Talk:Unit interval

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After I made this stub I found out that there used to be a Unit interval (telecommunications) article that was transwikied a year ago, but I think this has potential for expansion regarding different application specific unit intervals. I also think the (data transmission) subtitle is preferred because unit intervals are relevant to things like USB which are not generally considered telecommunications.   —Teknic^T-M-C 13:19, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I found it surprisingly hard to find a reference for this term ... Richard Pinch (talk) 19:38, 2 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

I have been trying to remove the following bit of unreferenced opinion from the lead of the article:

"These properties are in fact crucial to mathematics (especially compactness and the connectivity conditions)."

However, User:Topology Expert seems to believe that it should stay. Let me outline a few reasons, firmly rooted in policy, that this statement does not belong here.

1. It expresses an opinion without appropriate attribution. It is possible to avoid doing this by simply asserting facts. Where bits of opinion are needed, they should be appropriately attributed and sourced. The relevant policies here are WP:NPOV and WP:V.
2. WP:WEIGHT issue. Why are connectedness and compactness singled out for special treatment? Surely, metric spaces are at least as important as connected spaces. But more significantly are the other things we aren't saying are important here, like the real numbers. These are far more important than any of the other things under discussion, and yet the lead of the article fails to point that out.
3. WP:TONE. The sentence patronizes the reader. This kind of a statement is generally found in badly-written mathematics textbooks. Perhaps that is one reason that mathematics articles seem to be especially prone to this sort of statement. At any rate, we shouldn't condone such statements, for Wikipedia is not a textbook.

--siℓℓy rabbit (talk) 14:10, 15 December 2008 (UTC)Reply

I have a different issue with the word "crucial". That makes it sound as if the article is considering some other world in which the unit interval is not connected or not compact, and comparing that to our world. But that doesn't really make sense.

I agree, though, that even if "crucial" was replaced by "important", the sentence has the wrong tone. — Carl (CBM · talk) 14:27, 15 December 2008 (UTC)Reply