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The numbers of votes and edits displayed on the Users page don't feature thousands separators at the moment. This is slightly confusing and inconsistent — the reputation numbers do feature thousands separators, as do the numbers of votes displayed on a user's profile page. Please add thousands separators consistently.

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EDIT: Picking up casperOne's suggestion: as an alternative, one could show only the most significant digits of votes/edits numbers with at least four or five digits — e.g., my votes number would be displayed as 11.1k votes. (The exact number could be shown in a tooltip, as is done for five-digit reputation numbers.)

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    Looks like the same thing also occurs for the number of questions a tag is on as displayed on the Tags page (/tags).
    – V2Blast
    Commented Apr 14, 2022 at 23:32

2 Answers 2

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While it's true that on Stack Overflow (and the majority of the Stack Exchange sites) we've standardized on English (using the premise that it's the language of the Internet, a premise I support), that doesn't mean that the countries where English is primarily spoken are the locales of the Internet.

The convention you are proposing is a convention of locale, not language, and has many different representations around the world. For example, there are many places where the comma is used as the decimal mark instead of a decimal point.

That said, I don't know that thousand separators are necessary. There are few places where thousand separators are actually used, and it's probably a better idea to have them not used at all.

In the case you present, I'd prefer it show "5.1k" instead of "5,116".

As another example, the representation of the hour of the day is a locale convention as well, and we've standardized on UTC, which is locale-agnostic (even though it may align with certain locales at certain points).

This leads to the question of what the locale of the Internet is (or, what will most people understand)? We've already identified one part of it (the language, which is English), and I believe that the other parts (time of day representation, and numerical representation) are probably better off being as neutral as possible, in order to have the broadest possible reach (which is the point behind English being the language of the Stack Exchange sites).

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    In my case I'm undecided between 11,131 votes and 11.1k votes, but I prefer both to 11131 votes.
    – lockstep
    Commented Feb 1, 2012 at 19:32
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    If you don't want to use comma separators with the argument that it's locale dependent, why are you deciding to choose "5.1k" instead of "5,1k"? I think the only way to display it that doesn't have locale disagreements is "5116".
    – Peter Olson
    Commented Apr 23, 2013 at 23:01
  • @PeterOlson It's an unfortunate side effect of what will the most number of people on the site understand (which is the decimal point as a period, not as a comma). India and the US are the top two regions where users are from that use Stack Overflow, and those countries use a period as the question mark (as indicated by their omission from this list: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…).
    – casperOne
    Commented Apr 24, 2013 at 11:10
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Yes, adding commas as thousands separators would improve readability, and they are already used elsewhere on these English-language websites.

  • Here's an example for reputation:

rep bar

  • And another:

profile reputation

  • And a third:

next to a question

  • And for question counts:

total questions asked

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