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Following on from an archived discussion on currency conventions, I'm hoping to nail down some specifics on dealing with currency: comments are welcome at Wikipedia:Naming conventions (currency). Ziggurat 02:17, 28 September 2005 (UTC)
Have been bold and merged it here per merge tag. Hiding talk 20:02, 9 November 2005 (UTC)
This is a placeholder while I can come up with an eloquent way of stating that there needs to be a Wikipedia-wide convention on how to indicate currencies (US dollars vs. Australian dollars, etc.) and of which symbols to use (no one seems to know what to do about the Yuan). -- Dante Alighieri 01:17 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I suggest we use the ISO standard 3-letter currency codes defined in ISO 4217. This would have a number of advantages:
-- Cabalamat 16:28, 3 Sep 2003 (UTC)
The trouble is, most people don't know the codes. "2000 chinese renminbi" is more understandable than "CNY 2000" DJ Clayworth 22:00, 21 Nov 2003 (UTC)
In general, we defer to whatever is common practice for published English works in the English encyclopedia, why not do that here? It's probably reasonable to expect almost all English speakers to recognize the U.S. dollar, English pound, and Euro symbols, so just use them. Otherwise, the unit is usually just written out ("one million Japanese yen"). What do the style guides suggest?? I can imagine "$1 million (Australian)" being fine. If there's a need for an abbreviation (because the unit repeats throughout the article), use the abbreviation from ISO 4217, but define the abbreviation inside the article before using it. If you use almost all the abbreviations, at least cross-reference to the ISO page. -- Dwheeler
While I am normally a big fan of following ISO, this is one case where use of the standard is simply contrary to good English style. A good example is the Egyptian pound; ISO 4217 calls for EGP, which is virtually never used in Egypt (except maybe at foreign exchange counters). There are two commonly used abbreviations: in Arabic it is simply the letter gim (for guinea), and in English and other European languages it is L.E., for livre(s) egyptienne(s). In an article dealing with Egypt in English, the only acceptable abbreviation would be L.E., which in Wikipedia should be defined on first occurrence in an article. Similary, GBP should be £, JPY ¥, EUR €, etc. — Tkinias 16:55, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)
I am absolutely against using abbreviations except for the most commonly known symbols, as Tkinias suggested. I think there should be a preference for spelling out the currency -- 1,000 U.S. dollars (although $1,000 is also perfectly acceptable), 1,000 pounds sterling, 1,000 Australian dollars, 1,000 euros, 1,000 Japanese yen, etc. acsenray
"$1" would confuse me. Wikipedia lists over 30 currencies that use "$" (
here). Only USD uses the S-with-two-bars symbol, but that's hard to type.
The ideal solution is the same as the Wikipedia date standard; encode the ISO amount in the text, and have Wikipedia software display the article in a commonly understood format containing a link to the currency's definition. (E.g. "[[USD]]" would become equivalent to: "[[USD|$]]" - which Wikipedia would render as S-with-two-bars.) Although this envolves developer work it has the advantages of:
If ISO 4217 is not used, the convention must specify an efficient way of discussing the AUD/USD exchange rate, old Turkish Lira vs. new Lira, and prevent confusion of currencies with similar names. Wragge 16:19, 2005 Apr 17 (UTC)
On the dollar issue: surely a good idea (especially for the dollar) would be to use, for example, US$, AUS$ and Z$ or ZIM$ (although ZIM$ is more explicit, I have never seen it. Z$ seems quite common). I use R 0,00 for rands (my home currency), but recognise ZAR (ISO code) in international contexts. Same with british pounds (GBP). However, maybe a new notation like [[ISO-code]] is better. It makes hard-to-type (like pounds, euros and new sheqels on my keyboard) much easier.
The same issue came up in this discussion: Currency Style Dismbiguation. Surely this is a Style question rather than a naming convention? (i.e. it refers to the formatting within articles rather than how they are named). There should definitely be some kind of style guideline for currency. NPOV makes frequent reference to the international nature of Wikipedia (see especially Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view#Anglo-American_focus), and yet despite twenty three countries using the dollar there are several articles in which it is implicitly used solely for the U. S. dollar. In many articles of a specifically national nature this is not an issue (that it is US$ is obvious from the U. S. context of the whole article), but there is a clear NPOV bias in comments like this from 2004: "The People's Republic of China to invest $20 billion dollars in Argentina, a deal signed days before the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum to be held in the City of Santiago in Chile." Where more specific terms are used there are several styles throughout Wikipedia, so it needs to be standardised.
