User:Ytrottier
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Wikipedia:Babel | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
|||||||||
| Search user languages | |||||||||
|
||
|
Contents |
[edit] About
I am an engineer with an MIT degree and 10 years of practical experience. My first priority is to maintain the accuracy of engineering pages, but sometimes I have tidbits to add to other topics. My proudest achievements so far are
- vacuum and related pages
- Euler-Bernoulli beam equation
- Anodizing
- Pipe (material) and Nominal Pipe Size
I dreamed for years of writing some kind of searchable electronic document to house my key technical knowledge - just for my own use. Now that other people are helping me in this project, (and I hope I'm helping them,) it's become a lot more worthwhile. I'm also excited by the potential to lower the costs of education everywheres in the world.
My first official edit was on June 5th, 2005, but I was contributing anonymously a few months before that. I was at Wikimania 2006 and had a great time. I can't afford to spend much time on here, but the edit wars have never really hurt my enthusiasm.
Yannick Trottier
[edit] Soapbox
Wikiality according to Yannick:
[edit] Measurement Units
Several editors have disputed my use of U.S. customary units, (Often incorrectly called Imperial units,) so I am giving my general position statement on this here. Wikipedia tends to follow SI units, and there are very good reasons for that. I try to do the same wherever it makes sense. However, our role should be to document reality, and the real world still uses a lot of legacy tools, parts, etc. with non-SI units. This is not just US bias, either, this is a worldwide problem. For example, the most commonly used unit of vacuum worldwide is the Torr, even though it's a stupid unit that should be replaced with the Pascal. And when Europe wrote its standard pipe sizes, they just copied the American pseudo-inch sizes exactly and just renamed them with pseudo-millimetre names. But to make things worse they used a conversion factor of 25, not 25.4, so for example DN 500 pipe has an OD of 508 millimetres. (20 inches)
2X4 beams, milliTorr pumps and DN 500 pipe are not going away anytime soon. Too much money has been invested in building their production lines, and industry will not bow to SI pressure from Wikipedia. Our readers will encounter those legacy units when they try to apply their new knowledge, and our articles should prepare them for that. That's why I use legacy units when writing about topics that use those units in the real world, and I get into edit wars to protect them. Deleting legacy units that are still in use makes an article less useful, not more universal.
If you're disappointed that the superior SI system is again falling victim to resistance to change, I sympathize. I'd like to see a fully metric world too, and I think Wikipedia can help. We can use dual units, adding SI conversions to every legacy value we find, and maybe even giving the SI values priority. But we should not sabotage articles in the name of the SI ideology.
To check on guidance for the use of measurement units, see Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers). To see what other Wikipedians think of this debate, see Wikipedia:Measurements Debate.
[edit] Pop Culture
It bothers me that Wikipedia is turning more and more into a pop culture encyclopedia, instead of a real reference that people can go to for information. It seems to be going that way because so many contributions are from teenagers and other immature types, many of whom I suspect have never cracked open an encyclopedia. I'm mostly hopeful that Wikipedia's contributor base will stay with the project as they mature, and that future throngs of teenagers will move on to the next hot thing and leave us alone.
