Page MenuHomePhabricator

Template or magic word handling for monetary values (currency conversion/inflation rates)
Closed, DeclinedPublic

Description

Author: bfrantzdale

Description:
I mentioned this idea at the Village pump, but it appears it can't be
implemented easily with plain old templates:

A problem with mentioning dollar ammounts in a dictionary is inflation—the
meaning of a dollar changes so seeing that there was a $33 million bond to
finance the Golden Gate Bridge in 1933 means almost nothing to me. I would like
to be able to enter a dollar ammount like this: {{currency USD|33000000|1933}}
and then see “$33 million ($447 million in 2005 dollars)” or something similar.
Alternately this could be done like ISBN substitution, without any user
intervention.

This could be extended to a locale setting so one might see “$33 million (€382
million in 2005 euros)”.


Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement

Details

Reference
bz3955

Revisions and Commits

Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Lowest.Nov 21 2014, 8:55 PM
bzimport set Reference to bz3955.
bzimport added a subscriber: Unknown Object (MLST).

artslave wrote:

Another interesting suggestion in reply on the Village Pump:
"I agree this is a good idea. It would be hard to maintain this for many
currencies though. My idea would be to make it like the ISBN special page.
Dollar amounts formatted a certain way would be linked to a page where they are
automatically inflation adjusted to today's dollars and are then converted to
many world currencies. It'd be very useful. Broken S 02:39, 13 November 2005 (UTC)"

Siegel wrote:

I agree this would be desireable. it would obviously require soem sort of
table of relative infaltion ratios from specified years to the current
year, and since infaltion amounts vary in different currecies, a tablew
would be needeed for each currency supported. Since different sources
quyot different infaltion rates, we would need to agree on a source for
the standard table. ~~~~

avarab wrote:

Isn't there some offsite page which provides this? Can't you just link to that?

bfrantzdale wrote:

As for ISBN-style automatic linking, I don't see how that would let you include
the year in the wikitext. Automatically linking all monitary ammounts to a big
table would work, but isn't nearly as user-friendly as providing the information
inline.

As for the template approach, how difficult would it be to add a magic template
that called a function in MediaWiki rather than substituting text?

Alternately, might it be possible to implement this sort of thing using
JavaScript (ala http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tools/Navigation_popups)
for the arithmetic? (Ugly, I know.)

These conversions are an art, not a science. Do it manually.

epriestley added a commit: Unknown Object (Diffusion Commit).Mar 4 2015, 8:16 AM
epriestley added a commit: Unknown Object (Diffusion Commit).