Talk:Thousandth of an inch

Conversion

0.0254 mm, or 25.4 μm (1 millimetre is equal to about 39.37 thou) INCORRECT

0.254 mm, or 25.4 μm (1 millimetre is equal to about 39.37 thou) correct

—Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.132.201.32 (talk • contribs) 01:12, September 12, 2006

Actually 0.0254 mm does equal 25.4 μm —MJBurrage • TALK • 19:07, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

Taxation

The taxation info should not be on this page. Superm401 - Talk 21:08, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

"Thou" is not a unit

"Thou" is not a proper unit. It is a verbal abbreviation of "thousandth of an inch". The article should be renamed. Qwasty (talk) 04:00, 2 January 2010 (UTC)

The modifier (length) used in the title is only to disambiguate it from other articles titled "Thou"; it is not used to define the text of the article. I believe that you and most everyone else was able to understand that the modifier is used refer to "thou (the abbreviation for a thousandth of an inch)". As you can see that title is a bit bulky, therefore (length) works much better. Wizard191 (talk) 15:38, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

"Thou" should redirect to mil, rather than vice versa. "Thou" is only used in shortened verbal manufacturing jargon to indicate increments of .001 inches, and is never used in print, whereas mil is frequently used to specify thicknesses of plastic films, for example. I made some edits in line with your comment, but I don't know how to fix the redirection. Qwasty (talk) 03:29, 11 March 2010 (UTC)

'Thou' is very common in the automobile engine trade. Clearances and over-bores are commonly expressed in thou's without any qualifier. It's becoming less so as metric takes over but read car magazines or engine building manuals from the 80's to see how often it is used.  Stepho  (talk) 05:32, 11 March 2010 (UTC)

Mil may be common in the web industry, but definitely not in most other industrial settings, therefore I definitely wouldn't move this to mil. The only thing I *might* consider is moving the page to thousandth of an inch, but it's unwieldy. Wizard191 (talk) 14:33, 11 March 2010 (UTC)

I agree with moving it to thousandth of an inch, that is a better solution that encompasses both short forms, "mil" (milli-inch) and "thou". The abbreviated forms should not take precedence over the full form. I don't know how to do the move. I ought to learn how, but if you want to do it, go ahead. Qwasty (talk) 16:53, 29 March 2010 (UTC)

Per WP:UCN, I think it ought to remain the same as "thou" is much more common than "thousandth of an inch". Wizard191 (talk) 17:55, 29 March 2010 (UTC)

"Thou" is not more common, it's the abbreviated form of "thousandth of an inch". The article title should not use the abbreviated form. It would be the equivalent of titling the George W. Bush article "Dubya". Jeez. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 166.70.80.198 (talk) 15:37, 31 May 2010 (UTC)

"Thou" is slang. "Mil" is a unit of measure. The title ought to be "Mil (length)" or "Mil (unit)".  Randall Bart   Talk  22:57, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

All this "I'm right and you wrong"/"No, I'm right and you're wrong" is frankly nonproductive in the absence of anyone actually producing any evidence one way or the other. Assertions without any evidence are effectively meaningless. All I will add is that here in the UK in my experience "thou" is by far and away the most common term, and is even used in some older British Standards (yes, Qwasty, in print). "Mil", if it is recognised at all, will usually be regarded as an Americanism. That suggests to me there may well be some regional, cultural and possibly even sector bias one way or the other and blanket assertions that one or other is correct are misguided at best. Crispmuncher (talk) 19:46, 6 February 2011 (UTC)

"thou" is an abbreviation. It is obvious. The article should be renamed to "thousandth of an inch". Qwasty (talk) 05:09, 14 May 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not a dictionary, so in a sense the title of the article is not the point. However, you are right, this article is about "a thousandth of an inch" (so I've just moved that to become the first term used) - but in practice no-one uses that term - instead they refer to it as a mil or a thou depending on their industry or location. Snori (talk) 11:27, 14 May 2011 (UTC)

Again, this seems to be an obvious case of WP:UCN, just because it's an abbreviation doesn't mean that it's a bad title name. Look at Scuba diving. Wizard191 (talk) 16:36, 16 May 2011 (UTC)

