Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Wtshymanski (talk | contribs) at 14:23, 4 April 2011 (cleanup old business). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

• Open a door to a new, unfathomed level of geekery
• Share your ignorance with the world
• If wrong were energy, Misplaced Pages could power the world.
• One man with courage makes a majority. --Andrew Jackson

“Misplaced Pages is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world, can write anything they want about any subject. So you know you are getting the best possible information.” – Michael Scott

This is, sadly, a Misplaced Pages user page, not an encyclopedia article. If you're reading this anywhere other than en.wikipedia.org, it's even more out of date and irrelevant that the rest of the content of whatever Wikiscraper site you found it on.

Functional part of user page

Notability and stuff

They call AfD the "article improvement drive"; in this case, it's become the "article devolution drive" - many of these were (relatively) better *before* they were "rescued".

The Misplaced Pages:Notability guideline requires multiple independent sources with significant coverage of the topic. Sources should be secondary and independent, that is, not publicity by the manufacturers of the parts concerned. Sources should be significant, that is, not just a mention in passing or one-line statement, but some volume of discussion on the part.

Misplaced Pages:What Misplaced Pages is not says that Misplaced Pages is not a general collection of all the world's information, but is an encyclopedia. An encyclopedia is a reference work containing a summary of knowledge in one or several fields - it is an overview, not an exhaustive listing of every possible fact.

An article about a semiconductor device must contain more than a recitation of the specifications from an unreferenced data sheet. Otherwise, it's not an article but an entry on a parts catalog. Ideally an article would contain "who, what, when, where, why, how" information. Which company invented or developed the device, when it was invented or registered with JEDEC or other authority, was it always a JEDEC part number or did it have a proprietary ancestor, why was it considered necessary to develop the part, what technology does the part use, how does it compare to similar devices available at the time. To assess significance, how many companies make the part, how many parts are or were sold in a typical year, is the part still currently available? What products made significant use of the part? What was made possible when this part was released, that couldn't be done as well or at all before it was released?

Is the part significant in some way? Is it the first/the last/the biggest/the smallest/ the most powerful/ the fastest/the quietest device of its kind? Does the part have some relevance outside the narrow world of (hobby) electronics? Why was this part popular, and just how popular was it?

The problem with the above sort of information and writing an actual article about a semiconductor, instead of a parts list entry, is that sources are not available to hobbyist editors on-line and for no cost. Even if someone who edits here was working for Fairchild or General Electric or Motorola or RCA or Westinghouse at the time, their private experiences count as "original research" or primary sources at best, and lack independence. The marketing decisions that lead to the manufacture of many of these devices are locked in the 40- and 50-year old files of various companies many of whom are defunct or merged. There seems to be a few overview books of the history of the semiconductor business that show up on Google Books, but they rarely spend much space on individual devices.

Some would argue "Give it time, there is no deadline". Many of these items have existed for years with no improvements, owing to the factors described above. These factors are not going to get better with time. Even though Misplaced Pages data storage space is indefinite and large, the amount of human effort required to maintain articles and to read them must be considered. We' re wasting the readers' time with recitation of specifications that can be more reliably gotten from manufacturer's catalogs. It's not the mission of an encyclopedia to catalog every minute technological artifact. An encylopedia is not a parts substitution manual.

Observations on these AfDs

So far I've been accused of naivety, ignorance of the subject matter,lazyness, disruptive and pointy behavior, clogging the AfD system, and indiscriminate nominations, with a strong undercurrent that I'm also incompetent. Not just from one-shot IPs but by editors who've been here about as long as I. Imagine how I would be treated if courtesy wasn't one of Misplaced Pages: Five pillars. I've had fewer personal attacks for editing Tesla's nationality. --Wtshymanski (talk) 20:04, 31 March 2011 (UTC)

Flag	Manufacturer	Model	Processor	Year	User interface	Format	Remarks	Ref
	MITS	Altair 8800	8080	1975	Front panel	Card cage multi board	Buss becamse the S100 standard, many expansion boards eventually made
	Apple Computer	Apple I	6502	1976	Composite video and ASCII keyboard	Single board, user added case, power supply, keyboard and composite monitor	Recreated as Replica 1

