Talk:Orders of magnitude (chain page names)

(this is archived discussion from Talk:Orders of magnitude that came to a resolved conclusion)

Exponential notation in page names

I think I might be guilty of the 1e-15 notation, so I'd better give a comment. The reason that I started to name pages like that is because there were pages named 100000000km2 and it was very hard for me to count all those zeros. Yes, introducing commas might have solved the same problem. Furthermore, however, km2 (for square kilometres) might be useful for the sizes of countries, but not for the sizes of paper sheets, so it was clear that a consistent system that spanned the entire range of sizes could not be based on km2. One idea, as has been mentioned here, is to use different units for different parts of the spectrum, but this makes knowing/guessing the page name for a given size even harder than the "e" notation. I think that most Wikipedia contributors restrict their contributions to their own field of speciality (religion, science fiction literature, physics, medieval music, ...) and that those who find joy in arranging these order of magnitude pages will know the "e" notation. Those who merely read these pages, really need not worry about the page names. I think it shows now that the expansion of this system into m3, kg, J, s, and perhaps other units proves that it is useful. However, I'm not stopping anybody from renaming the pages or creating redirect aliases. I have no hard feelings about this. I think this was a funny game, an interesting new invention. It wasn't there until somebody invented it, and nobody told us how to do. I'm a strong believer in the try-watch-learn-redo approach. The current system is a try.--LA2, November 27, 2001.

The use of the lowercase "e" in these entries is completely wrong. Lowercase "e" is the notation of the natural logarithm -- Capital "E" is the correct shorthand used in scientific notation to denote the × 10^ in n × 10^y. I will move these to the correct capitalization in the next few days unless somebody can convince me that this is not a good idea. --mav

Go for it. I'll put links back to metre from each 1e-11 m-type page -- Tarquin 09:13 Aug 5, 2002 (PDT)

OK, I have fixed all the links and edit links and will be working on that version at Orders of magnitude/Temp. --mav

I've just noticed that --April uses lowercase e on her Simple Science wiki: http://www.renaissoft.com/april/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Exponential_Notation

Maybe that is where this came from. Anyway capital "E" is far better even if some people do use lowercase "e" for this; otherwise there is confusion as to whether e is a shorthand for × 10ⁿ or if the e stands for e which is the base to the natural logarithm. In either case, the lack of spaces between the characters is just plain wrong no matter what and m3 is not nearly as clear as m³. --mav

Aha, I've found your evil hidden plot, Mav! Ahem. I was under the impression that including spaces was incorrect. Certainly it looks very very wrong to my eyes. --Brion

Looks fine to me -- is there a ref. for how this is supposed to be done? I've just been expanding on the example Axel placed in scientific notation (which conforms to the way I've always seen the shorthand notation). --mav

I've never seen em with spaces. My experience of E-notation is overwhelmingly no spaces, and usually with an explicit + sign for positive numbers. I've been looking for some kind of official standard either way, all I can find is notes about number formatting functions in computer languages and spreadsseets (invariably without spaces), or notes for people taking standardized tests that they should not use spaces in their scientific notation. Proper scientific notation, of course, would use superscripts, but we can't put those in titles. --Brion

Hm. Knowing that others do not use spaces would have been useful info back when I started this process. However its a bit late now. Besides, not having the spaces doesn't work at all for me for negative exponents; 1E-10 m looks way too crowded; gives the impression that "E" is a variable and that "-" indicates subtraction. What do you think? --mav

Had I known you were going to blindly rename a gazillion pages on dubious grounds, I would have squealed earlier. ;) 1E-10 m looks fairly normal, though 1e-10 m looks even better. *cough cough* On the other hand, 1 E -10 m looks... bizarre. It looks like there were supposed to be more characters and somebody accidentally deleted them. --Brion

As was stated before the lowerecase e is wrong. Thus the change. Everything else really is more of a matter of personal taste. I will stop moving additional entries for a while and concentrate on improving the content. --mav

[[10E^-10]]? Guess not. It would be interesting to see how that parsed in a browser's location bar.... --KQ

If we could use superscripts, we'd just use [[1×10^-10]]... --Brion

I frequently miss the obvious. --KQ

Me too! We should invite it over more often. --Brion

That's a good one. --KQ

I just asked Axel to weigh-in on the issue here. If Axel agrees with Brion that the spaces should go then I move the articles myself and fix the links. --mav

Well, so much pressure! I definitely like E better than e, mainly because most calculators use E, and everybody else uses exponential notation anyway. Regarding the space issue I don't have strong opinions and could live with both solutions, but If I were completely free to choose, I'd tend towards writing them without spaces. AxelBoldt

I just found this from Axel's talk page. I use a lowercase letter, no spaces, and no plus sign. (Does that mean that I liked them how they were originally?) I don't see any grounds for calling any convention wrong; they're all just half assed attempts to do without superscripts, and we should have every likely format, with redirects. — Toby 16:03 Aug 21, 2002 (PDT)

