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Archive 1Archive 2

Wikipedia is not a crystal ball

This article makes a lot of claims about what this technology will achieve. "It could not be visually observed during daylight hours because the propagation of controlled electromagnetic waves would make it appear as if no ship were present." for example. See WP:CRYSTAL: "While currently accepted scientific paradigms may later be rejected, and hypotheses previously held to be controversial or incorrect sometimes become accepted by the scientific community, it is not the place of Wikipedia to venture such projections". There are many such sentences that need to be removed or rewritten. Noodle snacks (talk) 23:59, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

This article is riddled with technical errors

There are many very serious technical errors with this article, so many that I don't even know where to start editing. Are any of the editors experts in this field?

Firstly, it seems to be mostly an article about "cloaking". There seems to be some debate about whether this is an appropriate term or not. Without wading through all the arguments, I would like to point out that this is a relatively respectable term which is commonly used in the scientific literature. It also seems to describe the majority of the contents of this article.

Secondly, a negative refractive index has nothing to do with cloaking. Cloaking is based on transformation optics, which currently has a pretty awful page of its own. Probably the stuff on orthogonal coordinate systems and optical conformal mapping should be moved here.

The 2006 papers by Pendry and Leonhardt introduced transformation optics (which harks back to some previously known ideas in general relativity), and Pendry proposed that it could be used for cloaking. He also showed that any structure which could be described by transform optics could be implemented by metamaterials. Metamaterials can also be used to create a structure with a negative refractive index, but these two facts are unrelated.

Thirdly, there are cloaking techniques which are based on other approaches, such as plasmonic reactance (see the works of Alu and Engheta, or Ross McPhedran), which definitely having nothing to do with a negative index. It is also arguable whether they could be considered metamaterials, but then again the term does not have a universally accepted meaning in the scientific literature so they could probably be included.

Finally, stealth technology as used on current aircraft has absolutely nothing to do with metamaterials nor is it related to a negative refractive index. Of course it could be related to cloaking, though all the metamaterial related cloaking examples are still very speculative things in the lab shown under very limited circumstances, so they will not be seen in aircraft any time soon (if ever).

Also, why is there a mini section here on dispersion, when it is a well understood and distinct pheonomenon which has its own page? The same goes for the picture describing the electromagnetic spectrum.

ShiftyDave (talk) 01:44, 23 December 2009 (UTC)

A short answer is the article is yet very unshaped and was built up from scratch. Your editing is welcome. Please be tolerant. Quality of the content is usually considered more important than matters of terms, or which material should be where. That something can be this or that, here or there, does not mean it shouldn't be described. WP is not an ideal world and things are getting fixed gradually, one at a time. Regards. Materialscientist (talk) 02:03, 23 December 2009 (UTC)
Fixing this page is going to involve renaming it and/or moving vast slabs of irrelevant text to other pages. I don't want to spend my time doing this only to have my changes undone by someone else. And to be honest there are so many conflicting topics on this page it's hard to work out what to do with it all. I assume that the contents should match the title, which means that roughly only the paragraph entitled "Experimental verification of a negative index of refraction" should remain and everything else should be moved elsewhere. Probably some of the material should be put in a page on "Metamaterial based cloaking" or something like that, all the stuff about planes and ships needs to be put on another page about current stealth technology, although this already has its own page so this material may be redundant. ShiftyDave (talk) 22:46, 23 December 2009 (UTC)
True. As I mentioned, there is some specific history for this article - it was built from scratch and much of supporting material, which normally should have been in separate articles, wasn't there. Thus some parts were incorporated which normally should not be (however, metamaterial-related specifics of usual properties may be briefly mentioned). I do agree that shifting things around is often waste of time and personally prefer to polish the content (shape the text) and then simply split up what appear better suited elsewhere. The entire metamaterial topic on wikipedia was built from nothing, within the last few months, by a single editor, and is still very much work in progress. Constructive help would be very much appreciated. Your comment on chirality is valid and I talked with the article "author" about that. Materialscientist (talk) 01:32, 24 December 2009 (UTC)

I am proposing the following solution to fix up this page:

