This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
Infobox unit template. |
|
![]() | Infoboxes | |||
|
![]() | Physics Template‑class | ||||||
|
Coulomb | |
Unit system: | SI derived units |
Unit of... | Electric charge |
Unit conversions | |
1 C expressed in... | equals... |
↘ SI base units | ↘1 A s |
↘cgs | ↘2997924580 statC |
I find this template very confusing because of poor wording and layout. Here are a few suggestions:
Here's my humble attempt on the right -->
What do y'all think? Thanks! :-) -- Steve ( talk) 02:10, 26 October 2010 (UTC)
Earlier, the template used the word "Quantity" to mean "What sort of physical quantity does this measure?" (mass, charge, force, etc.). As I said in the previous section, When people see the word quantity they think "how much", so the "quantity" for one lightyear would be "the distance light travels in a year", not just "distance". I changed it to "Unit of ..." which in my opinion is much easier to understand.
MatthiasPaul has changed it back, with the edit comment: "Changed "Units of..." back to "Quantity:", as this is the proper term for it." What does that mean? Has some authority declared that "Unit of ..." is not "proper"? Professional physicists and physics textbooks use the term "unit of time", "unit of area", etc. very frequently. I have never heard anyone say it was not "proper" to use that terminology.
On the other hand, I have never heard a professional physicist or physics textbook say something like "The quantity of a joule is energy." I think most people would find that sentence to be confusing nonsense.
Therefore I am changing it back to "Unit of ...". -- Steve ( talk) 13:50, 6 October 2013 (UTC)
The dimension parameter has two big problems:
(1) It is redundant with expressing the unit in SI base units.
(2) There are no standardized symbols for dimensions, therefore editors are encouraged to make them up. M,L,T for mass length time seems pretty straightforward, but M could also be confused with meters (by non-experts), L could be inductance, etc. Much worse is when you get to electromagnetism. For example, take Coulomb. Someone put in that its dimension is I * T (current times time), but will readers know what the letter I means? Why isn't the dimension of Coulombs just Q for charge? What makes current and time more "fundamental" than charge? Aha, I see, amp is an SI base unit while coulomb is not. So that's the secret: It's actually exactly the same as SI base units, but replacing "m" by L and "s" by T and "A" by "I". So it's not only redundant with an expression in SI base units, it's an obfuscated copy of the expression in SI base units.
Therefore I will delete that part of the template. Just because something can be put in an infobox doesn't mean it should! -- Steve ( talk) 14:31, 6 October 2013 (UTC)
I don't understand why Name is required (earlier there was an error message if you don't specify a name; now it will default to the article title). For example, if the article title is "Pascal" and there's a template right at the top, then it is blindingly obvious to every reader that this is a template about the Pascal. So it's a waste of space to include the big bold text "Pascal" in the template. Shouldn't the writers of each article have the freedom to decide whether or not to include the name? I think it should be an optional parameter. -- Steve ( talk) 17:23, 16 December 2013 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Should the documentation for the name parameter be edited to indicate what the capitalization rule is for unit names (and the examples edited to agree)? Should the capitalization of the name be similar to the title of an article or section (e.g. "Watt") or as it would be if the name appeared mid-sentence (e.g. "watt")?