Hm. What to do. Over half of the articles and links are in the [1 E n unit] format. It also appears that there are several valid ways to express this notation which includes the now dominant form. Since Axel doesn't think the spaces should be removed (only has a highly qualified preference) I say that I should continue with the format I was working with (this represents far less work). That is unless somebody feels strongly enough about the no space notation to help with the moving. --mav

I don't think it matters so much what the article title is, since I find them all acceptable. My big deal is that redirects should be made for all of the notations that have been tried in the past (and are thus likely to be tried in the future). I'll help with that; let me know what I should do. — Toby 21:02 Aug 22, 2002 (PDT)

That'll be messy. We should agree on one format for these, and edit links to be in that format as and when we find them: consistency. A page on dates and numbers in the wikipedia:Manual of Style, maybe? -- Tarquin

Messy though it may be, I think that it (bunches of redirects) is necessary if we want Wikipedia to work proprerly. Casual users won't read Wikipedia:Manual of Style first and may not notice the subtle difference (as opposed to naming conventions about, say, royalty, which aren't very subtle). This certainly doesn't mean that we can't also edit links when we find them, to help copycats do it right the first time. We should use every tool that we have available. — Toby 11:34 Aug 24, 2002 (PDT)

I think Tarquin just wanted to have consistency in what we name each order of mag main article. I for one will make sure redirects exist for reasonable capital E spacing variants (the only redirects that I will maintain for the lowercase variants are the old page titles -- the only reason is for backwards compatibility for external search engines and visitors who may have bookmarked the pages). However I will also change each and every current link to the orders of mag articles to point directly to whatever we decide is the best syntax (see below). --mav

I may have found a way to do this that will satify everyone: Why not have a space after the first number and no space after the E. For example; 1 E4 m. Compare this to 1E4 m and 1 E 4 m Here is an example for negative values; 1 E-13 m. Compared with 1E-13 m and 1 E -13 m. I for one actually prefer the newer syntax becuase it is nicely balanced and easy to read. Brion is right, having spaces between everything is distracting and looks odd -- this new syntax look much better to me. --mav

I'm reasonably satisfied with the negatives, but now the positives look unbalanced. :) I'd recommend considering [[1 E+4 m]], but +s don't work in titles. (Probably hearkens back to the days of raw URLs, since a + is a special character in a URL; however this can be fixed with escaping, so I suspect it could be changed.) But if nobody likes that enough to fix the software, go ahead with your plan. --Brion

Just for reference (stuff got lost a bit in the refactoring of all this talk), the final consensus is: "1 E2 {unit symbol}" and "1 E-2 {unit symbol}". For example: "1 E20 m" and "1 E-20 m". I plan on doing some grunt work bit by bit. I'll set up a template too. -- Tarquin 21:04 Sep 9, 2002 (UTC)

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Mav's evil suggestion

Evil question; Would the syntax E11 m be better? That way one could simply say that 1 AU is equal to 150 E11 m. Yes, I know this is ultra evil but I just thought of it. At this point I guess I will have to settle for redirects since so much work has been done moving these articles around twice already. :) --mav

... yes, that's ultra evil. But I don't think many readers will understand what "150 E11 m" means in the text. I'm tempted to say "sure, we'll combine it with an effort to convert all the floating tables to full-width." ... ;-) -- Tarquin

Not to add evilness on top of evilness, but isn't 1 E11 m just one of E11 whole number values within the E11 order of magnitude range? I'm starting to get a bad feeling about the "1 E" syntax and I volunteer to spend an entire day fixing this myself but I won't do so unless you agree that it would be a logical thing to do. Otherwise I will just make a bunch of redirects (But I have no proplem with spending the time to fix this if it is in fact best for the articles). But I do think we should have the least ambiguous and most informative syntax as the place where the articles reside. Again, I am sorry for the evilness of this, but this has been something that has been confusing me ever since I first saw these pages back in Feb '02. Until yesterday I couldn't put my finger on exactly why the syntax was confusing me other than the obviously ambiguous lowercase "e". I think I have already mentioned that I have a math dyslexia. Unless numbers and equations are very clear I get lost. The E11 m syntax just seems to be the most logical and easy to work with to me. What do you think? --mav

This is one to ponder... I'm innumerate so between us we're maybe not best suited to working on these pages. (seriously. within 6 months of starting my maths degree I had clean forgotten my multiplication tables: being a mathematician, the only numbers I ever need are 0, 1, e, pi and infinity.) I've been unsure about the "1 E" too. Another point is that "1 E11" is numbers from 1E11 to 1E12, not including the 12, but I think we really don't want to start thinking of "1 E11 m - 1 E12 m", it'll be difficult to work with, and besides, thinking about it, the adding of an extra digit is the obvious cut-off point, and that's what we currently have -- so scratch that particular can of worms before we even open it.