  • Move all the metamaterial cloaking type stuff to a new page, possibly entitled Metamaterial Based Cloaking. This should then be linked to by the page Cloaking Device which also mentions this, and possibly should be combined with some duplicate material under Cloak of invisibility
    Reasonable, but again, I would focus on quality and split up content when necessary. There is one tricky part here - cloaking probably attracts many readers to learn science from this article, thus some part of it could stay. Materialscientist (talk) 01:29, 25 December 2009 (UTC)
  • Delete all the material on stealth for aircraft and planes, as it has nothing to do with a negative index, or to metamaterials, and only a very tenuous link to cloaking. In addition, there is already a page on stealth technology which seems to cover this topic already
    I would listen to Steve before deleting (he might wish to keep it in some form, in other article or elsewhere), but agree in general - only bits related to metamaterials may stay here. Materialscientist (talk) 01:29, 25 December 2009 (UTC)
  • There are a couple of paragraphs which genuinely relate to negative index metamaterials. These should form the basis of the page once it is fixed up. The page on metamaterials is currently getting very big, so the paragraphs on negative index, double negative and single negative metamaterials should be moved here, and a simplified explanation of negative index should be left on the metamaterials page ShiftyDave (talk) 01:15, 25 December 2009 (UTC)
    After stealth is gone, the article will lighten up. I wouldn't bother too much with splitting until the size becomes a real issue (70k is not at the edge yet). A second thought (after seeing your post at talk:metamaterial) is yes, some text could be moved from metamaterial to this (and other metamaterial-related) article, leaving metamaterial as a summary of various directions, without going in depth. Materialscientist (talk) 01:37, 25 December 2009 (UTC)
First since the previous (intense) discussion about cloaking with other editors I have since turned the corner, and I am not adverse to include "cloaking" or "cloak" in the title. I previously discussed this with Materialscientist, in fact just recently. I suggested a title change. For whatever reason we decided to leave it. It doesn't matter now. At the least a title change is appropriate for this article.
Second, This article is actually formatted to discuss the science behind the (first) original cloaking that occured in 2006. This is where the science part of the article ends. Regarding the content and sections:
If I remember correctly all the sections and material are connected, in that a later experiment or simulation was based on a prior study. I started with some general principles. Apparently I included theoretical studies on coordinate transformations - but with the intent that this is related to the actual cloaking demonstration. I then felt it was a good idea to include the first demonstration of negative refraction (the prism experiment). This was a breakthrough demonstration. Also, this is referenced in "Controlling Electromagnetic Fields" which is about coordinate transformation. As I briefly check the references for "Controlling Electromagnetic Fields" (J. B. Pendry D. Schurig D. R. Smith. Science 23 June 2006: Vol. 312. no. 5781, pp. 1780 - 1782) I notice the following:
  • Pendry's wire arrays and negative permittivity (if I recall) "Extremely Low Frequency Plasmons in Metallic Mesostructures" (Pendry, et al Phys. Rev. Lett. » Volume 76 Issue 25. 1996)
  • Pendry's cylinder and srr discussion effective magnetic permeability μ-eff "Magnetism from conductors and enhanced nonlinear phenomena" (J. B. Pendry, A. J. Holden, D. J. Robbins, W. J. Stewart, IEEE Trans. Micr. Theory Techniques 47, 2075 (1999)).
  • We know what this one is: V. G. Veselago, Soviet Physics USPEKI 10, 509 (1968).
  • This structure forms a left-handed medium "Composite Medium with Simultaneously Negative Permeability and Permittivity" (D. R. Smith, W. J. Padilla, D. C. Vier, S. C. Nemat-Nasser, S. Schultz, Phys. Rev. Lett. 84, 4184 (2000))
  • The first demonstration of negative index of refraction - "Experimental Verification of a Negative Index of Refraction" ( R. A. Shelby, D. R. Smith, S. Schultz, Science 292, 77 (2001))
So you can see where the idea of including negative index of refraction comes from.
Anyway, the goal was to lead up to the first cloaking demonstration, but use peer reviewed science to do it. I was mostly spurred on by the "thumbs down" attitude I recieved from other science editors when I tried to do this with popular science literature. When I did this with peer reviewed journal articles I could see a marked difference in the quality and accuracy of the science. I believe to "prove them wrong" is the reason I wrote this.
This is also the reason for including actual cloaking as a possible stealth technology. If you notice I state in the article that this technology is decades away. Also, the reason for the limitation to only one form of cloaking was to just lead up to the 2006 demonstration in the science section. So in a way this fills in where the media and popular sceince leaves a void.
Having said all that I think including other methods of electromagnetic or plasmonic cloaking would be a good fit. After I started working on the Metamaterial article I kind of left cloaking behind. Also I know there is no relationship whatsoever between current stealth technology and electromagnetic cloaking. There isn't supposed to be. EM cloaking is just a pie in the sky potential possiblity decades from now, and different from today's technology. Steve Quinn (formerly Ti-30X) (talk) 06:04, 25 December 2009 (UTC)
So now on to your current proposals. Are you sure that we should remove material related to negative index materials, because these are cited sources from the peer reviewed journals? Also some of the principles appear to be related. For example:
