This is a terrible piece of work, apart from the error in the spacing, they say "But don’t be too literal in the conversion of an approximate figure, as in*The lifeboat picked up the man about 200m (656ft) from the shore".*Then they do exactly that later on with "*The child weighed less than two stone (12.7kg) at the time of his death*; *She said the company had sacked her because she weighed 15 stone (95.3kg)*". As a stone is over 6 kg, it should at least be rounded to the nearest even 10 kg, or 5 kg either side of the original conversion.
The contact page on the BBC website above is only for employees, I wonder who we can contact to get some of this updated? As far as I'm concerned this is why folks in the UK continue with this archaic stuff, they even give Fahrenheit occasionally even though no one seems to use it. Many people use stones for mass, I have to ask them what that is in kilograms as I have no idea what a stone is.
There is an English newspaper here in France http://www.connexionfrance.com/ That probably uses the AP style guide, they use kph and cm of rainfall instead of the correct km/h and mm of rainfall.
I've quoted http://www.npl.co.uk/reference/measurement-units/si-conventions/ and http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/checklist.html to provide the correct format to no avail.
-- Mike Payne lieu dit Gasquet 82400 Montjoi France
BBC style guide.docx
Description: MS-Word 2007 document