As the proposer of this RfC, I favor capitalizing unit names as they would be capitalized if the unit name appeared mid-sentence (e.g. "The watt is a unit of power"). I observe that editors frequently capitalize the name of units which are named after people when the unit appears mid-sentence; using mid-sentence capitalization would help to reduce this error. It would be similar to the way dictionaries are written; a dictionary entry is capitalized as if it occurred mid-sentence, even though it is the first word in the entry. Jc3s5h ( talk) 20:19, 8 January 2017 (UTC)
We need a separate (new) parameter for use where a unit does not have a formal symbol. This may be noticed in the article describing something as an abbreviation (e.g. "The yard (abbreviation: yd) is an English unit of length, [...]" in Yard). SI formalizes symbols, but most traditional systems have no such mechanism/standard, and the abbreviations, while useful, should be described as such ("Abbreviation", not "Symbol") in the infobox. Failing that, it would be appropriate to delete the use of the symbol parameter from the template invocation in all those articles in which there no formally accepted symbol. I am aware that SI and ISQ do assign symbols to several of these (e.g. d (day), h (hour), min (minute), ′ and as (arcsecond), Np (neper), Sh (shannon), o (octet) and so on). — Quondum 18:21, 16 July 2017 (UTC)
|extralabel=
and |extradata=
be used for abbreviations (though display after "Named after" is not ideal). There may be multiple symbols for a unit (already supported by the template). Your idea of qualifications (possibly via footnotes) makes sense. —
Quondum 01:26, 17 July 2017 (UTC)I've just been editing
foot (unit). The abbreviation for foot is "ft", the symbol for foot is ′ (
prime). This is (almost) verbatim the opening phrase of the article, contradicting its own infobox. If I correct the infobox to say Symbol = ′
, the result is the unintelligible 1 ′ in ... is equal to .... From the discussion above, the solution is aleady obvious and seemed to have had consensus three years ago: provide the option to give an alternative word – for example, Symbol = ft|alt=abbreviation (without the bold obviously, {{
code}} and {{
xt}} can't handle the embedded pipe). So why hasn't it been done? --
John Maynard Friedman (
talk) 13:35, 27 July 2020 (UTC)
I dislike the new "official definition" fields, and propose that we remove them. This level of detail should be covered in the body of the article, not in the sidebar. What I particularly don't like is that for SI base units, the definition is an entire paragraph of text—too long and too detailed to be properly covered in a sidebar. Also, the fields "defining event" and "effective since" end up being misleading. For the SI base units, these are now set to "2018 General Conference on Weights and Measures" and "Effective since 20 May 2019", respectively. This would seem to imply that the SI base units have just been newly created. If we are going to provide a date in the sidebar, it should be the date the unit was first created, not the date when the definition was last tweaked. Really, though the sidebar is not the place to try to cover information that is this detailed and which requires context (explanation of definitions, history of creation and redefinition).-- Srleffler ( talk) 02:36, 11 February 2019 (UTC)
The field is ambiguous; since the definition of kilogram has been changed twice, should we use the date of the original definition or the date of the current definition? The /doc file was also changed recently to reflect the unjustified addition of the field, and to make other changes not consistent with the original intent. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 08:04, 29 May 2019 (UTC)
I tried adding the CGS equivalent under units4 in an article but nothing displayed, despite the description here saying up to units6 is supported. I then changed the US conversions to units_us1, so I could bump the CGS equivalent up to units3, but units_us1 doesn't display anything either. Currently, the table in the pascal article does not have room to cross-ref the barye. — kwami ( talk) 03:04, 23 October 2020 (UTC)
Since nosymbolspace
and formulaconvert
are rather cumbersome and unclear, I'll wait a little for suggestions for better names before beginning to use them.
Search links for the parameter names in wikitext:
-- wqnvlz ( talk | contribs) 00:33, 23 March 2022 (UTC)
The SI base units and the SI derived units are not themselves 2 distinct systems of units, they're both components of the SI, which is the system of units (It's in the name!). For context "Meters" has been going around setting article pages back to "SI base unit" after other people changed it to the more accurate "International System of Units" and citing the templates here as justification, so I'd like to put a stop to this at the source. If I don't get any responses here after a few days, I'll take it as tacit endorsement and do it myself, but I would prefer for it to be clear that there's community agreement on this point. Ava Eva Thornton ( talk) 04:45, 24 July 2022 (UTC)
If we agree to change the usage, that's fine with me(emphasis added). Stating that I will accept whatever consensus is reached is not saying that I "personally have no objections to changing the rules". This is an attempt to make a blanket change that contradicts the SI examples that have been in the template for more than a decade, and have been in the articles I edited for many years. If this is to become the new norm then we need to change the template documentation as well as correct these articles and any others that have this issue. So, yes, this needs to be discussed.
I'd say this discussion has run its course, and should be considered closed with consensus support for the suggestion as restated by Dondervogel 2 just above. I see one (Meters) calling for discussion, which has been had, and everyone else appears to support. An appropriate course of actions would be to first update the examples in this template's documentation accordingly, as pointed out my Meters. Once this is done, anyone should feel free to update the infobox parameter in any article accordingly. 172.82.46.195 ( talk) 17:40, 13 August 2022 (UTC)
While changing infoboxes to "Unit system = SI", Ava Eva Thornton has also removed "International System of Units" from many lead sentences (many others didn't have it anyway). I've started a discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Physics#"International System of Units" or "SI" in leads of unit articles, touching also on whether it's useful to readers to have eg "the derived unit of force" rather than "the unit of force" in the first sentence. Notifying here as this discussion was mentioned in edit summaries and participants here may indeed be interested. NebY ( talk) 13:28, 19 August 2022 (UTC)
This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
Infobox unit template. |
|
![]() | Infoboxes | |||
|
![]() | Physics Template‑class | ||||||
|
Coulomb | |
Unit system: | SI derived units |
Unit of... | Electric charge |
Unit conversions | |
1 C expressed in... | equals... |
↘ SI base units | ↘1 A s |
↘cgs | ↘2997924580 statC |
I find this template very confusing because of poor wording and layout. Here are a few suggestions:
Here's my humble attempt on the right -->
What do y'all think? Thanks! :-) -- Steve ( talk) 02:10, 26 October 2010 (UTC)
Earlier, the template used the word "Quantity" to mean "What sort of physical quantity does this measure?" (mass, charge, force, etc.). As I said in the previous section, When people see the word quantity they think "how much", so the "quantity" for one lightyear would be "the distance light travels in a year", not just "distance". I changed it to "Unit of ..." which in my opinion is much easier to understand.
