Originally Posted by Bah Humbug

The important question is whether "data" is a counting or non-counting noun. If counting, like... "dog", then "data" is linguistically plural. If non-counting, like "sand", then it's linguistically singular. This is the underlying disagreement - usually we deal with enough data these days (like, terabytes in some cases) that it's treated as an undifferentiated mass even though there are individual bits if you look closely enough (like... sand). The kicker is that the word's Latin origin is plural, but is that sufficient reason to treat it as such in English? I can go along with that, but it usually sounds awkward and will push back on being "corrected" when I treat it as non-counting.

This is also a super-English argument. Chinese has specific non-translatable words that are placed before countable nouns when counting. There is no in-between.