Talk:Ultraviolet

Numerical ranges for wavelengths (nm) and energies (eV)

Corrected three times the same error concerning energy in the third paragraph. A photon having a 10nm wavelength gives an energy of $h\cdot \nu ={\frac {h\cdot c}{\lambda }}={\frac {4.13566733\cdot 10^{-15}\cdot 299792458}{10\cdot 10^{-9}}}=123.9842eV$ and not 12.4eV as it was written.Gverez (talk) 16:06, 9 March 2010 (UTC)

The reference given for the table in the "Subtypes" paragraph requires the calculation described by User:Gverez: it doesn't cover the information directly—I looked it up to check before I reverted some typos. I've no reason to doubt the accuracy, but is it original research when used in this way?--Old Moonraker (talk) 06:15, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

I think "original research" was Planck and Einstein developing the equation E [in eV] = 1240 / λ [in nm], not Wikipedia editors doing basic arithmetic. That said, people who don't have a confident grasp of the mathematics really should refrain from putting their own numbers into encyclopedia articles! It's hard to believe how many times people have mistakenly changed the correct numbers in this one. —Patrug (talk) 15:22, 11 July 2014 (UTC)

As pointed out in the wikipedia link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_volt , the energy E[eV] = 1240 eV*nm/Lambda [nm], so the first phrase contains a large disagreement between the values given in eV and those in nm. In particular, the nm range (900nm - 2400 nm) is completely wrong, corresponding to the "other side" of the spectrum, i.e. the near infrared range. The right wavelength range is 4.3nm to 413 nm. In a short while (allowing other authors to choose a "common range" based on their info), I will correct that. Please, do elementary checks when editing such widely used pages. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 193.206.83.181 (talk) 15:40, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

I recently fixed yet another inconsistency in the same spot. The current version of the range is 400 nm to 10 nm, or 3.1 eV to 124 eV according to the Planck-Einstein equation. —Patrug (talk) 15:22, 11 July 2014 (UTC)

It currently says "Ultraviolet (UV) is an electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength from 10 nm (30 PHz) to 380 nm"Skintigh (talk) 15:11, 11 August 2016 (UTC)

The change to 380nm is from the Revision at 16:23, 10 April 2016; the user is an IPv6 address and offers no justification for the change. The rest of the article uses 400 nm, so I'm reverting that initial summary range to match. 380 nm is a common alternate endpoint. but ISO 21348 seems to define UV to up to 400nm even though optical is defined as down to 380nm, allowing a 20 nm overlap. — Esobocinski (talk) 13:19, 15 September 2016 (UTC)

Trim and branch out

The article as it is seems very long to me. There are some original research to be trimmed out as well. Cantaloupe2 (talk) 05:53, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

Yes, and the bloat makes it hard to find the summary info that most visitors are looking for. Without removing any content, I just trimmed 3 KB of verbiage by consolidating Health/Skin/Sunscreen/Suntan sentences that had become quite repetitive and disorganized — and then another 2 KB by tightening the scattered and redundant sentences on Vacuum UV and Extreme UV. Now in the sprawling Applications section, an overly detailed catalog of nearly 40 KB, I wonder how much of the material is *truly* notable enough to merit keeping in this article... —Patrug (talk) 10:39, 13 July 2014 (UTC)

Some of this material may not be notable enough to keep in a main article like this one, but all of it needs to be kept in Wikipedia, per WP:SS. So whatever is done, we should not lose the information. I think the proper way to proceed is to create a new main article called Ultraviolet light applications or something (suggestions?). Then, most of the last half of this article can go there "as is" (with a new intro and lede/lead tacked on), and then a condensed version (with some minor applications reduced to mere sentences) can go here, in Applications, in its place. Needless to say, the "Applications article" (whatever we call it) would then become the "main" article for the applications subsection, here. SBHarris 23:16, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

Good ideas, thanks. In fact, the reviewer who delisted this as a Good Article had similar recommendations way back then:

suggest creating more daughter articles and making fuller use of summary style. Richard001 07:12, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

Previous debates on this page confirmed a strong consensus for titling the main article "Ultraviolet" rather than "Ultraviolet light", so the daughter article should probably be just "Ultraviolet applications". There's also Cantaloupe2's point above, about material that seems to reflect specific research projects from primary sources with no independent evidence of being noteworthy, so maybe not "all" the detailed info belongs in Wikipedia. For a condensed section in the main Ultraviolet article, a reasonable goal might be a single sentence to replace each subsection 9.1.1, 9.1.2, etc. For now, I've tagged the main article with the "Very Long" template ("too long to read & navigate comfortably... consider splitting or condensing"). If you or I or anyone else has time to carry out your suggestions for splitting off the Applications section, I think we'll be on the right track. —Patrug (talk) 05:32, 24 August 2014 (UTC)

