Talk:Sixteen policemen killed in suspected terrorist attack in Xinjiang, China

unpublished

One-sentence article should be expanded before publication. - Amgine | ^t 05:14, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

"16" or "sixteen"

This is a sort-of grey area, the style guide is clear and emphatic on anything <10/11, but not so on anything outside this range. Should we be saying that anything up to twenty should be spelt? Should we be spelling decades (i.e. 20,30,40,50 and so on)?

I'd say that within an article it is less of an issue and the preference should be to spell things out where it isn't something silly like 142. But in titles space is at a premium and we might want to apply different rules. Obviously with really big numbers you wrap round to the spell-out rules again. You don't put 1,000,000 (or whatever decimal separator you want to war over), you put one million. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 13:51, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

Generically speaking, any number starting an article title, or a paragraph, should be spelt out in full. Any number of two or fewer words starting a sentence should be spelt out. All others should be numerically represented. (This is one of the areas where news style guides vary widely: Telegraph uses only zero through ten, prefers rounding so ten million vs 9.87 m or 9,874,302; AP style is inconsistent with itself, using spelt out for 0 to 9, numerals for 10 and above, except when it's an age or a percent which is always numerals, except if it begins a sentence in which case any number of any length is spelt out, unless it happens to be a year...; &c.) - Amgine | ^t 02:06, 5 August 2008 (UTC)