Agreed. From a linguistic science point of view, "thou" is a lexical item; it's a "real word" all right, although derived from a longer word by truncation. For those who oppose "thou" as a pagename, if you really started combing through etymologies of English-language words, I'd bet you could find many common words that came from such truncation that no longer have any registers where they "dare not tread". The idea that this process of linguistic evolution and expansion across registers must be stopped for propriety's sake bucks the realities of natural language. I agree that per WP:COMMONNAME, it's fine to keep the title as-is, and is actually preferable. A closer analogy would be if the article "physical examination" were called "physical exam". Physicians say "exam" or "lab" in speech much more often than they say "examination" or "laboratory"; and it's a certain hyperactive (although prevalent) kind of prescriptivism that insists that those words must never be written when the longer form could be substituted. The more common usage is not as horrid as a schoolmarm would have us believe. Her sense of how language works doesn't match linguistic reality. The comparison to "Dubya" is really a red herring. It speciously appeals as analogous on the surface, but it's a different subclass of the phenomenon (not least because names of persons are not precisely just like all other words in the way they're used and interchanged), and it serves as an exaggerated example that ends up being a straw man. Not saying that happens intentionally—just that the assumed equivalence is speciously appealing. — ¾-10 02:53, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

This article is an artifact of Wikipedia. It does not exist in the real world. Nobody writes "thou" (maybe you can find some irrelevant rare exceptions). Instead, it is always written numerically, or with the word "mil". Look to the plastic sheeting industry for examples. This article is an abomination and should be deleted, redirected, or renamed. Badon (talk) 06:34, 21 August 2012 (UTC)

I moved this article to Mil (length), which was reverted by Crispmuncher. Badon (talk) 06:56, 21 August 2012 (UTC)

I added dispute and citation needed templates. There are billions, if not trillions of works that use thousandths of an inch in the form of mils or just plain numbers. You could probably count on one hand the number of works that use the spelled-out literal verbal "thou". Nobody is ever going to be able to satisfactorily cite that "thou" is a unit, and "mil" is just another way of saying "thou". It's 100% total BS.

Mils and numerical forms have been used for as long as metrics capability has been able to reach that level of accuracy (probably since at least the 19th century). The most prominent usage of "thou" is only in this Wikipedia article. I dare you to try to find works using the word "thou" that predate this article. You get bonus points if you can find one that's older than Wikipedia. You don't even have to find cites to support the assertions of the article (they don't exist in significant numbers).

Badon (talk) 08:01, 21 August 2012 (UTC)

Perhaps that's true where you live, but "thou" has always been used in print in the UK, Australia etc: ...was a 2 Thou (mil) thickness clear film...[1], FEELER GAUGE, 1.5-25, THOU[2], a coating that is 1/2 thou. thick (0.0005")[3], 4 Thou thickness, clear[4], a hacksaw blade is only about 25-thou thick[5] etc. Snori (talk) 09:41, 21 August 2012 (UTC)

About 90 seconds on google brought my to Popular Science Oct 1963, page 220: http://books.google.com.au/books?id=niADAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA220&q=thou&f=false#v=snippet&q=thou&f=false It took 90 seconds because I had to spend time to filter out Shakespearean thee, thy, thou. How do I claim my bonus? On the Australia car scene up to at least the 1980s, every mechanic would talk about overboring an engine by 30 thou, shaving 50 thou off the head or gaping the spark plugs by so many thou. Of course it's an abbreviation for thousands of an inch but it was used as a unit by practically every Australian mechanic and rev-head. Until I read it on Wikipedia, I had never even heard of 'mil'. Is 'mil' an official unit? To me it looks like another abbreviation of thousandth of an inch except it uses the romance root instead of the Germanic root. Which would make both 'thou' and 'mil' slang. Except that 'thou' is far more popular than 'mil' (at least in automotive circles). And 'mil' is going out of fashion because of confusion with millimeter.  Stepho  talk  10:35, 21 August 2012 (UTC)

Viceversa here: working in electronics and PCB industry since about 13 years, all around the globe, but especially in South-East Asia, and never heard the term "thou" until today. We always used "mil". All tools (like for example Altium's Protel [[6]], just to give you an example of Australian software, one of the most used packages in PCB design and simulation, it does not know the term "thou", but only mils/inches or millimeters/microns (you can switch the unit). I am not an English native speaker and I don't want to claim any "I am right, you are wrong" sh!t, I just remark a fact, I have no idea what is right and what is wrong, but the truth is for sure somewhere in the middle. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 223.27.210.130 (talk) 03:38, 27 May 2013 (UTC)

