Template talk:Infobox unit

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Confusing template!!

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:

• Standard: here means "What unit system is this a part of?" That's a very unusual and unexpected definition for the word "standard". I suggest changing to Unit system:

• Quantity here means "What sort of physical quantity does this measure?" (mass, charge, force, etc.). 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 suggest changing to Unit of... or Measures... or something like that.

• Expressed in looks like an informational item, with the entry "1 C =", which is completely confusing on both ends. Actually expressed in is a heading for the next few left-column items, and "1 C =" is a heading for the next few right-column items! Therefore the formatting is wrong. It needs to look like a heading and be labeled much more clearly. I tried something on the right but I'm not quite sure what's best.

Here's my humble attempt on the right -->

What do y'all think? Thanks! :-) --Steve (talk) 02:10, 26 October 2010 (UTC)

"Quantity" vs "Unit of ...", again

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)

Deleting "Dimension" parameter

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)

"Name" should be optional

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)

That's a valid point about the redundancy, but this is more an issue of consistency: all infoboxes on wikipedia, to my knowledge, begin with a "Name" parameter, and 99% of the time this is identical to the article's name. The whole point of infoboxes is to display basic information in a standardized format, and this includes the name. One potential benefit of this standardization is to facilitate machine-readability of infobox content. In light of this, I'm returning the name to a "semi-mandatory" property: it needn't be provided explicitly except for those rare cases where it does differ from the article's name. This is consistent with other infoboxes. If you or others believe that this is a bad design practice, I believe it should be raised and changed at a more general level rather than this one particular infobox. Xiaphias (talk) 18:24, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

RfC: capitalization rule for name parameter

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")?

Unit name capitalization discussion

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)

I understand your point about the added clarity that it would add to use lower case, but it would be different from the rest of Wikipedia. Infoboxes and article titles should start with capital letters except in the rare examples where a proper noun is lower case (e.g. iPod). I think framing the first sentence so that the word is not capitalized as at Watt "The watt (symbol: W) is ..." is enough clarification.  SchreiberBike | ⌨  20:38, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

Strongly agree with proposal. Use mid-sentence capitalization in all situations except for the first word in a sentence. Dondervogel 2 (talk) 20:45, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

• lowercase like k.d. lang (unless the unit itself is capitalized). EEng 21:22, 8 January 2017 (UTC)
  • But not all unit names are lowercase in mid-sentence; several begin with capital letters.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  16:52, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

Actually, with a very few exceptions (none of which I can think of at the moment) unit names all start with lowercase, though some unit symbols start with a capital. I know that sounds backwards, but it's true. EEng 17:11, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

EEng is correct. There are not many exceptions to this nearly universal rule. The only example I can think of myself is the Rayl. Dondervogel 2 (talk) 11:05, 11 January 2017 (UTC)

• title case (capitalized) like we do for everything else, although I don't feel very strongly about this one. Kendall-K1 (talk) 22:53, 8 January 2017 (UTC)
• Use the same case that would be used in mid-sentence, otherwise the infobox will be misleading and confusing for every single case of units that don't normally begin with a capital.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  16:52, 10 January 2017 (UTC)
• Initial cap like all other infobox titles/headings. The box with lowercase watt at https://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Watt looks distinctly wrong. Everyone knows that we use "sentence case" (first word capitalized) in titles and headings, of things that might be lowercase in a sentence; there's no compelling case for this particular kind of topic to have its own rule. Alternatively, use mid-sentence case for ALL topics, not just units, with the same logic as the original proposal. Dicklyon (talk) 18:07, 10 January 2017 (UTC)