I just reviewed the last part of "Controlling Electromagnetic Fields". Here are two quotes that indicate a relationship to negative index materials. "In fact, it is now conceivable that a material can be constructed whose permittivity and permeability values may be designed to vary independently and arbitrarily throughout a material, taking positive or negative values as desired" Here is the last paragraph "We have shown how electromagnetic fields can be dragged into almost any desired configuration. The distortion of the fields is represented as a coordinate transformation, which is then used to generate values of electrical permittivity and magnetic permeability ensuring that Maxwell's equations are still satisfied" It appears that very similar principles are involved.
I just re-read through this paper carefully and confirmed what I already knew. The quote you give may lead one to think that a negative index is necessary for cloaking, but certainly does not explicitly say so. Its purpose in this paper is really just to emphasize the flexibility in material parameters which can be achieved using metamaterials. If you look at equation 7, you can see the values of epsilon and mu which are given by the coordinate transform. R2 is greater than R1, and R2, R1 and r are always positive. Therefore the values of epsilon and mu are always positive and there is no negative index. Further confirmation can be found in the paper by Schurig et al, Science 314 p977 (2006) doi:10.1126/science.1133628, which is the first experimental verification of this phenomenon. In the inset of figure 1 you can see the values of epsilon and mu, and they are all positive. Moreover, in the online supporting material there are several animations showing wave propagation through the cloak. It clearly shows that the phase fronts are all moving forwards (in the same direction as the power is flowing), whereas if the cloak had a negative index the phase fronts were moving backwards. ShiftyDave (talk) 08:02, 25 December 2009 (UTC)
So my point is that negative index and cloaking are only indirectly linked, insofar as they both relate to metamaterials (and should be linked to from the main metamaterials page). Therefore they should be split somehow. Maybe it would be easier just to rename the current page to something including the word cloaking, and to create another separate page for negative index metamaterials (adding it to the negative index section of the metamaterials page is another option but I think the page is getting a bit too big already - but this is more about organization than correctness so I'm not so concerned here) ShiftyDave (talk) 08:02, 25 December 2009 (UTC)
The idea behind this article is to present the science of EM cloaking instead of the more inaccurate popular science view. The stealth technology is basically a brief overview to mention the aircraft or ships. The idea is to use these as examples of objects that can be electromagnetically cloaked in the future - decades from now. It is merely a platform to showcase how electromagnetic cloaking works. That in a nutshell is the theme. Does this appeal to you, Dave?
Certainly you are right that there is a lot of nonsense in the popular press about cloaking. Actually there are good physical reasons to think that this approach will never be used, even decades into the future. They mostly relate to the very narrow-band nature of cloaking - that it only works for a small region of frequencies, and must do so because of the limitation that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. This is actually mentioned at the end of Pendry's Science paper on "Controlling Electromagnetic Fields", though there are other references out there which I can hunt down if you want to explore this point further. ShiftyDave (talk) 08:02, 25 December 2009 (UTC)
Also, to answer to one of your previous questions - the picture of the EM spectrum is neccessary for this article. It is a visual aid for the readers of this article. Steve Quinn (formerly Ti-30X) (talk) 06:36, 25 December 2009 (UTC)
But isn't this just a needless repetition of the material found under electromagnetic spectrum which could be replaced with a link? ShiftyDave (talk) 08:02, 25 December 2009 (UTC)
Also, I don't mind merging content from Invisibility or other cloaking articles into this one (whatever form it takes) but I am opposed to merging this material into those articles. Although this article may have some drawbacks, it is a science article. The other articles are based in the popular culture and popular media. I think that's it for now. Sorry about the length of this reply. Hopefully my future responses will be shorter. Steve Quinn (formerly Ti-30X) (talk) 06:43, 25 December 2009 (UTC)
Thanks for your response, Dave. It is really good to have clarity about certain points. Why don't we go ahead with your first and third proposal:
  • Move all the metamaterial cloaking type stuff to a new page, possibly entitled Metamaterial Based Cloaking. This should then be linked to by the page Cloaking Device which also mentions this, and possibly should be combined with some duplicate material under Cloak of invisibility
  • There are a couple of paragraphs which genuinely relate to negative index metamaterials. These should form the basis of the page once it is fixed up. The page on metamaterials is currently getting very big, so the paragraphs on negative index, double negative and single negative metamaterials should be moved here, and a simplified explanation of negative index should be left on the metamaterials page.
And regarding the second proposal - If you think current stealth technology in this article is too cumbersome for one of the "new" articles then let's go ahead and remove it, and see how this turns out. I agree that these are good ideas. And having an article named "Metamaterial Based Cloaking" (or something similar) will attract more readers than the name of this present article. OK I gotta go. I will be back later today. Merry Christmas to Dave, Materialscientist, and everyone else. Steve Quinn (formerly Ti-30X) (talk) 15:58, 25 December 2009 (UTC)

