Wikipedia:WikiProject Optics

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This Wikipedia page is currently inactive and is retained primarily for historical interest. A historical page usually is one that is no longer maintained or no longer relevant, or one for which consensus is unclear. If you want to revive discussion regarding the subject, you should seek broader input via a forum such as the proposals page of the village pump.

This WikiProject is believed to be inactive. If you are not currently a member of the project, please consider joining it to help. Feel free to remove this tag if activity resumes or if this tag was placed in error.

This is a wikiproject designed for the purpose of expanding, referencing and making more readable, the optics articles within the wikipedia. While optics falls under the scope of Wikiproject Physics, it's still an extremely expansive topic of great importance.

While optics can be a formula- and algebraically-heavy subject, it's always important to reference things to make sure that they are correct, and to allow us to make the wikipedia on the whole into a more credible source of information than it is. Let's not give those idiots at Encyclopedia Britannica a reason to try and badmouth us by neglecting to reference all of our work thoroughly.

[edit] Active Members

[edit] Readability

The most important thing about an encyclopedia article is that it does not discriminate against fields of endeavour, or against people with different intelligence or knowledge levels. This means that you need to add the information as it is in a book, or in an encyclopedic style, but you also need to make it easy for people to pick up the article and read it from beginning to end.

This doesn't mean that the language has to be "toned" or "dumbed" down, it just means that terms and other things need to be expanded or explained within the sentence to make it clear what the concept is – make the whole article explained within itself, rather than use 5 or 6 concepts a user has to then read fully before being able to understand the article. The concepts don't need to be super-explained, but explained within context. For example:

Avoid:

Instead:

The latter is more readable, mainly because we assume that a user reading the page knows nothing about optics, but has some knowledge of waves and particulate matter.

Now, the golden rule.

It's important to define terms initially, because you must explain the main concepts within that particular part of the topic in order to continue the other paragraphs using the same terms without definitions.

For example:

This is all true, but it makes it difficult to pick up on what's going on if you dont know what some terms mean -- in this paragraph, the terms of "rectilinear", "impingement" and "propogation" within this context. So, let's see how we can fix it...

[edit] Recap

1. Don't type paragraphs as if you're trying to teach someone a concept. This includes things like "imagine..." or "think about", or "consider".
2. Make sure you explain your terms and conditions before you explain a concept, or explain them within the context of the topic.
3. Reference all work you add in!