Talk:Axial symmetry

redirect → disambiguation page   (& confusion of terms)
I changed this from being a redirect pointing to Circular_symmetry to a disambiguation page because I stumbled upon the confusion of terms on Wikidata.

Some language articles are listed on Wikidata item "reflection symmetry" while most are listed on Wikidata item "axial symmetry".

Some pages seem to treat "axial" and "reflection" symmetry as synonyms, while others don't.

This page of the English Wikipedia used to redirect to 3-dimensional "circular symmetry" while the German page "de:Achsensymmetrie" (linked to this page on Wikidata) is almost exclusively concerned with 2-dimensional "reflection symmetry". The German page should hence really better be linked with Reflection symmetry but I am not sure how this would relate to the other linked pages. I therefore chose to leave the Wikidata entries as they are, for now.

The French Wikipedia has two articles "fr:Symétrie axiale" and "fr:Réflexion (mathématiques)" which seem to deal with mostly the same subject but each is linked to a different (i.e. one of the forementioned) Wikidata entries ...

best regards,

KaiKemmann (talk) 11:30, 24 January 2020 (UTC)


 * Dear Polyamorph,
 * thank you for your edits. (Using the same image as in circular symmetry to explain the difference between the two might be confusing though.)
 * Should it maybe be explained that "axial symmetry" in two dimensions is the same as reflection symmetry and that in three dimensions it equals rotational symmetry with a rotation of 180° ?
 * The difference between rotational and circular symmetry should maybe also be explained, if there is one. (In the German language we don't seem to make a difference between the two.)
 * As I am not a native speaker I would rather not do this myself ..
 * Also if you have a wider grasp of the subject, please be so kind to look at the Wikidata confusion described above and see if you can figure out a reasonable re-arrangement.
 * best regards,
 * KaiKemmann (talk) 12:50, 25 January 2020 (UTC)