Talk:Polarization

Polarization of cells

I removed Polarization of cells from the list. That doesn't seem like a good title for an article. Was the intent for an article on electrostatic polarization of biological cells? If so, is Polarization density sufficient, or is there a need for a specialized article? If the latter, a better title might be one of Polarization (biology), Polarization (cells), or Cell polarization.--Srleffler 16:20, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

Yes the title is probably imperfect. I searched for a link to an article about polarity of cells and found nothing, and I think if such exists, it should be referred to by this ambiguity page. Some expert in biology should name it probably. A link also exist in article Asymmetric cell division named Cell polarity. Also cell poles is mentioned in Polar membrane. --Sohale 17:19, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

Let me add some more ways that biology has embraced the use of terms of polarity. The common developmental terms Vegetal pole and Animal pole are applied to zygotes, a well-known aspect of Asymmetric cell division, although not mentioned yet in that article. The article on mitosis uses the concept of mitotic poles freely. Epithelium exhibits "apical-basolateral polarity", and thus the concepts apical pole and basal pole. Discussions of Membrane potential will talk about Depolarization, which, aha, has its own disambiguation page, Depolarization (disambiguation). I think that page needs to be included in the general scope of this discussion. I think all these concepts mixed together really are a problem for a beginner to sort out; this is something we can help with. --AJim (talk) 16:09, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

Requested move

The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was page moved. Please take care to correct the inbound links.  Skomorokh  07:10, 27 December 2009 (UTC)

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Polarization (disambiguation) → Polarization — Polarization has become free after old contents was moved to Polarization (waves). Wave polarization is not that much more important than dielectric polarization or spin polarization or membrane polarization to justify preferential treatment. --Marie Poise (talk) 08:12, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

"Polarization" isn't really free yet. The article that was there was moved without discussion, and links to that page were not adjusted to point to the new article title. Before moving the dab page, we need to establish that the move of Polarization to Polarization (waves) has consensus, and then all links to Polarization must be fixed.--Srleffler (talk) 05:09, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

For sake of starting a discussion, I proposed moving Polarization (waves) back to Polarization. See Talk:Polarization (waves)#Requested move--Srleffler (talk) 05:13, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

For what it's worth, I notice that there were over 600 pages linking to the old Polarization article, about 115 linking to Polarization density, and only 17 linking to Spin polarization. Of course some of the 600 will be links that were made in error, that should point to one of the other articles. I took a quick sample of ten links. Of those eight were indeed talking about polarization of light or other waves, one was talking about political polarization, and one was referring to electron and proton beams as "polarized"—which should perhaps be linked to Electrical polarity instead. Assuming those stats roughly hold, there would still be over 400 articles linking to Polarization that actually do relate to polarization of waves. This seems sufficient to establish that wave polarization is more important than dielectric or spin polarization. Whether it is sufficiently dominant to get the simple name is subject to debate. I'll be interested to see some other editors' opinions. --Srleffler (talk) 05:32, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

You, Srleffler, actually motivated my move proposal by this revert: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Polarization_(disambiguation)&diff=329978579&oldid=329863215. Restoring things as they were, and following WP:MOSDAB to the letter, would leave the disambiguation page look confused. -- Marie Poise (talk) 06:51, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

I also did a link count. My sample were the ten first entries linking to "Polarization (redirect page)". Here is how I fixed the links:

• Alkane -> relative static permittivity
• Atom -> spin polarization
• Augustin-Jean Fresnel -> polarization (waves)
• Anisotropy -> polarizer (correcting an error; polarizers are not necessarily lenses)
• Augustin-Louis Cauchy -> polarization (waves)
• Ant -> polarization (waves)
• Bit -> polarization (disambiguation)
• Physical cosmology -> polarization (waves)
• Carbohydrate -> polarization (waves)
• Code division multiple access -> polarization (waves), while waiting for article polarization multiplexing

So in my count only 60% of the old "polarization" links were correct.

