User talk:220.233.20.162

Greetings

I'm 220.233.20.162. I have a very violent allergy to the pompous, egocentric incompetence which Wikipedia seems to be full of. Here are some of things which bring me into convulsions of homicidal rage:

Seasons used to determine points in time

Hey, guess what? Seasons can not be used when describing when something will be released. I see this ALL THE TIME, for example: SomeNewMovie will be released in cinemas in fall 2011. Did you know that seasons are reversed in the southern hemisphere? Did you know that the tropics have different seasons to temperate regions? Did you know that America is not the centre of the multiverse?

Would you like to know something very, very funny? The article on seasons actually had a reference to how autumn (That's fall for those who have trouble with multisyllabic words), is when halloween is. The very article which attempts to educate people on the mechanics of seasons fails miserably.

Correct usage: SomeNewMovie will be released in the 3rd quarter or 2011, -or- SomeNewMovie will be released between September and November 2011.

Dates

This is far more than just an annoyance. This has actually caused significant problems for me and others I know. Virtually the whole world using some sort of endian date format. You know, year-month-day or day-month-year. Take a look at Date Format By Country. Virtually the whole world uses an endian format except for America. Why?!, all this accomplishes is confusion. As long as we use a 4-digit date (which is pretty much standard anyway), there is no confusion between year-month-day and day-month-year. The fact that Americans insist on using month-day-year (which, by the way, is the most idi0dic thing ever) just creates global confusion. I get invoices for services hosted overseas and I do not know if they are due on the 3rd of August, or the 8th of March! I might assume that since the invoice is coming from America, it is non-endian, but maybe they have anticipated that the invoice is being viewed in a SANE country and have adjusted the dates to make sense. Therefore, I cannot confidently make any conclusions.

Dollars

I often see articles use dollars without specifying a specific unit of currency, for example: SomeProduct went on sale for $299.99 in fall 2011. Did you know that many countries use the dollar? Did you know that they all have different values? Now that the American dollar is worthless, it should be especially important to label what unit of currency you are referring to.

Correct usage: SomeProduct went on sale for US$299.99

Language

English came from England, and they speak English there. The rest of the English-speaking world speaks [[English Language|English] except for America where they have had to resort to drastic measures to combat illiteracy.

Since Wikipedia is intended to be an international encyclopædia, why then is it written exclusively in the esoteric dialect of the Americans? For example: When I heard my neighbor went to jail, the color of my skin went gray.

Correct usage: When I heard my neighbour went to gaol, the colour of my skin went grey.

Units

Most of the world has used the metric system for over 40 years. Parts of the world have used if for hundreds of years. Some countries have been a little slow to adopt it and have only changed over in the last 20 or 30 years. America, on the other hand, is now the only country which still uses archaic units of measurement.

Just as we cannot expect all references to length be in both kilometres and furlongs (which is another outdated unit of measurement), why should it be written in miles? For example: The playing field is 8414 square yards (104 x 68 m, area of 7036 m²)

Correct usage: The playing field is 7036 m² (If you want to know how many yards it is, do the conversion yourself. We aren't going to clutter this article with redundant information).

Conclusion

The biggest problem is, I think the vast majority of Americans aren't even aware of all this. I bet most of them aren't aware that seasons differ across regions, that other people use different date formats, that other countries use dollars, and that the written language they speak is actually a modified (read: simplified) version of the English that everyone else speaks.