What functionality is missing? What is unsatisfying with the current situation?

Some of us use inches, feet, and miles; others use centimeters, meters, and kilometers; and some folk take it upon themselves to create all new units of measurement for their world.   Trouble arises, however, when you get to writing your artcles for an audience and they're getting bogged down by having to look up how many meters are in 120 yards, or how many teaspoons are in a dandy (a dandy being a unit of measurement for baking ingredients I just made up).   You could solve this problem by adding one (or more) common alternative measurements in parenthesis following the main unit you use, à la Wikipedia style, but that just moves the bogging down from the reader to the writer as now you have to stop to do the conversions.   The Solution? Auto-Units!

How does this feature request address the current situation?

The Auto Unit tool would work in a similar manner to how the Autolinker tool digs through your article and finds the titles of existing articles and replaces them with proper article links. Rather than replacing, however, it instead seeks out measurements (by finding numbers followed by known unit indicators such as "feet", "ft", "ft.", or the very minimal and confusing to quote "'") and tacks on a conversion right after that unit in parenthesis.   For example, if an article contained the following: "The Grand Canyon is 277 miles long, up to 18 miles wide and attains a depth of 6,093 feet (1,857 meters)."   Clicking the Auto Unit tool would open an interface and display the first unit it found (in this case, "277 miles") and prompt you to add a unit or skip it. If you choose to add a unit, it would suggest convertable units (kilometers, for example). When you pick a unit, it would place a space immediately after the found term, followed by "(" and the coverted unit, then end with a closing ")".   In this example, after running the Auto Unit tool and converting each instance of mile to kilometer and the one isntance of feet to meters, it would read: "The Grand Canyon is 277 miles (446 km) long, up to 18 miles (29 km) wide and attains a depth of 6,093 feet (1,857 meters)."   In theory it would be possible to allow multiple units to added within the conversion section between the two parenthesis by having the Auto Unit tool add a comma and space after each conversion before the last.   Ideally, for the most complete and customizable implementation, there would need to some means for users to implement their own custom units—which should be done at the world level. Common existing units should be supported by default across all worlds (possibly customizable within a world, though I don't think that's strictly needed and see how it could cause more problems than it would solve).   A user-defined unit would need:

• A name (i.e. foot)
• A plural name (optional) (i.e. feet)
• A short name (optional) (i.e. ft)
• A symbol (optional) (i.e. ')
• Type of unit (i.e. Distance, weight, volume, time, etc.)
• A conversion to an established unit (i.e. 1 foot = 0.3048 meters) (This means that there always has to be at least one definitive, unmutable unit for each unit type. Meters for distance, for example.)

 

Points of Concern

I awknowledge that this idea seems very simple on paper but might prove quite difficult to actually implement. Primarily because, unlike the autolinker tool, which simply looks for words that match a list and swaps them out for a link, this tool would need to find a term from a list, and then figure out what numbers that term is attached to (the value to convert), do some math, then correctly append the result after the term without disrupting the rest of the article.   I don't know how difficult it would be to create a tool that can locate the number value before a unit. I also awknowledge that this problem could be exasperated by the fact that not everyone writes large numbers the same way: some folk seperate with commas (1,000,000), some use fullstops (1.000.000), some spaces (1 000 000), and some nothing at all (1000000). There are also some cases where a number unrelated to the unit might be nearby, and cases (like some currencies) where the unit comes before the value.   Essentially, in some circumstances, this tool could potentially cause more issues than it solves or outright fail to detect some values—but that's why the autolinker gives you the option to check everything it is going to do before implementing and gives you the option to abort. Those features would be essential for this tool.  

What are other uses for this feature request?

A less unit/math orientented implementation could prove useful as well, though I feel that would be less essential and is also already fairly well covered with Variables.