Talk:Mebibyte/Archives/2017/06

Stop editing in _iB in all over Wikipedia

The first and foremost problem is _ibibyte is a corrupt and redundant standard that only causes confusion, and should have never existed in the first place. The second problem is that I've been seeing people, bots, sock puppets, and who knows what else randomly replacing _byte with _ibibyte all over Wikipedia. I don't have a problem with autonomous bots fixing spelling or adding headers, but I do have a problem when they randomly replace technical definitions in articles and leave the article in a clearly broken state. One example would be this: [[1]]

You have both Megabyte and Mibibyte used within the same article interchangeably, which some people would find very confusing. It also breaks the consistency of the article by using multiple definitions of the same thing, and that page is but one example of the millions of pages on Wikipedia. There is also the issue where articles on Vintage computing subjects use _byte, while newer computing related articles use _ibibyte, further causing ambiguity and confusion.

Having a half-assed standard like this where nobody even attempts to properly implement it is incredibly annoying, we don't need a consortium of idiots like the IEC who only look out for their best interests to try and redefine a standard that's been in place for over 50 years. What's happening now with this standard would be like letting people randomly replace Inches with Centimeters and leave the integer values the same, which is clearly wrong. I'm going to start fixing pages I see from now on which have both definitions used to use _byte only, because baring highly technical and scientific fields, most of the main stream economy uses _byte and not _ibibyte. Ggigabitem (talk) 09:11, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Just from reading this I can only assume that this entire article is heavily biased by the same execs responsible for writing the capacity specifications for retail hard drives.96.89.42.188 (talk) 13:31, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

Hard drives have always been specified using powers-of-1000, i.e. SI-compliant, terms, going back to the very first, the IBM 350 RAMAC at "five million characters". That was 1956, three years before the earliest known use of "K" to mean 1024 (see Binary prefix#History). So it is not the hard drive makers who set out down the "clearly wrong" path, ignoring existing practice in the industry (as well as SI). But "Editing in _iB in all over Wikipedia" has been generally precluded by WP:COMPUNITS (part of WP:MOS) for many years, so you need not lie awake at night worrying about that. As for this article, it is not arguing for or against the use of IEC prefixes; it is merely factually descriptive, hence not biased. If you have suggestions for improving it, that is what this talk page is for, so let's have them. It is not for arguing against (or for) the thing the article describes. Jeh (talk) 19:17, 2 June 2017 (UTC)