Of the major style guides, the APA and the MLA say nothing, and the Chicago Manual of Style discusses it briefly but only mentions one example: "In Canada the current quotation was $2.69 (U.S. $2.47) a pound." The MHRA Style Guide recommends using an appropriate abbreviation before the symbol (C$/Can$, A$/Aus$, NZ$).
International newspapers tend to display the same Americentric bias: Guardian "abbreviate dollars like this: $50 (US dollars); A$50 (Australian dollars); HK$50 (Hong Kong dollars)" Times "with figures use $5 (when American), A$5 (Australian), C$5 (Canadian), S$5 (Singapore) and so on"
The World Bank style guide World Bank (pdf) uses "U.S. dollars or US$"
In Wikipedia, most articles already use some variation of the style suggested in the international papers, MHRA, and World Bank, for example:
But some pages with an international focus need to be standardized:
"For example, GDP per capita in China is ca. 1,400 U.S. Dollars, while on a PPP basis, it is ca. 6,200 US$. At the other extreme, Japan's nominal GDP per capita is ca. 37,600 US$, but its PPP figure is only 31,400 US$"
"The Educational Testing Service (or ETS) is the world's largest private educational testing and measurement organization, operating on a annual budget of approximately $900 million. ETS develops various standardized examinations primarily in the United States, but they also administer tests such as TOEFL in most nations. "
"The Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) was a major international bank founded in Pakistan in 1972. At its peak, it operated in 78 countries, had over 400 branches, and claimed assets of $25 billion."
I would suggest a few things:
Ziggurat 02:11, 28 September 2005 (UTC)
(Discussion moved from Talk:Diamond)
I think the article will be improved by having specialist weight units (carats) supplemented with non-specialist weight units (grams). I made edits to that effect but the article was reverted to remove gram values. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Diamond&diff=24265758&oldid=24260125
This topic was discussed previously at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Bobblewik/units_of_mass#Units_of_mass_in_precious_stones Perhaps we have drifted apart from what was said in that discussion. I would like to find a solution. Can we go through it again please? Bobblewik 23:07, 28 September 2005 (UTC)
We've already standardised date format. It seems to me strange that any time format is allowed given that it is 24-hour, and, furthermore, that the manual actually specifically says not to edit an article just to change the time format (which, as you could probably tell, was exactly what I was about to do).
Like dates, there are lots of different time formats. And like dates, it would be better if they were all the same. I don't know about regional formats though.
Anyway, there are two things in time formats that annoy me when I see them, and I'd be very surprised if others here disagreed with me:
There is of course one other thing, that is the thing about 12-hour and 24-hour clock which I understand is very controversial and probably won't gain consensus, though if anyone is like me and wants it to be 12-hour in prose (not technical or tables), please drop a word.
Any thoughts? (If I don't post something for ages it means I've been caught up elsewhere, I'll try and check here as often as I can) Neonumbers 08:47, 3 October 2005 (UTC)
There having been no comments for the past while, I'm going to propose something.
Context will determine whether the 12-hour or 24-hour clock should be used.
Times in the 12-hour clock should with a colon(s), and lower case "a.m." and "p.m.". These suffixes generally cannot be omitted. "12 noon" and "12 midnight" should be used instead of "12 a.m." and "12 p.m."; some readers find the latter ambiguous. 24-hour clock times follow the same format, except without the a.m./p.m. suffixes. Discretion may be used to determine if leading zeroes should be used. 00:00 refers to midnight; 12:00 refers to noon. Examples:
|
I foresee a debate that takes the lines of "no consensus"; "no discussion", and so on. I waited one week from the last message and there were no replies, and three weeks from the first I posted to which there were no replies answering my question — so the best I can do is propose this change and see who objects. If no-one has strong objection reason then I think it's reasonable to assume people are okay with it.
It is not worth debating, in my opinion, which form of AM am A.M. a.m. is better because let's face it, none of them are "better" than any other and a simple plurality vote could decide it just fine; I'm sure many won't even have a preference.
