Talk:1993 "Maize & Blue" University of Michigan Solar Car

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Reserved for discussion of the 1993 Maize & Blue University of Michigan solar car.

[edit] Discussion of Page

For ease of reference, I'm including comments posted on User_talk:fnazeeri here:

==Solar car==

Something about this being a "one year college project."

The phrase was "one year's student project". Not about solar power. Not about Solar cars. Not about the University of Michigan or its college of engineering. Not even about the competition or the team participating: One freaking year's entry from 13 years ago AND a meaninglessly trivial text dump of statistics. The former is bad enough, but why in God's name is a separate article for specifications the tiniest bit necessary?

Over 100,000 man-hours of labor and more than $2 million were invested in building the car How much time and was spent bear little relation to whether the subject is worth an article. --Calton | Talk 06:37, 1 January 2007 (UTC)

The two articles referenced have been edited so that they describe the Maize & Blue solar car which is part of the permanent collection at the Chicago Museum of Science & Industry. I would presume that if the curators deem the vehicle worthy of permanent display in their museum it would be worthy of mention on Wikipedia, but that is not my decision to make.

FN 01:10, 2 January 2007 (UTC)fnazeeri

I believe it is sufficient to have a subsection on the UMSCT page for each car, as is done currently. The page for "Maize & Blue" has barely any addditional information, instead regurgitating information from the UMSCT page. ~Gertlex 03:19, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

There are a mere 60 words on the University of Michigan Solar Car Team page, which is hardly a complete let alone thorough history of Maize & Blue. You may also want to check out the Wikipedia articles on the GM Sunraycer which is also mentioned on the General Motors website with 50 words or the Nuna article about that solar car built by Delft University. The separate article describing a museum artifact seems accepted practice on Wikipedia.

66.30.193.215 04:41, 2 January 2007 (UTC)fnazeeri

Given the importance of the energy economy these days, and the potential importance of clean energy generation for the future, it is worthwhile to have information available on some of these early projects demonstrating people driving a car using such little power. The page provides a good summary of the vehicle design, the organization of the team, as well as a description of the race. The technical detail is complete enough to understand what this group of people did, and that's satisfying and important. This vehicle is a permanent display piece at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, and definitely deserves some Wikipedia time.

--ESlimko 17:32, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

Maize & Blue was built with two purposes in mind: to compete and win Sunrayce 93 (predecessor of North American Solar Challenge) and to compete in the 1993 World Solar Challenge. It was understood by both the team and the University that once these goals had been attempted (and hopefully completed) the University of Michigan Solar Car Team would move on to the next generation project. For this reason Maize and Blue as an entity and the project and people that surround it should have a spearate space from the University of Michigan Solar Car Team. Now, I'm not trying to imply that succesfully engineering, building and racing a solar powered vehicle and winning a national championship with it is the equivalent of putting a person on the moon (though it may have seemed that way to many of the students during the wee hours of morning many a day during the project) but I would like to draw the following analogy: The following hierarchy exists in Wikipedia: NASA → Project_Apollo → Apollo 11 (space project that put the first person on the moon). Using this logic wouldn't it then follow that this hierarchy would be just as acceptable: University of Michigan → University of Michigan Solar Car Team → 1993 "Maize & Blue" University of Michigan Solar Car Team.

-- Bdelapen 21:42, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

Reasonable enough to me. I'm not going to and never was planning to submit and Article for Deletion. The car's page looks much better than when I last looked at it as well. ~Gertlex 00:44, 3 January 2007 (UTC)