Invisibility science

OK, I went ahead and created a new article for the material related to metamterial cloaking (invisibility) entitled: Invisibility science. I merged the related material over to that article and left the negative index metamaterial content here. I still have some minor merging to do. The reason for this title is that Dave noted there are other types of cloaking materials which may, or may not, actually be considered metamaterials, so I opted for a more general name for the article. If another title is desired it is a small matter to move the article to a new name. That is just an adminstrative process. Dave, feel free to write and edit as you like in these articles. Both Materialscientist have no problem with that, since you obviously have a deep knowledge concerning this material. And your contributions are appreciated. Steve Quinn (formerly Ti-30X) (talk) 05:29, 26 December 2009 (UTC)

I also removed the material realted to current stealth technology - it really seems to be burdensome (to me) to have that mixed in with this material. Steve Quinn (formerly Ti-30X) (talk) 05:32, 26 December 2009 (UTC)

I am not sure the section entitled "Institutional research" is relevant to this article anymore. The only reason for its existence was to help demonstrate notability of the article when it was about cloaking. However, if it seems useful to this article feel free to keep it. Steve Quinn (formerly Ti-30X) (talk) 04:14, 29 December 2009 (UTC)
Invisibility science has been moved to Metamaterial cloaking. In other words, the article is now named "Metamaterial cloaking" with "Invisibilty science" as a redirect page. Steve Quinn (formerly Ti-30X) (talk) 22:29, 29 December 2009 (UTC)

Not valid science

Please excuse my inexperience with the editing of WP and I apologize in advance for anything that I say which is inappropriate (and I'd appreciate your pointing that out). However as an optical scientist I immediately challenge the validity of the entire concept of negative index of refraction, at least in the way that this would normally be interpreted (and if there is a different interpretation, then the accepted PHYSICS term index of refraction shouldn't be used to describe it!). A homogeneous isotropic material with n<0 (such as would produce the so-called Pendry lens, which I am therefore sure does not exist!) would violate conservation of energy. The amplitude reflection coefficient at an interface from free space (or air) is (n-1)/(n+1) and the power reflection coefficient is the square of that. This produces a coefficient ≤1 for any possible (that is, ≥0) index of refraction n. For n<0, there would be more power reflected from the interface than incident on it: it would produce energy!

Since this is an impossibility, I believe that the implied phenomenon is impossible and that this supposed science is invalid. WP could well report about the existance of such myths, but this cannot be portrayed as actual science. Interferometrist (talk) 20:40, 28 February 2010 (UTC)

I appreciate your interest in this subject, and you've said nothing inappropriate. Since it seems you are mostly disputing Pendry's "Perfect Lens" I would rather have this discussion over at Talk:Superlens. However, since you are new to Wikipedia we can have this discussion here. You are correct, the Pendry Lens does not in fact exist. Research which challenged Pendry's proposal turned out to be correct. This is actually discussed in the Superlens article. Pendry's proposal was a starting point for some intense research over the last decade, and merely a starting point for the Superlens article on Wikipedia. If you start with this section: Superlens#Perfect_lens you will see what I mean.
For negative index of refraction there are two peer reviewed articles which you might be interested in reading. The titles are linked to PDF formats of the article available to the public:
  • Smith, D. R. (2000). "Composite Medium with Simultaneously Negative Permeability and Permittivity" (PDF). Physical Review Letters. 84: 4184. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.84.4184. {{cite journal}}: Text "Free PDF download" ignored (help)
  • Shelby, R. A. (2001). "Experimental Verification of a Negative Index of Refraction" (PDF). Science. 292 (5514): 77–79. doi:10.1126/science.1058847. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)

This work was inspired and developed from a paper published by Victor Veselago 33 years ealier than the first of the above demonstrations (in 1967). To read this in available PDF format see the citation below. Then follow the link from Turpion Ltd, then on the next page click "Full Text: PDF file (531 kB)" then check the box on the page after that, and download the PDF.