If there are no objections for ten days, I will replace the current "Time formatting" section with the text above on 5 November 2005. Neonumbers 06:59, 26 October 2005 (UTC)
Okay, all :-). I'm reluctant to change the min/sec delimiter to a dot just yet, as I always thought convention was with a colon for both; but if anyone else has advice on this matter, that would be good too. Neonumbers 11:27, 10 November 2005 (UTC)
Following on from the page on currency style - Wikipedia: Naming conventions (currency) - I'd like comments on this proposed section, to be added to the end of the page:
For currency, use the appropriate symbol (before the quantity) or name of the currency unit (after the quantity), for example:
For national articles or those where the type of currency is unambiguous it is not necessary to denote which currency unit is being used. However, it is necessary to indicate the nationality of currencies in internationally oriented articles or articles referring to more than one currency of the same name. This is done to avoid confusion and potential ethnocentrism. For example, "US$100" or "100 U. S. dollars" (not "100 US$", "$100 (US)", or "USD 100"); "A$100" or "100 Australian dollars."
Standard abbreviations are given at the article on the currency, for example:
Interesting replies. Has anyone got a link for those codes as used by the World Bank? Googling for "currency codes" on site worldbank.org only gives me results that use ISO 4217. I actually suspect there isn't a canonical list of those codes that covers all the world's currencies, and that once you get past the better known dollars, most of them seem to be pretty ad hoc.
Which leads into my next comment. What's been said so far has mostly focused on dollars, pounds, yen, and euros. And I rather suspect that's the case with the two style guides (Times and Guardian) -- they're very centered on the northern industrial world. If the aim here is to set a global standard (gulp), then we need to consider the full range of world currencies -- dollars and pounds, sure; but francs and lempiras and dinars and rupees, too. Cast the net a whole lot wider.
On reflection, perhaps this is something that needs to be taken on a case-by-case basis. Maybe I wasn't casting my net wide enough, either. Those examples I gave above really only work well with currencies that use the £ or $ signs (does anyone else use ¥ besides the Japanese?). For instance, saying
doesn't sound too bad, but it would be frankly bizarre to say
Much better in those cases to use "...costs L.E.0.75" or "costs GTQ 3.50."
(One downside of the ISO Codes is that the standard recommends they be used without $, £, etc, but that's very difficult to do in everyday texts such as these encyclopedia articles -- it feels very unnatural, counterintuitive to write a dollar amount without including the dollar sign.)
Another alternative -- we are a wiki, after all -- would be to use neither system of code and simply to rely on a link to the currency from the symbol to make it clear what we're talking about: $100, £100, ₪100. That would make the text flow more neatly, but it would have one major drawback: including the ISO 4217 three-letter code makes it crystal clear whether you're talking about ARS or ARP pesos, RUR or RUB rubles, MXP or MXN pesos, ALL or ALK leks, etc. That's lost if we just use the naked symbol, without the ISO clarification.
One thing I don't like about those US$, Z$, RD$, codes is they don't always distinguish between the marker that's used in the country (such as Brazil's R$) and the combination of the domestic marker and additional identifier (such as US$, C$, etc.), in the sense that that's not what's printed on the banknotes or what people write on their checks -- ie, for international consumption only. Thus: the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank's officially sanctioned symbol for the East Caribbean dollar is "$". EC$ is just some form of disambiguation they use internationally to avoid confusion. Also, from an aesthetic point of view, some of them -- even govt. sanctioned ones, such as Barbados's "Bds$" -- are frankly hieroglyphic.
Sorry -- came out a bit rambling, the above. Essential summary: US$, A$, etc. are good (and internationally recognized) for disambiguating one dollar from another, but the system breaks down once you're past that first group of familiar currencies: Is there one for the Uruguayan peso? Is a similar set of symbols used with the pound sign? (I couldn't think of any xx£ examples.) ISO codes are utterly unambiguous but -- as noted above -- not that familiar to non-specialists not accustomed to the world's more arcane currencies and (as also noted) not that easy to work into a grammatically flowing sentence. It may very well be that one system is appropriate for the world's most familiar currency, but not right for the kwanzas and the like that no one's ever heard of. Let's discuss this some more. –Hajor 15:14, 4 October 2005 (UTC)
Skatebiker
07:35, 12 October 2005 (UTC) I think that using currency can be rather relaxed by e.g. using lower case names, ISO 4217 three letter codes, but e.g. US$ 100 os OK as well. But Z$ can be confusing, use rather ZW$ for Zimbabwe dollar.
