Talk:Micrometer

From Academic Kids

Amazing stuff. How come neither maveric149 nor eclecticology (seemingly busy, high profile editors here) managed not to notice that a micrometer = micrometre = 1/1 000 000 metres, not 1/1000, and that the symbol isn't µ it's µm? Especially since the page micrometre gives the correct info, making it trivial to check the data.

Some reference work this is. --Anon

Yes, it was caught by you - such is the wiki way. There is a million things to do around here and you can't expect any one person to catch them all. --maveric149

But I might reasonably expect the editor of a page to do even the most trival fact-checking while doing that one edit ot that one page, mightn't I? But then you seem to think its a good idea to duplicate the definition of micrometre. Duplication of data encourages errors. Why not just leave the link to micrometre?

In Wikipedia, there are no editors for a page - everybody is an editor. And since there's so many page, not everybody will read everything. And so there are a lot of errors. But, given enough editors, all of these errors will be found - you just found one, so good job. The reason why there's two different pages is probably because of the measuring device, which is never called a micrometre. Because many Americans may type micrometre when looking for it, there should at least be a reference on this page. And since the article which is to be referred to is so short, it's convenient to included that information here as well. But it is prone to errors, yes. jheijmans

I use "editor" here to mean the person editing a given page at any given time. The history shows that the two users I name above between them created and edited the page into the state it was in when first I saw it. While those acts of editing were going on, the errors were introduced. Since there was a link to the page with the correct info provided, I can only conclude that no effort was put into checking what had been placed on the page, even while knowing that it duplicated info carried on another page. Those users can't claim that this page is one of thousands that they haven't got round to yet, they wrote it in the first place. maveric149 also seems to have taken ownership of the page, undoing the changes to it I made.

While it is a fine idea to expect this resourse to increase in quality through collaborative review, it seems negligent, and an insult to the actual users of a reference work (those who turn to it for information, not the writers of it) to use the expectation of that review as a reason to not bother doing even the simplest, quickest check on new content. As clearly didn't happen in this case.

I jumped in on this one because I happened to notice that both articles exist, then made the effort to see which was the older so as to apply the generally accepted rule on American vs. British spellings. It's not unusual, Anon, for someone fixing one problem to completely fail to see another. When I do see an obvious error of the type you indicate I find it far more satisfying to fix it than to whine about it. I'm confident that Maveric149 does the same. Try it sometime! -- Eclecticology, Friday, June 7, 2002

So then, what's your problem. Some editors made a mistake. And the mistake may have easily been prevented. But everybody makes mistakes - you too. And all the other reference works you are using. Maybe not with micrometer, but probably with other entries. And those reference works usually have been read by several editors to check for errors - so does this one. Only, everything is directly available to the public, so errors may remain until they are correct. As a user of Wikipedia, you have to know that. If you can't live with it, don't use Wikipedia. But if you want to use it and if you find such an error, point it out or - even beter - correct it. That's what this project is about. And if the error made seems to be made on purpose, you can point that out, and discuss it with the editors. But a simple error such as this doesn't deserve this much talking. It just happens. jheijmans