Thank you VERY MUCH for these references which I will try to look at when I have a little time free from my own work! (And thanks for the general help about using WP). Interferometrist (talk) 13:24, 2 April 2010 (UTC)

To chime in, the reflection coefficient is actually based on the difference in material impedances between media.

You are absolutely right. My objection was written in haste. I will think more about this (though it STILL doesn't seem right!). Thanks. Interferometrist (talk) 13:24, 2 April 2010 (UTC)


As you probably know, you can use any of a set of two pairs of constitutive, independent properties to define a medium, like permittivity/permeability or index/impedance. Your beef is with the effective material concept: any of the literature which deals with retrieving effective parameters assumes that the real part of impedance has a specific sign, which takes care of your mathematical objection. I won't go into the derivation. A good one is here:

http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.70.016608
Sorry, I don't use the wiki syntax as you can see I don't have an account. Choosing the correct sign for effective impedance covers your objection relating to reflections, while choosing the correct sign of the imaginary part of the index insures the material is passive. There have been objections raised periodically by varied scientists, but the overwhelming consensus at the moment is that both a) effective material parameters are a valid description of metamaterials and b) negative effective index can exist. It sounds like you (Interferometrist) aren't very familiar with the current state of metamaterial research or the objections to its conclusions - I'm not saying this as an insult. Some scientists have developed critiques (IE Ben Munk, one of the pioneers of frequency-selective surfaces), but the overwhelming consensus among the electromagnetics community is that this is valid. The criticisms now come with problems in implementation. Here's an example paper dealing with the occasionally disputed theory of evanescent wave enhancement for some reference:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.73.016617
There have been many experimental demonstrations of phenomena best described by a negative index including things like, yes, negative refraction and the above evanescent wave enhancement. Really, the arguments boil down to the following.
  • If describing periodic, subwavelength structures with effective material parameters is possible, you can have structures yielding negative effective permittivity and permeability separately (papers like, eg, Pendry's original SRR-like paper http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/22.798002)
  • If you can have negative effective permeability and permittivity, you can have negative effective index of refraction (Veselago)
  • Negative effective index metamaterials have been created and observed to behave as predicted (Shelby/Smith/Schultz)

(not a WP user) 08:48, 14 March 2010 (UTC)

Delete patent section

I see no reason to have a separate section for the patent. The patent was filed by the same group (Smith/Schultz/et al) who demonstrated negative index and covers the same material - and this patent never comes up in technical discussions. Keep a note about it, but just add a single sentence to the experimental demonstration section. 19:29, 15 March 2010 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 152.3.196.93 (talk)

I agree to the suggestion for the removal of the patent section, since it adds no separate informative value to the article, and hints to a source of bias.Quantumavik (talk) 08:21, 29 January 2012 (UTC)
This section shows that negative index metamaterials have pratical value and that the work has gone farther than only lab experiments and theory. I don't understand how this section appears to hint to a source of bias. Can you elaborate on that? ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 06:57, 30 January 2012 (UTC)

Casimir effect

NIMs can be used for reverse Casimir effect. Shall we link?

http://iopscience.iop.org/0295-5075/72/6/929;jsessionid=308522502339F0F954377859C8271B94.c2 http://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/imaging/metamaterials-breakthrough-brings-invisibility-closer http://www.fisica.unipa.it/~cewqo2007/Archive/presentations/Philbin.pdf

Hcobb (talk) 05:02, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

This is very interesting, isn't it? I don't see a problem with putting these items in the External link sections. I came across a reverse Casmir effect using Chiral metamaterials, and only added a brief entry in Chirality (electromagnetism). So, I thought this was possible only with Chiral metmaterials. I didn't know that NIMs could possibly be used for this effect. Reverse Casmir effect is one of the topics I want to explore further, once these other metamaterial articles in are in good shape. The Casmir effect comes into play with nanoscale and microscale machines. Thanks for your contribution. Feel free to add these to the external links section, or I can do it later. ----Steve Quinn (formerly Ti-30X) (talk) 02:05, 28 March 2010 (UTC)

