User:Jrtuenge
Greetings from your friendly neighborhood web crawler. You may notice in my Wikipedia edits some recurring themes:
- making obscure connections
- making corrections (with supporting evidence)
- aiming for compendious coverage (often streamlining)
- fussing over terminology
A quick shout-out to another Wikipedia editor:
I'm not an expert Wikipedia editor, but want to share something others might find helpful: To avoid becoming discouraged and/or inappropriately discouraging others, I think it's best to embrace the crowd-sourced nature of Wikipedia. Don't try to curate a single page to your personal liking. Instead, try to leave bread crumbs for others to follow -- bits of supported information that will hopefully prompt other editors to help harmonize associated content.
Terminology
[edit]I strive to avoid ambiguity, and encourage others to do the same. I think it's really unfortunate when words lose specificity due to conflicting use, which often occurs out of ignorance and/or sloppiness. For example, it should go without saying that an orange should only be described as red if it's red in color; otherwise, the words for these different colors become interchangeable and we have to provide additional explanation (e.g., orange like billiard ball 5, red like billiard ball 3). For this reason, we should always strive to preserve or increase the precision of words. In the worst-case scenario, a word becomes a contronym, and its intended meaning cannot be determined without unambiguous context.
That said, we should recognize that some words are more precise than others. I believe Wikipedia provides a great medium for comparing, rather than establishing, definitions for various terms. When terminology is confusing, we can use Wikipedia to help clear things up, perhaps directing readers toward well-defined terms and away from ambiguous alternatives. For example, the meaning of "precision" is itself, in the context of accuracy (and trueness), established in ISO 5725-1:1994. [1] Tables can help to illustrate overlapping usage.
| Meaning | Orbit | Revolve | Roll | Rotate | Spin |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| across the floor (e.g., ball) | X | ||||
| about own axis (e.g., Earth) | X | X | X | X | |
| about other axis (e.g., Earth around Sun) | X | X | X | ? |
We should look to credible dictionaries (e.g., Merriam-Webster in the U.S.) for non-technical terms, and to standards for technical terms. For example, related terms are often conflated in the lighting domain (e.g., luminosity, brightness, luminance). Standard lighting terminology can be found on the following websites:
The above standard definitions can then be compared with non-standard definitions, for example those found in textbooks and peer-reviewed journal papers:
Currently, standards are cited in Wikipedia using the template (WP:CT) for books.
NOTE
[edit]My opinions expressed here are only my own; they do not represent the positions of my employer, its clients, or my place of work.
REFERENCES
[edit]- ^ ISO TC 69 SC 6 (1994). ISO 5725-1:1994(en), Accuracy (trueness and precision) of measurement methods and results — Part 1: General principles and definitions. International Organization for Standardization.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)