Talk:Solar tower

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I admit my article Solar power tower was ameturish compared to the many excellent articles in Wikipedia, however this is the common name well established by the Sandia Corp tower near Barstow, California, which is not descibed at all under the heading of Solar tower. The link supplied under solar tower did not finish loading sufficiently to obtain useful information in 30 minutes, which may be the fault of my computer, but more likely means the project is out of money and won't be built in this decade, perhaps never. IMHO, the mirrors are signifcantly more cost effective and the mirror pilot plant is still producing 100 times more power than the Solar tower in Spain which was wrecked long ago in a storm.

The solar collectors for both types of tower are valnerable to storm dammage and reducing valnerability will be costly in both cases. IMHO the Austrailia power tower solar collector (a square mile plus of green house) should be built on a steep hillside (steeply sloped land is less costly and the sun angle will be more favorable) which faces between North and Northwest. The mile tall chimney likely needs to be at the top of the hill to get a proper foundation for it's great weight. It will be more difficult to find multiple suitable locations for power towers than for Solar power towers. I think both will run into diminishing returns on investment before they can be scalled to ten gigawatt hours per year put on the grid, so hundreds of each are needed to help Earth's energy problems significately. Neil

[edit] Disam

None of the entries in the article are long or detailed enough to be deemed an article. Since it is used in so many different ways, shouldn't it be a disambiguation page instead? — Frecklefoot | Talk 19:56, Mar 2, 2005 (UTC)

The uncapitalised solar tower has only one meaning AFAIK. The existing pointers to Solar Tower and solar chimney seem adequate. See below. Andrewa 01:19, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Bad naming

Solar Tower (Capital Tower) is a different article entirely from Solar tower, one is energy and another is astronomy. I will move this one to Solar Tower (Astronomy) If no one objects. --Jake11 21:14, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

I don't see the point of a move, in fact I think it would be a very bad idea. Solar Tower is a registered name for a particular developer of solar chimneys, listed on the Australian Stock Exchange. These people have been posting a great deal of promotional material to Wikipedia, but they haven't actually built anything or produced any power, just plans, diagrams, websites and other promotional material. Meanwhile, the size of these proposals gets progressively smaller, the projected start and completion dates retreat further into the future, and the size of their requests for public funding get larger, partly perhaps to pay their CEO's salary reported at $250K AUD.

On the other hand, solar tower was the established name for the astronomical aparatus long before this organisation registered the name Solar Tower. I don't see why we should give them the unrestricted use of the uncapitalised name. I think we'll just make ourselves a laughing-stock if we do. Then again, we might be in good company. Andrewa 01:15, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

As it stands now, two entirely different concepts are distinguished soley by a capital letter. I don't think this is a good idea. In the very least, we should have a neutral disambiguation in the article naming. Either a single disambiguation page or clarifications in both page names. If you have any other objections/prefrences please post so the change can be made --Berger 18:53, 6 April 2006 (UTC)
We have other pairs of articles that are only distinguished by capitalisation, such as swing time and Swing Time. Unfortunately, it's not possible to distinguish between initial capitalisations, owing to a software decision taken (for good reasons) long ago.
Do you wish to propose a policy to change these too? How about ones distinguished by only one letter, such as knit and nit?
In written English, capitalisation is contrastive, and conveys meaning. You may not think this is a good idea, but that's the way the language works.
If one of solar tower (please note, no capital, your wikilink above is grammatically in error) and Solar Tower is to be renamed, it should be Solar Tower, which in any case is proposed to merge to Solar Tower Buronga. Andrewa 06:53, 7 April 2006 (UTC)
Firstly, distinguishment of an article by a whole letter is a world of difference compared to capitals, I shouldn't even have to explain why the difference is so large, and I won't. It should be apparent. Secondly, Not everything on Wikipedia is perfect. So citing other instances of this ambigous naming practice on Wikipedia does not justify it's use here. Whether I chose to change those other instances as well is irrelevant to this dicussion and does not help prop up you're argument.
Secondly, whether it is one capital or two that is distinguishing an article is irrelevant. Users, especially casual ones, often don't think in terms of capitalisation, since all major search engines mostly ignore capitals in queries and URLs and E-mails are case-insensitive as well. We have to think about user-friendliness here, and it's much better to redirect to a more clarified name or a disambig page than to let users thing they have reached the 'right' article, when they may not have.
In any case, someone else did the changes for me and it has stood since then, so apparently others think likewise. --Jake11 18:16, 23 July 2006 (UTC)

Is there a way we can find out how many viewers coming here use the link to go to "solar updraft tower"? If most of the addresses used the link, indicating they are not interested in the astronomical term, and expected to find out about the power plant instead, then we may want to return this page to being used for the energy generator.--Flexme 01:22, 11 July 2006 (UTC)


Note that some changes have been made to the naming, and Solar Tower has been moved to Solar updraft tower.

Re the capitalisation - googling "solar tower" gives mostly references to the "Solar Tower" proposed for Australia. Mostly the references are capitalised, but "solar tower" is often used as well. Common usage of "solar tower" does seem to have changed in recent years. --Singkong2005 tc 07:57, 18 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Proposal to make Solar tower a disambiguation page

Please see Talk:Solar updraft tower/Archive 2#Proposal to make Solar tower a disambiguation page.

I posted this at Talk:Solar updraft tower as it grew out of the discussion there, but this was probably a mistake. Anyway, please follow the link and support/oppose. If you oppose, you may wish to offer an alternative suggestion for naming. --Singkong2005 tc 07:53, 18 July 2006 (UTC)

weak oppose for changing the name of this article. Main reason for opposing a name change is precedence: Solar tower has been used for the solar observatory for over a century. On the other hand, as I have argued somewhere else, Solar tower is very ambiguous: a Google search yields a zillion unrelated hits. Adding Observatory as a keyword gives much more relevant hits. So if we were to change the name of this article I would argue to change it to Solar observatory tower; nice thing about that is that it is in line with Solar Observatory Tower Meudon. Since there is already a Solar tower (disambiguation) I would either redirect Solar tower to there, or to Solar observatory tower. JdH 13:59, 20 July 2006 (UTC)
Re Solar observatory tower - as I understand Wikipedia:Naming conventions (common names), we should use the common name, which is solar tower. Then, following Wikipedia:Naming conventions (precision), we should use an appropriate disambiguation technique - the use of a dab note, or an explanatory term in brackets. So the options, in my mind, are changing it to something like Solar tower (observatory) or Solar tower (astronomy), or keeping it as Solar tower. --Singkong2005 talk 14:34, 20 July 2006 (UTC)
neutral For optimal clarity, the different contextual usages of 'solar tower' should be distinguished by parenthesized clarifications (e.g. 'solar tower (astronomy)')(since Wikipedia is not really the place to redefine terminology). However the naming we have now is not bad considering we have a visable disambiguation page and don't have two different articles distinguished by capital letters. --Jake11 18:08, 23 July 2006 (UTC)