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User:The Photon

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Wikipedia philosophy

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When should the Operating principle section be first in a technology article

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Developed from a discussion at Talk:Optical fiber.

Consider the audience. Many technical articles are also of broad interest even to people outside of science and technology, as shown by the many questions we get indicating a reader hasn't understood a particular article. To general readers, other things are more important than how it works. For example, how it affects daily life, the economic world, and how its used.

In the case of Optical fiber, we responded to a question like that by introducing a new article in the Simple English Wikipedia. But the original poster didn't really need a version of the article in simpler language; s/he just needed an article that emphasized what's really important about optical fiber to the whole world, before getting him/her lost in the details that are only important to technologists.

There are cases where I agree the "Principle-of-operation-first" rule would be best:

  • When some detail of the physics is needed just to explain what it is, or how its different from other similar things. For example: Aspheric lens or Bipolar junction transistor. For optical fiber we can summarize the operating principle in one sentence: "it carries light from one end to the other." and have enough background to explain its important effects on everybody.
  • When the topic is so obscure that only readers who already have some background (or got lost) are likely to read the article. Again, the question that started this section shows that doesn't apply to optical fiber.
  • When a topic is only notable (in the Wikipedia technical sense) because of their importance in technolgical or scientific context, like Gaussian beam or Snell's law. Once a topic is discussed regularly in Time magazine or daily newspapers, this doesn't apply and Wikipedia should have an article that addresses the topic in general terms.

Something I worry about is that many editors tend to think of Wikipedia as something that is there for our entertainment, and not something that's meant to provide information to the whole world. A second, more subtle, version of this is to think that all the readers will have the same priorities as us. Then we might think that the most important thing about optical fiber is that it works by total internal reflection, and not the fact that it has been part of reducing telecommunications costs dramatically, enabling wide access to the internet, increasing access to world-wide communications, and also enabling globalization of the economy affecting everyone in the world.

See Nuclear weapon (as of Oct 25, 2006) for an especially egregious example of this. The device that created the cold war and set the course of the last 50+ years of history, starts with Types of nuclear weapons before going on to other topics. In that case there's no question general readers would be better served by a different arrangement, and the rest of us could still find the technical explanation if it were later in the article.

Laser market

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This is a draft table, which I might insert into the Laser and/or Laser diode articles once I've gathered enough data to fill out the table reasonably.

Laser diode market
Laser diodes Other lasers
year units value (billions) units value (billions)
2005 691,000,000 $3.23 119,000 $2.23
2004 644,000,000 $3.20 131,000 $2.19
2003 612,000,000 $3.07 122,000 $1.84

The 2006 article updates the 2004 LD units number to 644,000,000.

References

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  • Kincade, Kathy (Jan. 2004). "Review and forecast of the laser markets: Part I: Nondiode lasers". Laser Focus World. 40 (1). Retrieved Sep. 30, 2006. {{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= and |date= (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
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