MatthiasPaul has changed it back, with the edit comment: "Changed "Units of..." back to "Quantity:", as this is the proper term for it." What does that mean? Has some authority declared that "Unit of ..." is not "proper"? Professional physicists and physics textbooks use the term "unit of time", "unit of area", etc. very frequently. I have never heard anyone say it was not "proper" to use that terminology.
On the other hand, I have never heard a professional physicist or physics textbook say something like "The quantity of a joule is energy." I think most people would find that sentence to be confusing nonsense.
Therefore I am changing it back to "Unit of ...". -- Steve ( talk) 13:50, 6 October 2013 (UTC)
The dimension parameter has two big problems:
(1) It is redundant with expressing the unit in SI base units.
(2) There are no standardized symbols for dimensions, therefore editors are encouraged to make them up. M,L,T for mass length time seems pretty straightforward, but M could also be confused with meters (by non-experts), L could be inductance, etc. Much worse is when you get to electromagnetism. For example, take Coulomb. Someone put in that its dimension is I * T (current times time), but will readers know what the letter I means? Why isn't the dimension of Coulombs just Q for charge? What makes current and time more "fundamental" than charge? Aha, I see, amp is an SI base unit while coulomb is not. So that's the secret: It's actually exactly the same as SI base units, but replacing "m" by L and "s" by T and "A" by "I". So it's not only redundant with an expression in SI base units, it's an obfuscated copy of the expression in SI base units.
Therefore I will delete that part of the template. Just because something can be put in an infobox doesn't mean it should! -- Steve ( talk) 14:31, 6 October 2013 (UTC)
I don't understand why Name is required (earlier there was an error message if you don't specify a name; now it will default to the article title). For example, if the article title is "Pascal" and there's a template right at the top, then it is blindingly obvious to every reader that this is a template about the Pascal. So it's a waste of space to include the big bold text "Pascal" in the template. Shouldn't the writers of each article have the freedom to decide whether or not to include the name? I think it should be an optional parameter. -- Steve ( talk) 17:23, 16 December 2013 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Should the documentation for the name parameter be edited to indicate what the capitalization rule is for unit names (and the examples edited to agree)? Should the capitalization of the name be similar to the title of an article or section (e.g. "Watt") or as it would be if the name appeared mid-sentence (e.g. "watt")?