![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 25 | ← | Archive 27 | Archive 28 | Archive 29 | Archive 30 | Archive 31 | → | Archive 35 |
Following on from an archived discussion on currency conventions, I'm hoping to nail down some specifics on dealing with currency: comments are welcome at Wikipedia:Naming conventions (currency). Ziggurat 02:17, 28 September 2005 (UTC)
Have been bold and merged it here per merge tag. Hiding talk 20:02, 9 November 2005 (UTC)
This is a placeholder while I can come up with an eloquent way of stating that there needs to be a Wikipedia-wide convention on how to indicate currencies (US dollars vs. Australian dollars, etc.) and of which symbols to use (no one seems to know what to do about the Yuan). -- Dante Alighieri 01:17 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I suggest we use the ISO standard 3-letter currency codes defined in ISO 4217. This would have a number of advantages:
-- Cabalamat 16:28, 3 Sep 2003 (UTC)
The trouble is, most people don't know the codes. "2000 chinese renminbi" is more understandable than "CNY 2000" DJ Clayworth 22:00, 21 Nov 2003 (UTC)
In general, we defer to whatever is common practice for published English works in the English encyclopedia, why not do that here? It's probably reasonable to expect almost all English speakers to recognize the U.S. dollar, English pound, and Euro symbols, so just use them. Otherwise, the unit is usually just written out ("one million Japanese yen"). What do the style guides suggest?? I can imagine "$1 million (Australian)" being fine. If there's a need for an abbreviation (because the unit repeats throughout the article), use the abbreviation from ISO 4217, but define the abbreviation inside the article before using it. If you use almost all the abbreviations, at least cross-reference to the ISO page. -- Dwheeler
While I am normally a big fan of following ISO, this is one case where use of the standard is simply contrary to good English style. A good example is the Egyptian pound; ISO 4217 calls for EGP, which is virtually never used in Egypt (except maybe at foreign exchange counters). There are two commonly used abbreviations: in Arabic it is simply the letter gim (for guinea), and in English and other European languages it is L.E., for livre(s) egyptienne(s). In an article dealing with Egypt in English, the only acceptable abbreviation would be L.E., which in Wikipedia should be defined on first occurrence in an article. Similary, GBP should be £, JPY ¥, EUR €, etc. — Tkinias 16:55, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)
I am absolutely against using abbreviations except for the most commonly known symbols, as Tkinias suggested. I think there should be a preference for spelling out the currency -- 1,000 U.S. dollars (although $1,000 is also perfectly acceptable), 1,000 pounds sterling, 1,000 Australian dollars, 1,000 euros, 1,000 Japanese yen, etc. acsenray
"$1" would confuse me. Wikipedia lists over 30 currencies that use "$" (
here). Only USD uses the S-with-two-bars symbol, but that's hard to type.
The ideal solution is the same as the Wikipedia date standard; encode the ISO amount in the text, and have Wikipedia software display the article in a commonly understood format containing a link to the currency's definition. (E.g. "[[USD]]" would become equivalent to: "[[USD|$]]" - which Wikipedia would render as S-with-two-bars.) Although this envolves developer work it has the advantages of:
If ISO 4217 is not used, the convention must specify an efficient way of discussing the AUD/USD exchange rate, old Turkish Lira vs. new Lira, and prevent confusion of currencies with similar names. Wragge 16:19, 2005 Apr 17 (UTC)
On the dollar issue: surely a good idea (especially for the dollar) would be to use, for example, US$, AUS$ and Z$ or ZIM$ (although ZIM$ is more explicit, I have never seen it. Z$ seems quite common). I use R 0,00 for rands (my home currency), but recognise ZAR (ISO code) in international contexts. Same with british pounds (GBP). However, maybe a new notation like [[ISO-code]] is better. It makes hard-to-type (like pounds, euros and new sheqels on my keyboard) much easier.
The same issue came up in this discussion: Currency Style Dismbiguation. Surely this is a Style question rather than a naming convention? (i.e. it refers to the formatting within articles rather than how they are named). There should definitely be some kind of style guideline for currency. NPOV makes frequent reference to the international nature of Wikipedia (see especially Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view#Anglo-American_focus), and yet despite twenty three countries using the dollar there are several articles in which it is implicitly used solely for the U. S. dollar. In many articles of a specifically national nature this is not an issue (that it is US$ is obvious from the U. S. context of the whole article), but there is a clear NPOV bias in comments like this from 2004: "The People's Republic of China to invest $20 billion dollars in Argentina, a deal signed days before the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum to be held in the City of Santiago in Chile." Where more specific terms are used there are several styles throughout Wikipedia, so it needs to be standardised.