Propose delete DARPA section

This DARPA program has now ended. The final review for the program has already been conducted several months ago (it was actually done before that reference was originally retrieved). That's not to say that DARPA has no interest in NIM, but the overarching program is over and now there is ongoing research on more specific topics by, for example, the ARO and AFRL. The program did have many interesting/useful output projects over its length, but anything available for a public website is going to already be published somewhere in journals/conference proceedings. I'm not sure where to find a public source for what I say above - this is speaking from firsthand experience on the program. Perhaps cutting this section down to a sentence or two in the intro - is it really notable that a research office sponsored a program on this which has now ended, enough for a full 2 paragraphs? 152.3.196.93 (talk) 21:32, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

First, thank you for your interest in this article, and metamaterials. Just to let you know that you have been "heard", I am responding. I intended to get back to that section and edit it to make it more like part of an encyclopedia article. Upon quickly re-reading this section I notice some material can be removed. For example, there is some material in this section that has already been mentioned somewhere else in the article. Specifically, one example is material referring to Vesalgo and his research. In fact, I just removed that, and almost the whole first section.
On the rest of this I would like to get back to you, as I am busy right now. Do you have any more information on what DARPA was researching regarding metamaterials, or negative index metamaterials? Is there another organization which has supersceded DARPA? I guess it moved over to ARO and AFRL.
So you are saying that having published this material in journals and conference proceedings DARPA itself would be irrelevant in this article? I guess that makes sense. Would it be worth doing an overview of the reasearch that DARPA conducted regarding these materials? Or do you think it would be trivial? ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 22:18, 4 October 2010 (UTC)
In fact, as you seem to be saying, that might belong in an article about DARPA and off topic here. So I am leaning toward what you are saying. ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 22:22, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

image metrication

The image of a split-ring resonator array, courtesy nasa, has a measure in it divided into 16 subparts going from the start to one, so I'm assuming this scale is in inches. An image with at least also a centimetre scale would be more useful. Perhaps mark the caption? The scale itself isn't explicitly marked. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.159.108.120 (talk) 22:36, 29 September 2011 (UTC)

Thanks very much for your interest in this topic. Yes, you are correct - the scale is in inches. The ruler merely serves to depict that the size of the unit cells are small. I suppose the relationship of the actual size can be easily and instantly seen. Well that explains the ruler.
I think you make a good suggestion for some some sort of centimeter explanation in the caption. So, one centimeter equals 0.393701 inches. Next -- 6/16 inches = 0.375 inches and 7/16 = 0.4375 inches. So one centimeter could be viewed as approximately 6 increments across the ruler. I can put something like this in the caption. Furthermore, if I come across a free image with a centimeter ruler I can add that to the article. Also, I might be able to query Wikipedia:Graphic Lab/Illustration workshop, and see if they would be willing to create such an image. (I have other files that I want to ask them to create anyway, but I have been procrastinating). ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 04:03, 30 September 2011 (UTC)
OK I have modified the caption. I also used "one inch equals 2.54 centimeters" in the caption, besides what was discussed above. Let me know what you think. ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 04:33, 30 September 2011 (UTC)
Thank you. The trouble with captions is of course that they're easily too long, moreso than main body text. So I've shortened it a bit. Linking 'inches' is perhaps a bit over the top.
This leaves the structural thing: There's a tag for marking pictures that use coins as size indicators and a drive to replace them with images showing rulers instead because coins vary by country. Wouldn't it then be prudent to create a tag for images that use inches (and not also centimetres, or otherwise unindicated scales) to show scale? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.159.108.120 (talk) 10:28, 2 October 2011 (UTC)
Archive 1Archive 2

Archiving

As the page was at the top of Wikipedia:Database reports/Long pages, I've split it into three archives; one for the requested move discussion in August 2009, and another two chronologically (1 is discussions in August 2009, and 2 is discussions after August 2009 but before 2014). I've also set up the page for lowercase sigmabot III to carry on archiving any discussions more than 90 days old. — Sasuke Sarutobi (talk) 18:01, 31 May 2014 (UTC)

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