Last modified: 2011-03-13 18:05:24 UTC
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)”.
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)"
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. ~~~~
Isn't there some offsite page which provides this? Can't you just link to that?
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.