To do

• Router is still horrible. The lead should at least explain what a router does in plain English without descending into a forest of pronunciation guides, jargon, acronyms...the usual Misplaced Pages cat-lady nonsense. It's no good saying a router is different from a switch if you don't tell us *how*. A couple of diagrams would be helpful, too.
• Add at least one reference per paragraph to Superheterodyne receiver and get the refimprove tag off it.
• Architectural lighting design needs a few more references, it's been waiting since August '09.
• Put an alt= tag on an image every day (some day I might need them myself).
• Streamer theory for electrical discharges; unless we have it buried somewhere?
• Universal asynchronous receiver/transmitter needs references other than parts catalogs and maker's data sheets.

Pictures needed

• Take pictures of the Peguis monuments at Kildonan Park and St. Andrew's Church for Peguis.

Illustrations needed:

• Induction furnace needs diagrams for coreless and channel type furnaces. Commons? No, doesn't have.
• Voltage regulator - take a picture of a distribution voltage regulator on a pole-line somewhere. There's one on Pine Ridge Road, but maybe there's others closer.
• Actually, anything on a pole line that I can positively identify would be useful. Many Commons photos don't explain what's in the picture, either because the uploaded didn't type it in or didn't know what he was photographing. Voltage class, kva, frequency, etc. all good to know and useful to the reader.

Got to learn Inkscape so I can draw:

• touch and step potentials, stray voltage, voltage gradient in earth ( Stick man touches fence and dies, stick man straddles 1 m, how a cow gets shocked, transferred potential)
  • Either Inkscape is a pain in the *** or else I've been ruined by Autocad. Drawing the simplest things in Inkscape is so un-Auto-cad-like that it takes me hours to switch gears between the two programs. Hang it, I'll draw what I want in ACAD and then export it to some format the Wiki can use; it's less trouble than learning how to coax Inkscape into working like Autocad. A spiral drawing tool, forsooth - but just try and draw a paraboloidal arc without combing through the on-line reference. And I was distressed at how long it took me to figure out how to draw...a straight line. And the Google drawing program is $500 if I want the version that doesn't lock in to their proprietary secret format.
  • Hmm, I'm supposed to be doing some self-training on PowerTools - maybe I can export some nice ground gradient plots, though I still need the stick drawings.
• symmetrical components (unbalanced phasor set is sum of positive, negative and zero-sequence phasors)
• Zonal cavity (lumen method) showing room split into ceiling cavity, work plane, floor cavity
• Speed droop
• Ground and neutral
• John Wellington Starr lamp enclosure
• A drawing showing the meaning of the various units used for lighting - luminance, illuminance, "brightness", lumen,lux, candela, candlepower. Distinguish between light energy leaving a device and light energy falling on a surface. I've never seen a similar diagram that I can rip off emulate. Research continues, though still no comprehensive picture.

• Electric arc, Glow discharge need a V vs I diagram to show dark current, Townsend, normal glow, abnomal glow and arc regions. Wonder if Commons has one? Nope. Working on this on weekend, using a mouse is like drawing with a bar of soap... found a good one, though I need to caption the segments
• Protective relay needs a diagram showing characteristics of a protection relay - time/current for an overload type, operate/restraint for some zone protection relay.
• Diagram of Ohm's experimental setup for Ohm's law; try to convey how tedious those 19th century measuring techniques were.Popular Science has an article from December 1913.
• Coefficient of performance needs a diagram - heat in, heat out, power in...sunny day house, snowy day house.

Misplaced Pages is a parts catalog

No need to go to Canadian Tire and look up the sparkplug for your lawnmower - it's probably here somewhere. User:Wtshymanski/parts

Whining, griping, and blowing off steam

See User:Wtshymanski/Griping

References

1. ^ Cite error: The named reference none was invoked but never defined (see the help page).