Talk:International System of Units/Archives/03/2018

Completeness of SI

I removed a claim ("The SI is capable of describing most useful and measurable physical quantities") as inappropriate in the section in which it occurred. There is no clear place to put it, though it could be integrated to some extent in the History section. If anyone feels that this claim is important, it might be possible to claim that Giovanni Giorgi showed that the four-dimensional system based on the base units metre, kilogram, second, ampere is a complete system in that sense that units for all mechanical and electromagnetic quantities can be expressed in terms of these. I find it problematic to make a mere general claim about SI's comprehensiveness in this sense, though: it includes redundant "base" dimensions (temperature, illuminance, amount of substance) from the perspective of physics, and fails to provide units for every conceivable dimension of physics (consider colour charge). I mention this only to show that we cannot claim that SI is really as comprehensive or consistent as we generally think it to be, and thus claims of this nature will most likely have to be limited to what Giorgi showed. —Quondum 00:40, 16 March 2018 (UTC)

Tags

Article has received a few tags (removed two). How are we going on resolving the others? AIRcorn (talk) 03:08, 27 March 2018 (UTC)

All of these aside from the one in International System of Units § Birth of the SI strike me as having the nature of edit notes not useful to the general reader, and could be moved into hidden edit notes or to a dedicated section on this talk page. My feeling is that when the reader's understanding is aided by understanding the incompleteness, the note should be visible in the article. —Quondum 12:38, 27 March 2018 (UTC)

There's something I'm not getting. Is it not bizarre to end the SI article with a section entitled "Birth of the SI"? Dondervogel 2 (talk) 15:22, 27 March 2018 (UTC)

– It does feel weird. But the article does end with the history section, and that section is in chronological order. What is missing is the history of the SI after its birth. —Quondum 16:19, 27 March 2018 (UTC)

I am just going through Good Articles with cleanup tags on them and trying to resolve the issues, or if I can't delist them. This article looks in decent shape so I would hate to delist it, but it is not a good look to have articles we say are good with big orange banners on them. I agree that having a big banner for small issues is not helpful to the reader or project so would support removing those and maybe starting a talk page section so the info is not lost. Thanks for the response. AIRcorn (talk) 20:48, 27 March 2018 (UTC)