Please also keep in mind the unequal gravity of errors: if a link goes to disambiguation instead of <more specific lemma>, it's uncomfortable. If it goes to wave polarization instead of <appropriate lemma>, it's plain wrong. -- Marie Poise (talk) 07:22, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

I would oppose. The basis of your argument is that people looking for dielectric polarization would be directed to wave polarization. However, if they were specifically looking for dielectric polarization, then they would type in "dielectric polarization". These are not exact terms for different uses; they all have different names. I agree with Srleffler, and the initial move from "Polarization" to "Polarization (waves)" should be moved back, IMO. Ωphois 11:15, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

My basic argument is that there is no systematic reason why an article carrying the generic lemma polarization should be restricted to the special case wave polarization.

Supporting arguments are

• Fellow editors will no longer create wrong links to polarization, linking actually to wave polarziation, though they mean spin polarization or dielectric polarization. In the worst case, they will link to a disambig page instead of the more specific page.
• Clearly separating wave polarization from generic polarization will facilitate later improvements; for instance one might think about splitting the polarization (waves) article into a popular article on polarized light and a more technical article about the mathematical description of whatever kind of polarized waves.
• Reverting to previous state of affairs would mess up once again the disambiguation page.

-- Marie Poise (talk) 15:45, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

A look at the traffic hows that those two articles you cite are barely visited at all, especially compared to Wave Polarization. Thus, it would be the primary topic. Ωphois 16:50, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

Why should I take for granted that the frequency argument outweighs the systematics argument ? I guess, most vistors come through links, not through typing "polarization". Therefore, usability is but a weak argument. -- Marie Poise (talk) 17:18, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

I think based on your edits and the comment above, that you may be misunderstanding what a disambiguation page is. A dab page is not an article; it is not a place to provide content. Rather, it is a navigation aid to help out when a naive editor makes a link and fails to check where it goes. You can think of a dab page as an "error" page: "Oops, the link you clicked was bad. You probably wanted one of these articles..." Ideally, no articles will link to dab pages, and nobody should ever come here. Our goal in laying out the dab page should be to allow the reader who has ended up here by mistake to find the article she wants as quickly as possible. For that reason a good dab page consists only of a list of linked ambiguous terms, with very short descriptions of each; just enough to allow the reader to figure out which link she wants. In many cases, the most sensible organization for a dab page is to list entries by frequency of use, since that minimizes the average search time for a reader to find the correct link. If the meanings are related, and distinguishing between them isn't easy, it may make more sense to organize them in a systematic, conceptual way. That might be the case here, for the physical science uses of the term.

By the way, I am not dead-set against the move of the main wave polarization article. I have opposed it because I am uncertain which title is best, and would like to see the matter discussed before we lock in the new title and fix all the links.--Srleffler (talk) 18:09, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

Fine. As for the name, I have no clear preference for "polarization (waves)". "Wave polarization" might be better, and in the long run, as said before, I would even prefer to move large parts of the present text to "Polarized light". As for the implementation, I hope bots will help, or is that too naiv ? -- Marie Poise (talk) 18:15, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

There is no bot that will change the links by default. When you moved the page, the system created a redirect from Polarization to Polarization (waves) (which you then changed and I changed back). The redirect makes the existing links work. Bots will fix double redirects but intentionally do not shortcut out single redirects, since such redirects are often desirable. It's possible that there is a bot that could do it on request. I'm not sure.--Srleffler (talk) 03:17, 8 December 2009 (UTC)

I like the idea, in general, of a disambiguation page, and I like the idea, although it appears to be a lot more work that I would have guessed, at sorting out, and correcting, the multitude of links involved. I think the results of this discussion will be useful. In particular, I am impressed at how many uses this concept has found. It makes me wonder about the origins of the terms polarization/polarity/poles; was it mechanical, geographic/astronomical, electrical, magnetic, or optical originally? Were the other uses by analogy? And, while thinking about explanation by analogy, I would like to note that the first "waves", water waves, that a novice reader might think of, do not exhibit polarization (or, if you prefer, it is uninteresting, because they all have the same polarization). Although "polarization" is intimately entwined with the development of the wave theory of light, in ways that I think the Wikipedia has not, yet, fully elucidated, I wonder if there might be a better choice for the specifier? --AJim (talk) 15:41, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

