User talk:Oilpanhands

Hands get full of oil guess what I do?

Engine displacement units

Greetings, Oilpanhands. Please do not use CID for engine displacement, and especially do not change existing engine displacements expressed in in³ to CID. Per the applicable unit conventions, in Wikipedia's automotive articles we use in³ for this purpose. My personal preference is for CID, but for valid encyclopædic reasons, the convention is in³. If you feel this convention is in error, and can provide valid reasons (not just "I don't like in³") why CID should be the convention, please join the linked discussion and state your case; if consensus develops to allow or require CID, then the convention will be changed. Unless that happens, please adhere to the present convention and use in³. Thanks! —Scheinwerfermann (talk) 18:42, 15 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

OK, Cool. Thanks for the links. The conventions are blatantly wrong in respects to the automotive community. And to me, in³ jumps out of the page and screams "ERROR". It's like seeing car spelled "kar". I will formulate my argument and respond at those links. Oilpanhands (talk) 16:54, 16 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Talk page hierarchy/indenting

Hello, Oilpanhands. Will you please pay slightly more attention to indenting on talk pages? Beyond a level-four indent (four colons), the text becomes narrow, gets hard to read, and takes up a lot of vertical space. If there are no colons before the first characters of the paragraphs you're responding to, please use one. If one, please use two. If two, please use three. If three, please use four. If four, please use none. When you edit the page, put together your text like this-

Comment text from an editor

:Comment text from a second editor

::Comment text from a third editor

:::Comment text from a fourth editor

::::Comment text from a fifth editor

Comment text from a sixth editor

:Comment text from a seventh editor

::And so on

:::And so forth

::::Et cetera

Lather, rinse, repeat

Thanks, —Scheinwerfermann (talk) 01:07, 15 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I usually do add one more :, but it has been a very long and hard day and not paying enough attention to something like that is definitely par-for-the-course for today.

Displacement

The second bullet is correct in concept but it's just missing something...

Many engines are designated or named based on their displacement; but not always. Where conflict exists between the actual and marketed displacement of an engine, we treat the marketed displacement as a part of the engine's designation or name, placing it in italics or boldface as appropriate, and we also express the actual displacement. Example: The Ford 5.0 Windsor 4942 cc (302 cu in) engine

Some slight changes; probably could be neater/clearer. Actual displacement would be cc and nominal displacement would be litres, eh?

Let me sleep on it; so to speak and maybe I'll have something clearer or not tomorrow. Oilpanhands (talk) 01:47, 15 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Many engines are designated or named based on their displacement; but not always. Where conflict exists between the actual and marketed displacement of an engine, we treat the marketed displacement as a part of the engine's designation or name, placing it in italics or boldface as appropriate, and we also express the actual (if known) or nominal displacement. Example: The Ford 5.0 Windsor 4942 cc (302 cu in) engine. Similarly, the Chevy Turbo-Jet 400 402 cu in (6.6 L) engine...

A couple of things that stuck out to me: the word "marketed" seemed more appropriate and if one knows the actual or published displacement in cubic centimetres, then it should be used. If not known use the nominal measurement of litres. Any rewording of that or anyway that you feel it would be improved is fine by me. What do you think? Oilpanhands (talk) 16:49, 15 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I think you've got some good ideas and some that need further thought. This really isn't the best place for us to be discussing the matter. We should be doing it here, but because the discussion is already underway over here, that's where we should carry it on and finish it up. Maybe we can hash over some of the rougher details here, then bring a finished proposal over to the existing discussion for (hopefully) quick consensus and adoption.

I don't think the first sentence you added is necessary; we need to be careful of making the convention notes so long nobody reads (and therefore nobody adheres to) them. The sentence you added is wholly implied by the now-second sentence, which starts "Where conflict exists...". The situation you describe in your new first sentence is the only reason why the condition described in the second sentence exists, so there's no reason to have that new first sentence in there.

