Talk:List of measuring instruments

Sources and Scope
There's been some great work done to expand this article (and the related article Measuring principle). Just my two cents on it -- perhaps the content is growing beyond the logical bounds of the article? There are already articles which provide much more detail on many of the measuring instruments and principles. (Often that's handled with a brief mention in the article here, with the use of the "details" template to link to the complete article. A good example of that approach (imho) is the article on Chromatography.)  This is beginning to look like an annotated list of measuring instruments - which is useful, but as a practical problem such a collection has no obvious boundaries... "Every instrument that scientists use, and everything that they measure with those instruments" basically becomes an attempt to summarize all of experimental science...

An even wilder question - what's the difference between the scope of the articles Measurement, Measuring instrument and Measuring principle? Would it make any sense to figure out how to combine all three into one article?

As far as references go - since this is largely a summary of other articles (with their own references), perhaps just a book or two about "measurement in general"? I'm going to check my uni's library tomorrow for something of the sort... - Jaeger5432 | Talk 04:14, 29 June 2008 (UTC) this is all wrong so don't use this information — Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.26.54.19 (talk) 00:59, 1 July 2014 (UTC)

Article layout
Please tell me I'm not the only one who recognizes the massive need for improvement in how this article is laid out? The Table of Contents is so long that it's virtually impossible to navigate. It's unreasonable and counterproductive to give every single specific type of device its very own header (and I'm bewildered why there were several headers with no content -- if there's no measuring instrument for that quality, then it makes no sense to list it). A header where all the content is included under a single sub-header, such as Measuring instrument, is equally useless. And at the very top, what exactly is the point of the header "Time, energy, power, and action" that goes on to include the subheaders "Time", "Energy," "Power", and "Action"? Either get rid of the top header, or get rid of the sub-headers, but don't just repeat the one in the other.

There especially seems to be a ton of over-categorizing and over-linking in the section on the human body -- for example, solely for the link to ergometer, the page includes one heading and one subheading, which, combined, link to six different articles besides the link to the instrument. (Okay, and then the link to the instrument actually goes to a disambiguation page that shouldn't even list the instrument, because there's no existing article with any information about it.)

I was going to take a whack at trying to simplify and condense things, but I thought I should ask here for thoughts here first, in case there's a rationale, that led to the article's current state, that needs to be considered. Any thoughts or objections? Propaniac (talk) 20:44, 8 October 2009 (UTC)


 * The article definitely needs cleaning up. It seems that the majority of the article is actually a listing of different types of measuring instruments. Perhaps that list should be moved to List of measuring instruments, that way we can have a readable article that references the list? Wizard191 (talk) 16:32, 9 October 2009 (UTC)


 * Well, I was thinking the same thing, and then I found that there actually is a List of measuring devices already (and I'm assuming that there's no distinction between a measuring device and a measuring instrument). I can't really figure out how to reconcile them. This list organizes by field, which seems more helpful than alphabetically, and I think it contains a lot more devices; on the other hand, that list can actually be read. I guess the best thing, and basically what I was going to try to do in absence of other input, is clean up this list and then probably use it to replace that one. Or, that list could just be expanded with the items from this list, but it would be a really long table. Propaniac (talk) 17:33, 9 October 2009 (UTC)


 * Good catch, I didn't know that list existed. There's no reason to keep two lists, so I definitely would support cleaning up the list in this article and then copying it to list of measuring devices. I also think that the list should be renamed to "measuring instruments" to match this article. Wizard191 (talk) 17:53, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for discussing issues I had seen as problems myself more than a year ago; to my impression the table of content in its new form could be seen as a definite improvement. Due to a heavy workload I couldn’t continue the systematic work on this article and even today I cannot promise an effectively focused approach.

Nevertheless a few ideas on the overall concept could become helpful:

As I began to work on this article, “Measuring Instrument” was a list of physical quantities and areas of natural science, sub-listing, linking and commenting on associated measurement devices: This list of list intends to comment on its items, unlike other mentioned lists. And this article may attempt to give an overview over the range of existing measuring devices related to its field of use. Others helped me in structuring and expanding this list. (In case this approach may be questioned, “Measuring instrument” could be disambiguated, for example in “Measuring instrument (generic)” or (abstract) and “Measuring instrument (exemplified)” or according to other criteria.)

Over-categorization was a valuable helper in striving to properly structuring this area. Re-categorizing a structure usually proves much more difficult than carefully considering whether apparent redundancies have a meaning. Headers with no content do not imply the non-existence of a device, they may give a useful hint on still missing items. Headers with one sub-header are concerned in the same way (Hearing may not be confined to Loudness only). There even seems to exist no measurement device for mole numbers, nevertheless the sub-header mole number appears and seems to be intelligibly commented. If the header “Time, energy, power, and action” is too explicit, then “Time, energy and derived quantities” could do as well. A repetition may be considered a problematic style in some literary context, but if there doesn’t exist a compelling reason for something else, one may be allowed to live with repetition.

The current structure of this list of lists was not obvious in the first place and --- as can be seen from the history of this article --- took some time to be carefully arranged. Some categories may still be extremely expandable (Rays, Identification and Content). This might even allow to introduce new articles of the type “(field of interest) Measuring devices”. An uncommented variant of this externalization is found for the areas of Meteorology and Navigation and Surveying.

Templates of ranges of measurement devices probably should associated to the articles on the individual devices, nevertheless I included some ranges in the thermometer section.

This apparently simple listing, if taken seriously, contains more aspects causing problems than may seen to exist in the first place. Even if some ideas for changes may occur to be obvious when taking a first view. UserXresu (talk) 21:27, 12 October 2009 (UTC)

Energy section
This section seems to be more about defining energy than measuring it. Biscuittin (talk) 23:50, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

Proposed merge of List of sensors into List of measuring devices
same concept, just different names fgnievinski (talk) 21:36, 14 May 2021 (UTC)
 * Oppose, I think. If Measuring instrument wasn't really a list, this wouldn't be a candidate for merge. Should be refactored and all the stuff that relates to measuring instruments in general (discussions of history, accuracy, precision, traceability, ease of use,and so on ) should be factored out to Measuring instrument, and all the listy things put into List of sensors.  Though let's think about "measuring" vs. "sensing" - something that mere detects the presence of an object isn't really "measuring", like for instance a limit switch - my microwave oven needs to know the door is closed, it doesn't measure where the door is in its range of motion. Needs further discussion. --Wtshymanski (talk) 20:20, 17 May 2021 (UTC)