Talk:Fields of engineering

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

what is engineering education?what are its different fields?

[edit] Merge proposal

This page needs to be merged into the Engineering article. All engineering fields need to be listed there, no just a chosen few to avoid the appearance of bias.—The preceding unsigned comment was added by FactsAndFigures (talk • contribs) .

I disagree. This list is quite long, and would dominate the Engineering article. Standard practice on Wikipedia is to break out excessively long sections into separate articles, and provide some summary information in articles that reference the breakout article. The current engineering article includes a summary in the form of a list of what the NSPE considers the "major branches" of engineering (alternative references welcome, but I think a reference of some kind is needed to avoid arguments about which branches should appear in the summary list), and directs readers to this article for a complete listing. --Allan McInnes (talk) 17:46, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

No way that 'sanitation engineering' is a "more major" branch of engineering than many on the 'fields' list, for example. And it is part of civil engineering anyway. NSPE isn't exactly an unbiased source, and it just depended upon who was in the room, online, etc. at the time when that list was drawn up.

Without a merger, a solution would be to delete the short list from the engineering article and refer readers to the fields list. FactsAndFigures 20:45, 15 October 2006 (UTC)FactsAndFigures 15 October 2006

I admit that I was also somewhat surprised by the presence of "sanitation engineering" on the NSPE list. It's your (and my) opinion that sanitation engineering isn't really "major". It's the opinion of the NSPE that sanitation engineering is "major". The difference is that inserting our opinions into Wikipedia counts as original research (not allowed), while including NSPE's opinion counts as providing verifiable information. Since the lead-in to the list explicitly says "According to the NSPE..." I don't see a problem including such a list. Again, if you would like to provide an alternative reference, I'd be happy to use that instead. Perhaps the Bureau of Labor Statistics would provide a more "unbiased" viewpoint. Alternatively, I'd be more than happy to see the list deleted entirely. --Allan McInnes (talk) 05:01, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

I think I've solved it -- see the engineering article. As such, I've deleted the merger tag. FactsAndFigures 16:10, 21 October 2006 (UTC)