To answer your question, "polarize" was termed in relation to optics. Ωphois 16:53, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

• Support of moving the dab page to the primary name, since polarization occurs outside of physics, such as in politics. no opinion on what happens to the title of the page that used to be at polarization. 76.66.192.35 (talk) 04:39, 12 December 2009 (UTC)
• Support of having "Polarization" as the dab page. I think the wave polarization itself should be titled "Polarization (wave)" or "Wave polarization". Not everyone will look up or link to "polarization" for only wave theory in electromagnetism (as has already been elaborated above.) Steve Quinn (formerly Ti-30X) (talk) 02:33, 24 December 2009 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

Move not complete

Note that links to this page still need to be corrected. It is not acceptable to move an article to make room for a dab page, and leave links that formerly pointed to the article pointing at the dab page. Every link to this page needs to be checked and adjusted to point to the correct article. I presume the proponent of this move and those who supported it will take care of this.--Srleffler (talk) 23:22, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

It's basically done. It's not completely done, but it's better than it ever was: Before, there were links going to [wave] polarization though actually dielectric or social polarization was meant, which is definitely worse than a few links going to a dab page. -- Marie Poise (talk) 13:14, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for taking care of that. I agree: a few bad links are OK, and links to a dab page are better than links to the wrong article.--Srleffler (talk) 15:42, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

For what it's worth, the disambiguation page now has accumulated 50 incoming links. 69.3.72.249 (talk) 23:19, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

The incoming links are listed here. 69.3.72.249 (talk) 13:51, 29 September 2010 (UTC)

After the move

In November 2009 Polarization (disambiguation) had 1672 page views and Polarization had 58017. The ratio was 1672/58017 or 2.9%. In December 2009 the article at Polarization was moved to Polarization (waves) and replaced by the disambiguation page. In December 2009, as all the incoming links to Polarization were fixed, page views on Polarization (waves) climbed from 0 to many hundreds per day. In 2010 so far Polarization (waves) has averaged 20455 page views per month. So, roughly 60% of the page views on Polarization before the move were in error. 69.3.72.249 (talk) 23:17, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

Electrochemical polarisation

This is a general concept in electrochemistry although in older literature the nature of it was probably poorly understood. In this list only the stub article "polarisation (corrosion)" refers to this, but it would be better to have a more general, electrochemical, article on this subject. It should be noted that the removed subject "Polarisation of cells" might be interpreted as "Polarisation of electrochemical cells" (i.e. batteries or electrolysis cells), another, but wider, electrochemical subtopic. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 150.227.15.253 (talk) 10:29, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

I moved the stub article to Polarization (electrochemistry) and updated the link here. Thanks for the suggestion!--Srleffler (talk) 05:38, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

Sunglasses

When buying sunglasses one is given the option of having them 'polarized'. I of course turned to Wikipedia to find out what this means, but this disambiguation page was of no help. If someone can please fix this I would be very grateful.

--Tibetologist (talk) 02:30, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

The first link on the page, Polarization (waves) is the relevant one; see in particular the section Polarized sunglasses.--Srleffler (talk) 04:14, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

Please take a look at the Polarization page now. I tried to add a bit to help bridge the gap between the very general subject and some of the common related queries.

As a total aside, since you appear to be interested in both Tibet and sunglasses, it might help to know that common sunglasses can only do so much in a situation with thin atmosphere and high UV intensity. About the most common sunglasses can do is reduce solar input to about 1% transmission. That is not always enough, because if the glasses are any darker than that then the dominant input to the eye is from around the frame. This is why welders goggles completely cover the eye. In addition, there are side shields that can be added to safety glasses, and there is a specialized type of sunglass called "glacier glasses" that address this problem. --AJim (talk) 18:56, 4 April 2016 (UTC)