Category talk:Spectrometers

articles on instruments vs articles on spectroscopic technique

I just discovered this category. It seems like a good thing to have. I am puzzled though about how to go about expanding it. I see that there are a number of spectroscopic techniques, Circular Dichroism and the related, but distinct Magnetic Circular Dichroism for instance, which have articles, and which discuss instrumental considerations, but which do not have articles explicitly about the instruments themselves.

I believe that an encyclopedic approach justifies a separate article about important instruments because building a practical instrument involves specific considerations and knowledge/institutional wisdom that is outside the scope of the technique itself. Why, for instance, do scanning spectrometers scan from longer to shorter wavelengths, and not the other way?

--AJim (talk) 18:33, 20 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Spectrometer vs spectroscopy

In my view, there is some confusion between spectrometry (general measure of spectrum which may be the energy or wavelength of electromagnetic radiation, but also mass or energy of a particle) and spectroscopy which is normally only about study of electromagnetic spectrum.

Therefore, I suggest to place category "Spectroscopy" as a subcategory of "Spectrometers", not the other way round. Ileresolu (talk) 08:27, 7 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

This doesn't work. A category on a specific type of measuring instrument should not contain a category on a broad class of techniques. If you were proposing to make "Spectroscopy" a subcategory of "Spectrometry" that might work, but that's not the situation here.--Srleffler (talk) 17:36, 7 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I reverted your category changes. First, I'm not convinced that you're correct about the distinction between spectroscopy and spectrometry. See Electron spectroscopy for one counterexample. If you were correct about the distinction, it would be necessary to split Category:Spectroscopy into Category:Spectroscopy and Category:Spectrometry, and move articles into one or the other. I am not convinced that the distinction between the two is sufficient to make that work, though.--Srleffler (talk) 17:46, 7 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]