"==bcm versus km³==
Dear Gene Nygaard,
You said that generally everyone understands km³. I am not sure about this statement and find this use quite unusual and misleading. Could you please give any example in gas industry where km³ is used (maybe just some newspaper article)? Also, if youd could find any article in wikipeedia about gas fileds or pipelines, which use km³, I would like to get a reference.  

Google ""natural gas"" ""km3""  823 hits

Note that Google, as far as I know, won't search for the ³ character, but this gets those that use either html superscripts, or just ""km3"" and the like.

There are other ways to find more of them.  You will of course find many using bcm as well.  But as I pointed out, that may be jargon used within the industry, but it is not known outside the industry (there might possibly be other little pockets of its usage in other contexts, even less known). 

another search, on AltaVista:
km³ ""natural gas"" 3130 hits. 

AltaVista appears to treat ³ and 3 as synonymous, unlike Google. You can limit them to .gov sites, or to .edu sites, too, to see that this isn't ""newspaper usage"" but in fact more likely to take place in more serious and professional contexts.  

BTW, if you were arguing about ""tcf"" you'd maybe have a better case.  That is common enough in the industry, more so than ""bcm"", that it is better known outside the industry, too.  

I am able to use different search engages. However, could you please give any example of use km³  as an unit of capacity of gas pipeline? Concerning tcf (trillion cubic feet) - it's used more in the US gas industry, while bcm is used mainly in Europe. Don't see problem with this. If you look the external links of this artcile, you will find both: tcf and bcm, depending of the source.

 In the petroleum industry the unit systems used are Oilfield and Metric like what was mentoned above, all depending on where you are and who you are working with. However I have never come across km³ being used to describe gas field sizes or gas production and if someone was to describe a field or gas production in such a way to someone in the industry it would have no revelace to them, it is not a standard of unit. It would have to be Bcm, Mcm, E3M3, Bcf, Tcf, MMscf, Mscf etc.   

Surely, we writing for a general audience not only for people in certain industries.  km³ is standard SI if some people in some industry want to use something else, then that's their problem.  P.S. Hello Gene. ɪmp 

 Very true Jimp we are writing for a general audience. And when i searched some news articles by the likes of Forbes, CNN Money etc on Google news in the past month for the phrase km3 in relation to gas/gasfield/ gas field/ ""natural gas"" it returns one result from Petroleum World. However the units tcf, bcf, bcm return   at least 102, 147,  51 hits when used with the above phrases. And these are from Forbes, Reuters, CNN Money, Globe and mail which i think you would agree are also writing for the General Audience. The numbers are in their hundreds of thousands when you do just a general web search for tcf, bcf and bcm compared to the 823 km3 turns up. So its not really just ""some people in some industry"" using these terms.  Cheers  
Sure it is.  But that's beside the point; we at Wikipedia choose to use standard unit symbols, not all the various off-the-cuff possibilities, and km³ is the standard symbol for 1,000,000,000 m³.  It isn't surprising at all that financial magazines are too innumerate when it comes to units of measure to even understand what they are, so sure they get passed on unchanged.  So what?   

 Sorting on Ø's 

Are you quite sure that ø's should be sorted under o? The ø is a separate character, and is sorted separately in Danish (a,b,c,...y,z,æ,ø,å).  | talk 

Yes, it's sorted differently in Danish.  But this i