Badon, the mistake you're making is believing that Wikipedia only covers topics whose names are used in written registers. That's an assumption you're making, not an indisputable fact. Machinists *SAY* the word "thou" all day long, every day. That alone is why we are "allowed" to say it on Wikipedia. — ¾-10 22:39, 21 August 2012 (UTC)

By the way, nothing in this article, either now or before the recent edits, is or was incorrect. It's all correct. The overblown use of {cn} tags can stay, because yes it will be nice to take the time to find refs to cite, but your adding them with the tone that you think the information is wrong just exposes your own ignorance. If you were a machinist in a commercial machining environment in either the US or Australia or Britain, you wouldn't think this article is an "abomination" or whatever other silly hyperbolic adjective you might apply. This article exists in Wikipedia because it ACCURATELY covers the subject of what a thousandth of an inch is, and how machinists talk about it. So you're absolutely 100% wrong that "This article is an artifact of Wikipedia. It does not exist in the real world." Like I said above, just because the short form "thou" is seldom *written* doesn't have anything to do with the fact that machinists *say* it every day. — ¾-10 22:51, 21 August 2012 (UTC)

Badon, the diverse ways which you are condemning this article smacks of trolling. As 3/4-10 points out, the article (faults and all) discusses the mil and thou in such a way as to make it clear that this is one of the many hundreds of units of measure that were developed before the ubiquity of the Metric system. If engineers in the 19th century DID NOT USE THE THOU, then what in the world did they use? Do you propose that this article is mythology and should be deleted and yet at the same time you want it to move elsewhere? You find it so weird that "thou" and "mil" are equated when they seem like only semantic differences to those who use them? You know, some people find out new information on Wikipedia. Now that I attacked your methods, let me attack your sense of logic.

Suppose that at least one person in the WORLD had a mnemonic or abbreviated way of pronouncing the following:

0.036 inch

Suppose that this person did not toe the line and say "36 thousandths of an inch" or "36 mil." Suppose he was unlearned, or his sense of abbreviation had gone wacko when he was dropped on his head when he was a child slaving inside a grimy engine factory in Detroit or in the Outback of Australia. And he alone said aloud, 36 THOU. My question to you is this: Would his co-workers (a) laugh, (b) cry, (c) understand him and admonish him not to be linguistically lazy, (d) start using the same abbreviation. I like to saw logs! (talk) 02:39, 22 August 2012 (UTC)

I am a machinist (and more). A darn good one too. I have done a bit of everything: medical, aerospace, tool and die, light industrial, heavy industrial, mining, oil, military, automotive, plastics, composites, ferrous, non-ferrous, metallic, non-metallic, hazardous, non-hazardous, robotic/CNC, manual, Japanese, American, German, Swiss, English, metric, modern, antique, chemical, biological, nuclear, etc, etc. Some of the things my teams have built are on Mars right now. Other bits are flitting around parts of the universe I can't even imagine. But, none of that is important.

What is important is "thou" is not the name for the unit of length equal to .001 inch. It is a verbal abbreviation for the word "thousandth", and NOTHING MORE. Yes, everyone in industry who uses any thousandth of any unit will say the word "thou" as a matter of expediency. Yes, we say "thou" even when talking about .001 millimeters. Things like that are the reason the Mars Climate Orbiter crashed. For inches, the unit name is "Mil". Anything else is supplementary to that, not vice-versa.

I have seen ungodly quantities of blueprints and technical documents, in more languages than I can identify. Not one of them has the word "thou" on it. Many of them have the word "mil", though. That includes blueprints originating from Europe, China, or some other part of the world. In total, I will make a wild guess that there are at least 1 trillion written works that do NOT use the word "thou". The word "thou" is specious, and it's non-verbal usage is also specious. If it deserves an article, then it is on the same level as ain't. I don't think "thou" deserves its own article, but I see nothing wrong with making one.

What I am opposed to is supplanting formal "Mil" with informal "thou". It makes no sense. It would be equally stupid in any culture, and any language. You don't push aside technical specificity for vague colloquialisms. Somebody tried that once with something important, and it's now twisted up in it's own little crater on Mars. Maybe you should call that guy up ask him how his career is doing, to get an idea of how ridiculous such things are.

"Mil" is the correct name for the unit of length equal to .001 inch. "thou" is a verbal slang abbreviation for the word "thousand(th)(s)". That's all there is to it.

Badon (talk) 04:38, 22 August 2012 (UTC)

I will make a wild guess that there are at least 1 trillion written works that do NOT use the word "NASA". Is there a point?

