Talk:Penny (British pre-decimal coin)

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Since the decimal penny is 1/100 of a pound, as opposed to 1/240 of a pound for the old penny, the decimal penny is worth 2.4 old pence.  The value of the old penny works out to 41.666 % of the decimal penny.

This reads like a grade school assignment. Deleted. —ThorstenNY (talk) 12:39, 11 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Is it really of any utility to have an infinite number as the primary value? TheCurrencyGuy (talk) 08:42, 21 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The value needs to be expressed in terms meaningful to a worldwide audience, so decimal pounds. I wrote £0.00417 first but decided that someone would declare it inaccurate. The large majority of readers do not understand the overbar notation and will see £0.00416, which is close enough. But if you want to change it to £0.00417, I won't object.

More generally, though for such a long-lived denomination I'm not sure how best to express it, but the true value of a coin is its purchasing power. To express it in terms of another denomination of the same currency or even another currency is widely done but a bit of a cheat IMO. (<rant> it jerks my chain to see unqualified statements like "the bridge was rebuilt in 1789 at a cost of £4321". How many days' wages was that? </rant>)--John Maynard Friedman (talk) 20:31, 21 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

All I am trying to do is find an answer. This coin is no longer in circulation, and its value cannot be defined in decimal without looking ridiculous. An infinite number does not enlighten any audience. TheCurrencyGuy (talk) 01:43, 22 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The other articles on coins of different non-decimal currencies assign no infobox value at all, decimal or otherwise. If we were to apply this policy generally it could get truly ridiculous. For example if the 1870 mark was defined in relation to its euro equivalent, which is a calculation most calculators cannot even display properly. TheCurrencyGuy (talk) 02:13, 22 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion centralised at talk:Pound sterling#"Value =" in infoboxes for historic sterling coinage. The 1870 Mark argument is worth repeating there. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 08:45, 22 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

It seems a bit odd that this article has not a single link to the modern day decimal penny.

Penny (British decimal coin) - Wikipedia MaxConfusion (talk) 12:30, 23 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Its decimal equivalent was the half-penny (+1⁄2p), which is mentioned and linked in last sentence of the lead. I will add a note to the top of the page for readers who pick the wrong penny. Bazza (talk) 12:44, 23 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Perfect. This will aid many people who might stumble upon this page while trying to find a modern penny. MaxConfusion (talk) 19:12, 27 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@JMF: Hi! I was going to thank you for fixing the reference to the Challis book. (As my edit summary says, those templates are Greek to me. I can do APA, Chicago, MLA, etc., but not Wikipedia templates! Yes, I know they're s'posed to make it easier.) But then I clicked on your link and discovered page 511 doesn't show up, thanks to the vagaries of Google Books. Your way is correct and elegant but doesn't display the whole reference source. My way is wrong and clunky, but once you click on the first link in the page, all the source material shows right up. What should we do? Best wishes, YoPienso (talk) 03:20, 28 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I'm afraid we are in a no-win here. Either method is subject to the whim of Google but (in my experience) your way has seemed more subject to arbitrary choices of what is shown or not shown – even between successive runs of it. My way tends to survive a bit longer but I have certainly experienced Google ceasing to display the page although it was willing to do so a few months earlier.

So maybe it is worth recalling the purpose of citations: they are there so that (a) casual readers have reasonable confidence that our text isn't just made up and (b) serious students who need to read around the subject are given a good pointer (and they should expect to buy or borrow the original source); the formal policy is WP:Verifiabilty. In essence, either method shows our good faith, it is not unreasonable to expect the serious reader to verify more closely. We can only do what we can do.

The url= facility in book citations is intended to be a link to the book itself, for example for out-of-copyright^[a] books on archive.org, Hathi Trust, Open Library or Google Books. There is also a chapter-url= but unfortunately no page-url= (so if you want to specify a specific page, you have to resort to my (admittedly ugly) page=[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Penny_(British_pre-decimal_coin) 1234] technique). I say "intended" but I regularly see it used to link to a specific bookseller's page, which is a definite no-no. The isbn= and oclc= provide that information, but vendor-neutrally.

So if you feel lucky, you can put your url back, but it needs to go in the page= box (i.e., use my technique with your url.) --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 11:16, 28 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you so much for kindly giving your time and explanation and advice. I really like to be able to click to a source, and try to more often than many readers, I'm sure. When I feel lucky I may put my url back in. But I agree enough info is provided in yours that serious readers can find it themselves. YoPienso (talk) 03:14, 29 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I see that archive.org has Catalogue of the coins, tokens, medals, dies, and seals in the museum of the Royal Mint (vol 1). I was misled by their description giving the publication date as 1806, it is actually 1906. I don't have the time (or, tbh, the inclination) to delve into it, but someone else may. More specifically, this would be a good example of a valid use of url= but might still need a specific page url too. --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 13:02, 28 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]