ve revised the article so it now uses the conventional binary prefixes and they are now disambiguated. However, Warren’s edits could have been lifted out of any computer brochure or any of thousands of articles in Mac World or PC World. His use of the conventional binary prefixes like “megabyte” was clear enough because it was common verbiage seen a million times before in real-world usage; it wasn’t “necessary” or “mandatory” to disambiguate them.
Thunderbird2: For you to have entirely undone Warren’s work was a violation of Wikipedia:Do not disrupt Wikipedia to illustrate a point. From now on, I suggest that if you really feel that an expression like “The Windows-box 9000 comes stock with 3 GB of RAM so it runs less slug-like with Vista” truly, really, honestly confuses so many readers, then you can disambiguate articles that other editors have upgraded to the conventional binary prefixes. You are free to use the techniques I’ve just employed here—they are minimally intrusive to the body text and are clear enough. Please don’t just revert other editors’ work by restoring units of measure few readers have ever seen before. MOSNUM’s call to “disambiguate where necessary” is a matter that is subject to interpretation. What MOSNUM now makes abundantly clear and is not subject to interpretation, is that the IEC prefixes are not to be routinely used in articles and your reversion violated that guideline. Whether you agree with the consensus view or not, please respect it. Greg L (talk) 23:05, 8 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Interesting - one revert and I am accused of edit warring. I see no mention of slugs or vista in the article, so I have no I idea what you are talking about. The guideline clearly says that KB, MB etc need to be disambiguated. The editor who made the change seemed to be unaware of that so I reverted the change and pointed it out the reason, both here and on his user page. Thunderbird2 (talk) 23:21, 8 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I can’t help how others may feel about your conduct but I did not accuse you of edit warring. My intervention was in the hopes of preventing edit warring. As for your fallacious statement above: “ The guideline clearly says that KB, MB etc need to be disambiguated”, MOSNUM says no such thing. Thank you once again for buttressing one of your arguments with, (*ahem*)… non-truth. MOSNUM states as follows:

Editors should use the conventional prefixes, such as kilobyte (KB) and megabyte (MB), and disambiguate where necessary.

My emphasis

Warren’s edits were fully consistent with real-world usage and arguably needed no disambiguation at all. You know full well what the issue is about based on the latter part of this discussion thread of Talk:MOSNUM so please don’t play all confused here. The accusation (from four of us now, all in perfect agreement) is that your reversion edit was entirely contrary to a fair and proper reading of MOSNUM policy. The IEC prefixes are not a fall-back option here; MOSNUM is clear that they are not to be used like you used them. As for Warren being “unaware” of anything, he fully well understood what your stated reasoning was and hit the nail right on the head with his rebuttal. So now Warren, and I, and Fnagaton, and Francis Schonken, have all told you that both your edit and your stated reasoning for doing so were without foundation and have asked you to not be so selective as to what parts of the MOSNUM guideline you chose to pay attention to from now on.

If you come across an article using the conventional binary prefixes and feel compelled to disambiguate it, do so using any one of the half-dozen or so methods prescribed on MOSNUM and not with the IEC prefixes, which MOSNUM proscribes. ¿Comprende? Greg L (talk) 03:36, 9 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Should MOSNUM continue to deprecate IEC prefixes?

A discussion has been started at WP:MOSNUM concerning the continued deprecation of IEC prefixes. Please comment at the MOSNUM talk page. Thunderbird2 (talk) 19:28, 5 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

This has been addressed and we’re done. Greg L (talk) 19:29, 5 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Footnotes

Please do not use the footnotes to broaden this particular article into a general purpose example. Go fight your battles on WT:MOSNUM. The hard drive in this article was 2 gigabytes. Period. There is no point mentioning other magnitudes, such as megabytes of hard drive storage. The text in footnote #2 here as now revised has been nearly lifted straight from Apple’s own literature. Further, someone had the following all screwed up for footnote #1:

Transistorized memory, such as RAM and cache sizes, are specified using binary meanings for K (1024¹ instead of 1000¹), M (1024³ instead of 1000¹), G (1024³ instead of 1000¹), ...

Greg L (talk) 19:29, 5 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]