Removing the "1" would allow "transparent" links in pages if we wanted them, like "138 E13 m" -- do we want those? Some extreme siszes maybe, but for everyday stuff like the surface area of Lake Titicaca, it's best to use SI multiples like MegaWatt, Hectare, etc.

The other point you raise is a clean, clear page title. I agree, the "1" bugs me in some way I can't quantify. I think we need to hassle the scientist Wikipedians who actually use this notation in real life (again). -- Tarquin

Yeah, you are probably right about having to bug Axel and crew again (their eyes are going to role, I know it). Since I'm not working as a real scientist right now I can't say I use the E or even standard scientific/engineering notation in real life but I have been using it in the elements articles. In fact I have been using the E notation often lately since doing so saves a lot of horizontal space (the element tables are mostly in SI so use the same standard units we are using here). The more I think about it the more I like the E11 m notation. Most importantly I can see myself easily using this in many articles (granted, most of the time it will be sublinked under prefixed units like kilometers, but having the option of creating direct free-links where appropriate is nice). If I only thought of this a month ago. Fixing all these pages twice already was a great deal of work, but simply removing a "1" and a space from each shouldn't take me nearly as much time as it took both of us to do the previous conversions. --mav

Slight problem: E1, E2 are already redirects, and one possible plan was to do a chain of dimensionless numbers. (There's also an EEC thing called the E111, but I don't think it exists anymore.) I think we should wait a while to get all the sciency wikipedians' opinions. -- Tarquin 23:42 Oct 6, 2002 (UTC)

Waiting to form consensus seems to be the best thing to do -- we aren't the only ones that will be using these articles. Since I don't even pretend to be a mathematician I'm not sure what the value would be about having dimensionless number articles. What more can you say about E12 other than it is a range of numbers from 1,000,000,000,000 and 999,999,999,999,999.9999.....? The redirect examples are just cases of disambiguation. In my opinion E1 and E2 are way too ambiguous for their current purpose and can be taken over by us if we place disambiguation blocks at the bottom of the resulting orders of mag articles (fixing the current links of course). --mav

OK I see. Number of human hairs type of thing. Yes that would be neat. --mav

Since there is talk about renaming the articles again, here are my thoughts: pretty much everything can be accomplished with redirects, except for the actually displayed title of the article. So that one should be as descriptive as possible. In that light, I think "E10 m" is worse than "1 E10 m", but both are pretty bad. The optimal title would be "Lengths between 1 E10 m and 1 E11 m". That would explain it completely. You'd link to it via redirects such as "E10 m" or "1e10 m" or what have you.

Oh, and one thing about the "E10" notation: a link such as 53 E10 m is not correct, since we want to link to "E11 m" in that situation. And readers have probably more trouble with the E's than with powers of 10. AxelBoldt 04:46 Oct 7, 2002 (UTC)

Lengths between 1 E10 m and 1 E11 m is a bit wordy but this is the least ambiguous title. Howver, since this is a long name I don't forsee that systax being linked directly much (except from unit articles). Redirects should work fine in most cases. I will try to think of something better than your idea and if that isn't successful then I can start moving the articles and fixing any double redirects. Hopefully we've got this right this time. --mav

You could at least shorten the words a bit. Say Lengths from 1E10 to 1E11 m, or even Lengths 1E10 - 1E11 m?

What was it about that can of worms that didn't say "don't go there"? *sigh* It's maybe clearer to call them "Lengths from A to B", but it's more technically correct to say "1E1 m", since the way the system works is up from a new power of ten. Axel's absolutely right to correct me: "53 E10 m" is incorrect. You can only use numbers from 1 up to 9.9999 for each slice, so I think it makes sense to name the page after the base number. I'm feeling terribly ambivalent about it now. Wish I hadn't brought it up! (BTW, I like Lengths 1E10 - 1E11 m if we do go for that style) -- Tarquin

Lengths from 1E10 to 1E11 m would be fine with me; Lengths 1E10 - 1E11 m seems a little less self-evident, and since nobody will use these links directly anyway, a bit of wordiness in the interest of clarity cannot hurt. After all, the title of the article is what Google and our search engine indexes and displays. AxelBoldt 18:42 Oct 8, 2002 (UTC)

Lengths from 1E10 to 1E11 m gets my vote too. Not too wordy and not too vague. --mav 19:04 Oct 8, 2002 (UTC)

Actually I think the current page titles are fine. They could still be moved to Lengths from 1E10 to 1E11 m format but I now don't think this is that important given the amount of work involved. If however, double redirects could get automatically fixed then a move might be in order if somebody is so inclined to do so. We should go live with what we have now, me thinks. --mav