There are lots of subordinate articles that can offload this one from the really fine and repetitive detail - summarize, summarize, summarize! I was suspicious of a 3-column see also list for an article this long; sure enough, many of the entries were redundant. If it's inline text or in a section see-also, it doesn't have to be in the end see-also section. --Wtshymanski (talk) 20:40, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for the great progress! If you could let us know when you're "done", I'll stay out of your way before attempting further cleanup myself. —Patrug (talk) 05:37, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

I'm still clearing away the soggy mattresses and old tires...it will be a while before we need the lawn mowers. --Wtshymanski (talk) 16:34, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

Getting down to the broken bottles and rusty cans level... --Wtshymanski (talk) 16:23, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

Lookin' good. The new lean introduction is a big improvement over the incredibly bloated previous version, choked with stray verbiage leftover from generations of edit wars over tanning. --Chetvorno^TALK 20:11, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

"Why" is always a good question to answer in an encyclopedia

We might want to explain *why* someone would want to take pictures in the ultraviolet. Finding fossils and detecting old carpentry repairs are two points I ran across. --Wtshymanski (talk) 17:50, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

Trimming more, and reorganizing applications differently?

What do you think of simplifying and condensing the applications part of Ultraviolet? I thought it could be reorganized to the way in which UV is applied: direct imaging or sensing of UV (photography, astronomy, chemical analysis, etc), use of UV to induce fluorescence (NDT, dayglo paint, stamps and passports), and to induce chemical changes or physical changes (curing plastics, air treatment, germicidal, EPROMs and so on), perhaps with a single sentence for each application instead of the wall'o'text we have now. It should be an overview of techniques, not an exhaustive catalog.

I'd also like to find out more about UV destruction of VOCs and CO for air treatment...the ASHRAE handbook gives about 1 sentence to acknowledge that this can be done, but has none of the usual tables and helpful chatter that would accompany a mainstream technique (like they have for germicidal air UV irradiation, etc.) If this is important, it needs to be expanded somewhat in the article....if it's fringy crystal-fondling, it should be removed.

Thanks for the additions...when you get the burnt couches and car hulks out of the playground, you can see the places to put new benches and maybe a fountain.... --Wtshymanski (talk) 16:37, 26 September 2014 (UTC)

You've been doing well, but this is a long road. I was actually the first to try to make some order of the applications, in Aug. 2012. At that time, it was once just a random list of apps, no particular structure, in an 88 KB article. [1] What structure you see is what I imposed then, but there's always room for improvement. What we have now is organized loosely by field, not by UV-interaction mechanism. So it's:

   8.1 Photography
   8.2 Electrical and electronics industry
   8.3 Fluorescent dye uses
   8.4 Analytic uses
       8.4.1 Forensics
       8.4.2 Enhancing contrast of ink
       8.4.3 Sanitary compliance
       8.4.4 Chemistry
   8.5 Material science uses
       8.5.1 Fire detection
       8.5.2 Photolithography
       8.5.3 Polymers
   8.6 Biology-related uses
       8.6.1 Air purification
       8.6.2 Sterilization
       8.6.3 Biological
       8.6.4 Therapy
       8.6.5 Herpetology

And so on. If you organize it by UV interaction mechanism, all that's going to be mixed up again, since you can use induced fluorescence to look for a gene in a cell making a fluorescent protein, or on a banknote to look for counterfeiting, and now these two things are next to each other. I think my way which organizes by educational and (essentially) Dewey Decimal subject topic is more natural, but that's just how I think. Not all of these above are that great-- why should fire detection go under "material science"? Maybe it needs to go under new "safety". This was a first-shot try.

I do feel strongly that the biology uses should go together, as you very much change the types of people and equipment whenever the life sciences are involved. If you want to try it another way, "have at it," but it's going to be ugly if it ignores boundaries of how it is taught, and who pays for the application, and what kind of degrees and education the people using it have, for the purpose. (Are they engineers, biologists, cops?). It is, after all, a section on APPLICATION, and we traditionally organize applications by job-- industrial or science application, literally. Do we want to go from "top down" (people, jobs, organizations who use it for what), or "bottom up" (UV interaction mechanism). Perhaps a list of both, with the app detail not duplicated, but major apps mentioned in both lists.

