Admins?

Neither the FAQ nor the Help page gives a way of finding and contacting an admin, so I'll ask here instead.

According to MediaWiki:Size-yottabytes/qqq, the units used are actually binary (powers of 1024) instead of the powers-of-ten implied by the message name's prefix. So the symbol (MediaWiki:Size-yottabytes) should be "$1 YiB" instead of "$1 YB". An admin is required to make this change because this "sensitive" page is otherwise protected. The same holds for the rest of the series: MediaWiki:Size-zettabytes ($1 ZiB), MediaWiki:Size-exabytes ($1 EiB), MediaWiki:Size-petabytes ($1 PiB), and MediaWiki:Size-terabytes ($1 TiB). The remaining ones are already fixed: MediaWiki:Size-gigabytes ($1 GiB), MediaWiki:Size-megabytes ($1 MiB), and MediaWiki:Size-kilobytes ($1 KiB).

Usually, this page right here is a good place to contact the translatewiki admins.

However, this change won't be made by translatewiki admins on wiki pages within translatewiki. English source messages must be changed in Git. Technically, I can do it (and so can you), but I'm not entirely sure that the proposal is correct, as I've never got into the deep details of data unit names. In addition, these messages are many years old, and I'm reluctant to change old messages unless I'm very certain the change is good.

I therefore recommend discussing this change in Phabricator.

I also agree: these keys are named using prefixes for powers of ten, so the abbreviated formats should also use power of tens (without any "i"). If some project decides to use powers of two, they'll need to use other message keys ("Size-kibibytes" and so on) and associated keys for abbreviated formats ("$1 kiB") will be needed as well and translated separately. There's certainly a problem in projects that use these units, without being entirely clear (when in fact they shuold have use the other units).

But isolately, on these messages used independantly of a clear scope, we cannot change anything here. It's up to projects using these messages to update their code to reference the correct units.

Anyway, I added a "Related" template in the doc to link these messages and present them in a table (showing powers of 2 for memory or file sizes, and powers of 10 for bit rates). This allows poiting to these messages and update them consistantly. I tried to see if there were messages naming sizes in "kibibytes" or "kibibits" for powers of 2, but did not find any of them.

The pages without language code are only used in translatewiki.net. The remaining units can be overridden here as well.

If the request is to change these in MediaWiki itself, then it's like Amir said. People were revolting against using the correct units so in English they follow the common convention. Translations in other languages are free to use the correct units.