As the proposer of this RfC, I favor capitalizing unit names as they would be capitalized if the unit name appeared mid-sentence (e.g. "The watt is a unit of power"). I observe that editors frequently capitalize the name of units which are named after people when the unit appears mid-sentence; using mid-sentence capitalization would help to reduce this error. It would be similar to the way dictionaries are written; a dictionary entry is capitalized as if it occurred mid-sentence, even though it is the first word in the entry. Jc3s5h ( talk) 20:19, 8 January 2017 (UTC)
We need a separate (new) parameter for use where a unit does not have a formal symbol. This may be noticed in the article describing something as an abbreviation (e.g. "The yard (abbreviation: yd) is an English unit of length, [...]" in Yard). SI formalizes symbols, but most traditional systems have no such mechanism/standard, and the abbreviations, while useful, should be described as such ("Abbreviation", not "Symbol") in the infobox. Failing that, it would be appropriate to delete the use of the symbol parameter from the template invocation in all those articles in which there no formally accepted symbol. I am aware that SI and ISQ do assign symbols to several of these (e.g. d (day), h (hour), min (minute), ′ and as (arcsecond), Np (neper), Sh (shannon), o (octet) and so on). — Quondum 18:21, 16 July 2017 (UTC)
|extralabel=
and |extradata=
be used for abbreviations (though display after "Named after" is not ideal). There may be multiple symbols for a unit (already supported by the template). Your idea of qualifications (possibly via footnotes) makes sense. —
Quondum 01:26, 17 July 2017 (UTC)I've just been editing
foot (unit). The abbreviation for foot is "ft", the symbol for foot is ′ (
prime). This is (almost) verbatim the opening phrase of the article, contradicting its own infobox. If I correct the infobox to say Symbol = ′
, the result is the unintelligible 1 ′ in ... is equal to .... From the discussion above, the solution is aleady obvious and seemed to have had consensus three years ago: provide the option to give an alternative word – for example, Symbol = ft|alt=abbreviation (without the bold obviously, {{
code}} and {{
xt}} can't handle the embedded pipe). So why hasn't it been done? --
John Maynard Friedman (
talk) 13:35, 27 July 2020 (UTC)
I dislike the new "official definition" fields, and propose that we remove them. This level of detail should be covered in the body of the article, not in the sidebar. What I particularly don't like is that for SI base units, the definition is an entire paragraph of text—too long and too detailed to be properly covered in a sidebar. Also, the fields "defining event" and "effective since" end up being misleading. For the SI base units, these are now set to "2018 General Conference on Weights and Measures" and "Effective since 20 May 2019", respectively. This would seem to imply that the SI base units have just been newly created. If we are going to provide a date in the sidebar, it should be the date the unit was first created, not the date when the definition was last tweaked. Really, though the sidebar is not the place to try to cover information that is this detailed and which requires context (explanation of definitions, history of creation and redefinition).-- Srleffler ( talk) 02:36, 11 February 2019 (UTC)
The field is ambiguous; since the definition of kilogram has been changed twice, should we use the date of the original definition or the date of the current definition? The /doc file was also changed recently to reflect the unjustified addition of the field, and to make other changes not consistent with the original intent. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 08:04, 29 May 2019 (UTC)
I tried adding the CGS equivalent under units4 in an article but nothing displayed, despite the description here saying up to units6 is supported. I then changed the US conversions to units_us1, so I could bump the CGS equivalent up to units3, but units_us1 doesn't display anything either. Currently, the table in the pascal article does not have room to cross-ref the barye. — kwami ( talk) 03:04, 23 October 2020 (UTC)
Since nosymbolspace
and formulaconvert
are rather cumbersome and unclear, I'll wait a little for suggestions for better names before beginning to use them.
Search links for the parameter names in wikitext:
-- wqnvlz ( talk | contribs) 00:33, 23 March 2022 (UTC)
The SI base units and the SI derived units are not themselves 2 distinct systems of units, they're both components of the SI, which is the system of units (It's in the name!). For context "Meters" has been going around setting article pages back to "SI base unit" after other people changed it to the more accurate "International System of Units" and citing the templates here as justification, so I'd like to put a stop to this at the source. If I don't get any responses here after a few days, I'll take it as tacit endorsement and do it myself, but I would prefer for it to be clear that there's community agreement on this point. Ava Eva Thornton ( talk) 04:45, 24 July 2022 (UTC)
If we agree to change the usage, that's fine with me(emphasis added). Stating that I will accept whatever consensus is reached is not saying that I "personally have no objections to changing the rules". This is an attempt to make a blanket change that contradicts the SI examples that have been in the template for more than a decade, and have been in the articles I edited for many years. If this is to become the new norm then we need to change the template documentation as well as correct these articles and any others that have this issue. So, yes, this needs to be discussed.
I'd say this discussion has run its course, and should be considered closed with consensus support for the suggestion as restated by Dondervogel 2 just above. I see one (Meters) calling for discussion, which has been had, and everyone else appears to support. An appropriate course of actions would be to first update the examples in this template's documentation accordingly, as pointed out my Meters. Once this is done, anyone should feel free to update the infobox parameter in any article accordingly. 172.82.46.195 ( talk) 17:40, 13 August 2022 (UTC)
While changing infoboxes to "Unit system = SI", Ava Eva Thornton has also removed "International System of Units" from many lead sentences (many others didn't have it anyway). I've started a discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Physics#"International System of Units" or "SI" in leads of unit articles, touching also on whether it's useful to readers to have eg "the derived unit of force" rather than "the unit of force" in the first sentence. Notifying here as this discussion was mentioned in edit summaries and participants here may indeed be interested. NebY ( talk) 13:28, 19 August 2022 (UTC)