As for shortening much more, I am NOT in favor. The article is 51 KB which is about right for a major science article, and now shorter than the infrared one at 54 KB. It was up to a bloated 90 kB once. My opinion is that it is time to stop shortening for the sake of shortening, and take the banner off the top.

This is important enough that I think we should have input of all the editors, so I'm going to copy this to the article TALK page to get other people's inputs. SBHarris 22:31, 26 September 2014 (UTC)

Ref. 14 is not a proper citation

A popular science article in a daily newspaper (moreover, one widely ridiculed for its errors) is not a proper citation in an encyclopaedia.

Reference numbers can change as other people edit — but judging from the date of the Edit History for your unsigned comment, I presume you were referring to The Guardian's 2002 article. So, I've added a direct citation to the 1982 scientific paper that the newspaper mentioned. Hope this helps. —Patrug (talk) 21:54, 2 January 2015 (UTC)

What's going on with compact fluorescent bulbs emitting UV, and how does "254 nm" line get out?

The info I can find suggests that there is concern over compact fluorescents with cracked phosphors emitting 254 nm light. How does this pass through glass to even get out of the bulb? Also, they seem to always use the action spectrum for erythema ("sunburn") when discussing the exposure potential. The action spectrum extends into the UVA but is steeply reduced - so is it feasible that the 365 nm Mercury line is a bigger contributor to the erythemally weighted output of these sources than the 254 nm line, even though it falls in the "UVA" range while the 254 nm line is "UVC"? 129.2.106.82 (talk) 13:03, 26 July 2015 (UTC)Nightvid

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I reverted back to trim version / consensus version

We do not need to drone on and on about skin cancer in this article. We already have articles that cover skin cancer, sunscreen and risks, so we only need to touch on these topics in a general sense and link to the larger articles. Otherwise, you are giving too much space to side topics and not on what really matter, ie: the bandwidths that make up UV. This is an article about science, not social issues. As this restores the consensus version, we would need to have a consensus here before adding back over 11k worth of extraneous info, via WP:BRD. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 13:10, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

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WP:MEDRS Primary vs. secondary source disagreement

In good faith, I deleted a paragraph which I believe contained sources that violated WP:MEDRS, the Wikipedia "guideline [that] supports the general sourcing policy with specific attention to what is appropriate for medical content in any Wikipedia article, including those on alternative medicine." (WP:MEDRS).

My deletion was revision 745997202. @Kleuske: disagreed and undid my revision, writing in his/her comments that the sources are not primary sources.

Per WP:MEDRS: "A primary source in medicine is one in which the authors directly participated in the research or documented their personal experiences. They examined the patients, injected the rats, filled the test tubes, or at least supervised those who did. Many, but not all, papers published in medical journals are primary sources for facts about the research and discoveries made."

I looked at the sources (academic journal articles) and they appear to be written by the scientists who performed the research.

In the spirit of positive collaboration, I'd like to ask @Jytdog: - can you lend your expertise here? Are the sources considered primary or secondary per MEDRS?

The two sources in question are:

• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12547714

• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16049334

Thanks, --Sarahcunningham87 (talk) 20:30, 24 October 2016 (UTC)

I may have been mislead by the first link to primary source in MEDRS, for which I apologize. I should have read better.

Nevertheless, I do have some problems with the edit I reverted, since the sources mentioned above pertain to one specific affliction, pterygium, but the entire section was removed. This includes well known consequences of overexposure, specifically welder's flash or photokeratitis. As much as i value the efforts of Sarahcunningham87, that seems a bit too much. If sources are inadequate, remove the statements supported by that source, I would think, but not the entire section. Kleuske (talk) 20:57, 24 October 2016 (UTC)

Kleuske - That seems fair. We may need to find a source for the last part of the paragraph, but I could help look around for one. I appreciate your response! --Sarahcunningham87 (talk) 21:24, 24 October 2016 (UTC)

Sorry for the wait. So the consensus is, just remove the offending sources and pterygium, and reinstate the {{cn}}- you placed (feel free t add some). I'll try to help you on the sources, since it's a fairly major article. I'll edit on the assumption we have consensus, here. Roll me back if you disagree. Regards, Kleuske (talk) 17:23, 25 October 2016 (UTC)