As for confusing "thou" for thousandth of a millimetre, I'd say that confusing confusing "mil" with millimetre is far more likely in this era of metric use. But that's off topic - we live with what the real world throws at us.

Please provide a reference for the formal definition of 'mil'. Otherwise we have to put both "mil" and "thou" on an informal footing. If you can give a formal reference then the discussion is over and we can go back to being productive.  Stepho  talk  07:57, 22 August 2012 (UTC)

Google produces 29 million results for the definition of "mil". Take your pick: https://www.google.com/search?q=mil+definition

And yes, there is a point (you completely missed it). 1 trillion written works where the subject is measurements in mil units is pretty conspicuous if not one of them uses the word "thou". It doesn't get any more definitive than that. Seriously, how could it be more definitive? If out of 1 trillion definitive works you can find maybe 20 questionably notable ones that say "thou", what kind of insanity does it take to decide the 20 is more important than the trillion? It makes no sense! Badon (talk) 09:51, 22 August 2012 (UTC)

Ok, Badon, Me TOO! I think that if it was up to me, the article would be titled "Mil" or "Mil (unit)" or something and the article would use the mil for most of its language. I don't see anything horribly wrong with keeping it the way it is, but I would prefer that mil predominate. Now, what about you? Could you tolerate some or very many thous in the article? Obviously your threshold for pain was quite low on this one, so please elaborate. I am afraid some folks from UKoGBaNI and the Commonwealth states might have a low tolerance (pun intended) for instances of the mil. I think in the overall scheme of things that the thou is too heavily used for my tastes, but it hasn't aggrieved me. I like to saw logs! (talk) 05:25, 23 August 2012 (UTC)

Badon.

• Yes, I saw your point but its hard to take it seriously when you go off into hyperbole and wild exaggeration. These supposed 1 trillion written works prove very little. I could find plenty of works that mention "thou" and do not mention "mil". Advantage neither side.
• As mentioned in the article, some fields of work naturally use "mil" (the article mentions thin plastics, a field in which I am not familiar) and other fields naturally use "thou" (eg automotive, of which I am quite familiar). Advantage neither side.
• You anecdotally mentioned that you have seen many works with "mil" and none in "thou". I counted this with my own anecdote of many works with "thou" and none in "mil". Advantage neither side.
• Uruiamme might have something in it being an American vs Commonwealth thing (I'm Australian but have worked in many countries). If it is an American vs Commonwealth thing then WP:ENGVAR says that both forms are valid but that we should not change the title unless there is clear consensus. See Talk:Aluminium/Spelling and the history of Aluminium if you want to see a full fledged war based on cultural usage. Advantage neither side.
• Your google search doesn't produce much that usable. I checked the first few pages and they were mostly sites like www.answer.com - not exactly first class references. I'm not going to do your work for you by wading through thousands of links. However, your search did produce http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mil but that's an American dictionary and I'm not sure whether a dictionary counts as an official definition. If dictionaries count then http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/thou makes the same claim for "thou". Here's the correspond google search for "thou" https://www.google.com/search?q=thou+definition+inch which produces sites with a similar lack of quality as your search. You still haven't provided an official body that defines "mil" as an official unit. Advantage neither side.

So far it looks like two informal units used in different fields and possibly different cultures.  Stepho  talk  18:58, 23 August 2012 (UTC)

I have run out of time for addressing all of your points, some of which I disagree with still. The one thing I partly agree with is the largely informal nature of both "mil" and "thou". However, the definition for "mil" is unambiguous, while "thou" is just slang for "thousand(th)(s)". There's a reason we don't call the kilogram a "kilo".

"Kilo" is in far more common usage in verbal language than "kilogram", but it is just ambiguous slang, and not suitable for being presented as anything else. "Kg" is also just an abbreviation, and not suitable for an article title even though it is both standardized, and in far more common usage in written works than either "kilogram" or "kilo". "Kg" and "kilo" both take second place to the unambiguous "kilogram", simply because they're merely alternative forms for "kilogram".

Another proposal is to rename the article to "Thousandth of an inch". Then we can discuss "mil" and "thou" on equal footing, and I don't think there's any disagreement about that. What do you think?