Of the major style guides, the APA and the MLA say nothing, and the Chicago Manual of Style discusses it briefly but only mentions one example: "In Canada the current quotation was $2.69 (U.S. $2.47) a pound." The MHRA Style Guide recommends using an appropriate abbreviation before the symbol (C$/Can$, A$/Aus$, NZ$).
International newspapers tend to display the same Americentric bias: Guardian "abbreviate dollars like this: $50 (US dollars); A$50 (Australian dollars); HK$50 (Hong Kong dollars)" Times "with figures use $5 (when American), A$5 (Australian), C$5 (Canadian), S$5 (Singapore) and so on"
The World Bank style guide World Bank (pdf) uses "U.S. dollars or US$"
In Wikipedia, most articles already use some variation of the style suggested in the international papers, MHRA, and World Bank, for example:
But some pages with an international focus need to be standardized:
"For example, GDP per capita in China is ca. 1,400 U.S. Dollars, while on a PPP basis, it is ca. 6,200 US$. At the other extreme, Japan's nominal GDP per capita is ca. 37,600 US$, but its PPP figure is only 31,400 US$"
"The Educational Testing Service (or ETS) is the world's largest private educational testing and measurement organization, operating on a annual budget of approximately $900 million. ETS develops various standardized examinations primarily in the United States, but they also administer tests such as TOEFL in most nations. "
"The Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) was a major international bank founded in Pakistan in 1972. At its peak, it operated in 78 countries, had over 400 branches, and claimed assets of $25 billion."
I would suggest a few things:
Ziggurat 02:11, 28 September 2005 (UTC)
(Discussion moved from Talk:Diamond)
I think the article will be improved by having specialist weight units (carats) supplemented with non-specialist weight units (grams). I made edits to that effect but the article was reverted to remove gram values. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Diamond&diff=24265758&oldid=24260125
This topic was discussed previously at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Bobblewik/units_of_mass#Units_of_mass_in_precious_stones Perhaps we have drifted apart from what was said in that discussion. I would like to find a solution. Can we go through it again please? Bobblewik 23:07, 28 September 2005 (UTC)
We've already standardised date format. It seems to me strange that any time format is allowed given that it is 24-hour, and, furthermore, that the manual actually specifically says not to edit an article just to change the time format (which, as you could probably tell, was exactly what I was about to do).
Like dates, there are lots of different time formats. And like dates, it would be better if they were all the same. I don't know about regional formats though.
Anyway, there are two things in time formats that annoy me when I see them, and I'd be very surprised if others here disagreed with me:
There is of course one other thing, that is the thing about 12-hour and 24-hour clock which I understand is very controversial and probably won't gain consensus, though if anyone is like me and wants it to be 12-hour in prose (not technical or tables), please drop a word.
Any thoughts? (If I don't post something for ages it means I've been caught up elsewhere, I'll try and check here as often as I can) Neonumbers 08:47, 3 October 2005 (UTC)
There having been no comments for the past while, I'm going to propose something.
Context will determine whether the 12-hour or 24-hour clock should be used.
Times in the 12-hour clock should with a colon(s), and lower case "a.m." and "p.m.". These suffixes generally cannot be omitted. "12 noon" and "12 midnight" should be used instead of "12 a.m." and "12 p.m."; some readers find the latter ambiguous. 24-hour clock times follow the same format, except without the a.m./p.m. suffixes. Discretion may be used to determine if leading zeroes should be used. 00:00 refers to midnight; 12:00 refers to noon. Examples:
|
I foresee a debate that takes the lines of "no consensus"; "no discussion", and so on. I waited one week from the last message and there were no replies, and three weeks from the first I posted to which there were no replies answering my question — so the best I can do is propose this change and see who objects. If no-one has strong objection reason then I think it's reasonable to assume people are okay with it.
It is not worth debating, in my opinion, which form of AM am A.M. a.m. is better because let's face it, none of them are "better" than any other and a simple plurality vote could decide it just fine; I'm sure many won't even have a preference.
