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Obviously a significant proportion of our audience (namely in the United States) prefer °F over °C, whereas the rest of us work in °C.

If a question or answer features temperature, usually the author will only use his preferred measure.

Possible approaches:

a) seek to always edit in the translation so that all content here has temperature in both °C and °F

b) editing the odd question where temperature is the main point of the question/answer and/or editing questions you are interested in as and when you find them

c) leaving the post in the author's original preferred measure

For example, in today's question How low (and for how long) does the temperature need to be before I need to worry about covering my outdoor vegetable garden? I can't get anything valuable from it until I've translated it into °C and if I'm doing that, shouldn't I edit it in for other visitors?

Any thoughts? Does anyone know what they do at Cooking?

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Editing rights are there for users who have earned it (and suggested edits for others) to make a post better. Here, clearly adding a conversion to ºC for non-US folks is making the post better, so people should be encouraged to make such edits freely. It would be nice if the OP did it themselves, but even if they didn't, no big deal.

Normally, when I make such edits, I try to leave the OP's units in the text and add the conversion in parenthesis or something like XºF/YºC.

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  • This sounds the best approach. At a bare minimum there should be a C or an F to make the units explicit. Eg. an American might assume "30 degrees" is cold (30F) - but that is pretty warm to a Briton (30C)! Putting the alternative-to-the-OP's-choice in brackets is a good way of handling it. Usually the question will be aimed at places using the same units as the OP.
    – winwaed
    Jan 4, 2012 at 20:44
  • thanks yoda, also i saw that you edited the post in question. i guess posts are still few enough in number for an editor to catch most of them
    – Tea Drinker
    Jan 5, 2012 at 23:06

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