Badon (talk) 04:45, 25 August 2012 (UTC)

Good, we at least agree that both forms are informal. I'm still confused about a couple of your points. If 'thou' is dismissed as just an abbreviation of thousandth then why is 'mil' okay when it is just an abbreviation of 'mille' (Latin for thousandth)? And if 'thou' is dismissed because of potential confusion between thousandths of an inch and thousandths of some other unit then why is 'mil' okay when it can be confused with mm (common in metric countries to say 5 mm as '5 mil')?

The article concerns the expression used. People tend to type in the expression rather than the formal concept. My preferences for the article name would be 'Thou' (first), 'Mil' (second), 'Thousandth of an inch' (very distant third).  Stepho  talk  04:02, 29 August 2012 (UTC)

Redirects can handle whatever people are likely to type in. I concede that "mil" and "thou" are on equal footing beneath "Thousandth of an inch", for the purposes of this article. If we are moving towards Thousandth of an inch as the proper title for this article, then we can present the full spectrum of usage of numerical forms, "mil", "thou", and whatever else is notable, all within an unambiguous context of "Thousandth of an inch".

I disagree that the article concerns solely the expression "thou". Firstly, given its nature as a trivial abbreviation of the word "thousand(th)(s)", it is either ambiguously meaningless or not sufficiently notable for Wikipedia, separately from the full context of "Thousandth of an inch". "Mil" seems to be in a similar situation. Therefore, information about the unit of length meaning for both "mil" and "thou" naturally belongs in an article about "Thousandth of an inch". I learned a few things just fleshing this issue out here on the talk page - like "mil" is not so well-defined as I had thought, which makes it perhaps literally equivalent to "thou" as yet another informal abbreviation of an ambiguous word (although the choice of a Latin word was undoubtedly meant to avoid ambiguity and trivialness, much like Latin and Greek scientific naming schemes - a feature that "thou" does not have).

So, in terms of raw usefulness, I think a properly contextualized article explaining all of this would be very good for anyone looking for the information. I'm a pretty knowledgeable fellow, particularly in this area of specialty, so the fact that I didn't know some of this information is a testament to the importance of getting this article right here on Wikipedia.

Badon (talk) 10:36, 29 August 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, I know the feeling of finding out a belief of 20 years was wrong (see my folly at Talk:Parallel_ATA#Removed Master/Slave Controversy).

I much prefer 'thou' due to my own biases and could live with 'mil' in recognition of other people's biases (as agreed by both of us, both forms are on an equal footing). I'm not thrilled with moving to 'Thousandth of an inch' because nobody says that but I'm not seriously against it either. And as you said, redirects can cover all forms. Give me a few days to let it rattle around my subconscious a bit - like wine, sometimes a bit of aging brings out the fine points :)  Stepho  talk  04:46, 30 August 2012 (UTC)

Sounds good, I'll kick back and visit this talk page again in a few days. Wost Wikipedians are lifelong-learners, so I'm sure we'll recover after we integrate this "new" paradigm into our subconscious :) If it's any consolation, America will probably switch to the metric system after we finally figure out exactly what to call this unit we've been using for the last 200 years, and then it will be just a historical curiosity... Badon (talk) 06:07, 31 August 2012 (UTC)

It has been a over a month since there has been any discussion of disagreement about renaming this article to Thousandth of an inch. This is a last call for further discussion, and if there's no response or no disagreement, then myself or someone else can do the move and adjust the phrasing in the article to accommodate it. Badon (talk) 17:57, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

Oops, I'd forgotten about this. I'm still not thrilled about the proposed name but I'll not stand in it's way. Don't forget to make 'thou' and 'mil' redirect to the new name and to mention them both prominently in the introduction.  Stepho  talk  22:54, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

Support. I'm not against the current title, but I'm equally OK with the change as described above (title thousandth of an inch, all redirects point to there, make sure to keep all discussion of nomenclature and usage). I think I'll go move the page now, and tweak the lede accordingly. — ¾-10 18:15, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

I like the work you hove done for the move, thank you very much! Badon (talk) 06:51, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

spark plug gap

http://www.gsparkplug.com/shop/spark-plug-gap-settings was recently added to explain spark gap gaps, then deleted because it was a commercial site, the restored because it was claimed as useful. I'm not worried that it is a commercial site because it explains spark plug gaps well enough and doesn't push its products. It would probably be a good reference for the spark plug article. However, it doesn't explain anything about 'thou', the closest it gets is an example usage: 'The rule of thumb for the spark plug gap on older engines is coil ignition 0.025 thou and magneto ignition 0.018 - 0.020 thou.' Since this is not an article about spark plugs, I would like to remove this reference without continuing an edit war. Thoughts?  Stepho  talk  02:05, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