If there are no objections for ten days, I will replace the current "Time formatting" section with the text above on 5 November 2005. Neonumbers 06:59, 26 October 2005 (UTC)
Okay, all :-). I'm reluctant to change the min/sec delimiter to a dot just yet, as I always thought convention was with a colon for both; but if anyone else has advice on this matter, that would be good too. Neonumbers 11:27, 10 November 2005 (UTC)
Following on from the page on currency style - Wikipedia: Naming conventions (currency) - I'd like comments on this proposed section, to be added to the end of the page:
For currency, use the appropriate symbol (before the quantity) or name of the currency unit (after the quantity), for example:
For national articles or those where the type of currency is unambiguous it is not necessary to denote which currency unit is being used. However, it is necessary to indicate the nationality of currencies in internationally oriented articles or articles referring to more than one currency of the same name. This is done to avoid confusion and potential ethnocentrism. For example, "US$100" or "100 U. S. dollars" (not "100 US$", "$100 (US)", or "USD 100"); "A$100" or "100 Australian dollars."
Standard abbreviations are given at the article on the currency, for example:
Interesting replies. Has anyone got a link for those codes as used by the World Bank? Googling for "currency codes" on site worldbank.org only gives me results that use ISO 4217. I actually suspect there isn't a canonical list of those codes that covers all the world's currencies, and that once you get past the better known dollars, most of them seem to be pretty ad hoc.
Which leads into my next comment. What's been said so far has mostly focused on dollars, pounds, yen, and euros. And I rather suspect that's the case with the two style guides (Times and Guardian) -- they're very centered on the northern industrial world. If the aim here is to set a global standard (gulp), then we need to consider the full range of world currencies -- dollars and pounds, sure; but francs and lempiras and dinars and rupees, too. Cast the net a whole lot wider.
On reflection, perhaps this is something that needs to be taken on a case-by-case basis. Maybe I wasn't casting my net wide enough, either. Those examples I gave above really only work well with currencies that use the £ or $ signs (does anyone else use ¥ besides the Japanese?). For instance, saying
doesn't sound too bad, but it would be frankly bizarre to say
Much better in those cases to use "...costs L.E.0.75" or "costs GTQ 3.50."
(One downside of the ISO Codes is that the standard recommends they be used without $, £, etc, but that's very difficult to do in everyday texts such as these encyclopedia articles -- it feels very unnatural, counterintuitive to write a dollar amount without including the dollar sign.)
Another alternative -- we are a wiki, after all -- would be to use neither system of code and simply to rely on a link to the currency from the symbol to make it clear what we're talking about: $100, £100, ₪100. That would make the text flow more neatly, but it would have one major drawback: including the ISO 4217 three-letter code makes it crystal clear whether you're talking about ARS or ARP pesos, RUR or RUB rubles, MXP or MXN pesos, ALL or ALK leks, etc. That's lost if we just use the naked symbol, without the ISO clarification.
One thing I don't like about those US$, Z$, RD$, codes is they don't always distinguish between the marker that's used in the country (such as Brazil's R$) and the combination of the domestic marker and additional identifier (such as US$, C$, etc.), in the sense that that's not what's printed on the banknotes or what people write on their checks -- ie, for international consumption only. Thus: the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank's officially sanctioned symbol for the East Caribbean dollar is "$". EC$ is just some form of disambiguation they use internationally to avoid confusion. Also, from an aesthetic point of view, some of them -- even govt. sanctioned ones, such as Barbados's "Bds$" -- are frankly hieroglyphic.
Sorry -- came out a bit rambling, the above. Essential summary: US$, A$, etc. are good (and internationally recognized) for disambiguating one dollar from another, but the system breaks down once you're past that first group of familiar currencies: Is there one for the Uruguayan peso? Is a similar set of symbols used with the pound sign? (I couldn't think of any xx£ examples.) ISO codes are utterly unambiguous but -- as noted above -- not that familiar to non-specialists not accustomed to the world's more arcane currencies and (as also noted) not that easy to work into a grammatically flowing sentence. It may very well be that one system is appropriate for the world's most familiar currency, but not right for the kwanzas and the like that no one's ever heard of. Let's discuss this some more. –Hajor 15:14, 4 October 2005 (UTC)
Skatebiker
07:35, 12 October 2005 (UTC) I think that using currency can be rather relaxed by e.g. using lower case names, ISO 4217 three letter codes, but e.g. US$ 100 os OK as well. But Z$ can be confusing, use rather ZW$ for Zimbabwe dollar.