"Marketed" vs. "Advertised"...h'mm. I'm not sure it makes a huge difference, but I do think "advertised" is more precisely what we mean here. "Marketing" is a buzzword that encompasses advertising and a lot of other activities, too, and can reasonably be taken to mean "put on the market". In that case, ambiguity arises because we are essentially saying some cars were put on the market with a 5.0 L engine but these cars were actually put on the market with a 4.9 L engine. On the other hand, if we say those cars were advertised as having a 5.0 L engine, it leaves no room for doubt as to what is meant.

I like the way your examples are formatted. I agree that CCs will be the most precisely illustrative choice of metric units, but there may be some benefit in also giving the actual, properly-rounded litre displacement: the Ford 5.0 Windsor 4942 cc (4.9 L, 302 cu in) engine. What do you think?

As for the question of actual vs. nominal displacement, I think here again we need to be careful not to create new ambiguity in our efforts to clean up existing lack of clarity. "Nominal" in this context can reasonably be taken to be synonymous with what we have already called "advertised" and/or "marketed". Enough data exists on every engine we could conceivably write about here that there will practically never be a case of unknown actual engine displacement. There'll be cases where nobody's yet looked up the actual bore and stroke in a reliable source, but that's not a data-unavailable problem, it's a citation-needed matter, and I think it should be treated as such. —Scheinwerfermann (talk) 23:39, 15 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I don't have any objects to most of your points. They were just ideas that I threw out there and figured they were best "ironed out" off the main pages to spare some of the other editors the boring details. I'm still not sure about the marketed vs. advertised, but I'll defer to you on that. I think the extra litre displacement is well extra and even the most metric illiterate can kind of conclude what the rounding would be. That being said, I wouldn't remove such an addition if I came across it; especially considering that we see x.x L (xxxx cc, xxx cu in) a lot anyway. I think that the two samples I gave can lead editors in a good direction, but here's your bullet mostly intact.

Where conflict exists between the actual and advertised displacement of an engine, we treat the advertised displacement as a part of the engine's designation or name, placing it in italics or boldface as appropriate, and we also express the actual displacement. Example: The Ford 5.0 Windsor 4.9 L (4942 cc, 302 cu in) engine. Similarly, the Chevy Turbo-Jet 400 402 cu in (6.6 L) engine...

What says you, shall we place this on the convention? Oilpanhands (talk) 01:18, 16 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Well, if it were up to me/us, I'd say yes. But we need to present it and see what others think (consensus). So yeah, please do put it in the existing discussion. I suspect it'll attain consensus in a hurry and we can put the whole engine displacement convention to bed. —Scheinwerfermann (talk) 04:59, 16 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I placed the bullets on the WP:CARS talk page. I don't foresee any objections. If everything is ok, can you place them on the convention page? I have to go back to Canada this weekend to take care of family business and therefore be unable to address any questions/concerns that someone else may have. Thanks Oilpanhands (talk) 10:57, 16 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Can do; let's see if there are any objections. —Scheinwerfermann (talk) 15:29, 16 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Displacement copyedits

Hi, OPH. Good intent with your recent engine displacement copyedits, but please when you find incorrect displacement expressions, don't just copyedit the raw text. Rather, insert the applicable templates. Template:Auto L, Template:Auto Lrev, Template:Auto CID, Template:Auto in3cm3, Template:Auto cm3in3, various iterations of Template:convert, etc., as appropriate to the specific instance. This maximises the uniformity of displacement expression across articles, maximises the conformity of those expressions with the applicable conventions, and if in the future those conventions should change, means a lot less work to fix the affected articles. Thanks! Oh, and you may want to take a look at this for guidelines on how to handle the ever-sticky Ford "5.0" issue. —Scheinwerfermann (talk) 17:15, 2 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It's all a matter of time and I could only quickly do the "baby steps" of searching for the incorrect displacements and that took some time in & of itself. If I'm reading an article start to finish I use the templates, I like {{auto cc}} & {{auto Lrev}}. Oilpanhands (talk) 21:37, 2 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

{{nowrap

Hi, could you please try to not use nowrap in automobile infobox, the idea is to make the text to suit for the box, not to enlarge the box to fit more text. --Typ932 ^T·C 14:44, 7 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

okOilpanhands (talk) 16:00, 9 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

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