I would agree with its removal - especially as that means there are now two reasons for it to go. --Biker Biker (talk) 08:18, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

Yeah, not the best ref for this article, although it would be good in spark plug, if required. Wizard191 (talk) 15:17, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

It has been removed from that article several times after being spammed by the site owner. --Biker Biker (talk) 16:39, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

Trim

I've just done a pretty good trim. Apologies if your contributions went into the bit-bucket, but the stuff that went - while interesting - wasn't really directly relevant. Snori (talk) 11:27, 21 August 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for your efforts. The article is pretty stuffed with questionable material, so it needed a good trim. Badon (talk) 09:55, 22 August 2012 (UTC)

If the "questionable" accusation is true, then what are any specific examples of such "questionable material"? Any specific example at all, let alone "stuffed with"? There was nothing in the article that wasn't accurate. Regarding Snori's trim, I'm fine with it because it was done with enough smarts that it succeeded in shortening without omitting anything essential. The cut-out material was educational for those wanting explication, but it's true that most WP readers wouldn't want so much to absorb. I have more respect for one aspect of Badon's position now that it has been explained: that it's not that he hasn't *heard* the usage "thou", it's just that he wants the article title to switch to "mil" because that's the term used in written registers. And that switch would be fine with me. I never cared which title redirected to which, as long as the information is present. However, the thing I did take exception to was Badon's melodramatic attitude accusing the content of being flawed. Just because you don't like a colloquial usage doesn't mean that there was any incorrect content in the article. Those are two separate concerns, and the latter is groundless. Also, just because you don't like the informality of a colloquial usage doesn't mean that the usage "doesn't exist". That's not the way language actually works, although most of us were taught in school to believe that it is. — ¾-10 01:30, 23 August 2012 (UTC)

I think we agree more than we disagree. That's really my only major grudge with this article - the direction of the redirect. "Thou" is important enough to require explanation, but it should probably be done in an article titled "Mil", instead of vice-versa, with "thou" redirecting to the Mil article. Then, the article would just need some minor tweaks to bring it up to a good standard of consistency and quality, with some cites to prove that "thou" really is used verbally, even though it is extremely rare for it to appear in a written record within it's context of usage. That in itself is unusual and interesting enough to be notable.

The "questionable" stuff is mostly either superfluous trimmable stuff like what Snori dealt with, or it's stuff that needs to be adjusted with regard to the relationship between "mil" and "thou". Badon (talk) 02:43, 23 August 2012 (UTC)

By the way, if I have succeeded in making my case for renaming the article with "mil" instead of "thou", we should probably do the move before Snori does much more trimming. Parts of the material that has been trimmed will be useful in a retitled "mil" article, once we add some cites to document the usage of "thou" in speech. Badon (talk) 02:54, 23 August 2012 (UTC)

I think I've trimmed about as much as necessary - I'll be on my way and leave others to look after this article for a while :-) BTW, I don't have a strong opinion regards the title of the article, but as noted by myself and several others, outside of the US mil is/was nearly unknown, or clearly a USism - and thou was definitely commonly used in print (again, outside the US), before metric/SI swamped it. I'd concede that it may not ever have been as formal a unit as the mil has been in the US - but even that isn't a "real" unit as far as I can tell. Snori (talk) 09:07, 23 August 2012 (UTC)

Snori might have stepped in it here. A "real" unit? You just sent quite a number of technicians and their engineering friends into a milspec tailspin. So before everyone's head spins from lack of a specific issue, let me put it bluntly: By what authority do people use either the mil or thou? If this is a matter of usage, then it is merely a unit of convenience or convention. It is no more a recognized unit than a carton of eggs or a "package of gum." While my examples seem to be clear and concise, there aren't formal bodies that produce perfect and precise uses, definitions, and standards for their international use. I will go further and say that even if there was an official name for this unit, the Wikipedia might not agree with official nomenclature and go with common usage... See the article Burma and its history to see why it's not entitled Myanmar.

So if this is not a real unit anyway, then the title isn't all that big of a deal. Even the poor Myanmarians have to be content with being Burmese if that's what consensus says or historically they were called. But as long as the mil is a simple matter of usage and convenience, then an article called thou can cover them both, real or imaginary, unit or convention. I like to saw logs! (talk) 00:45, 25 August 2012 (UTC)

Edit of Mnemonics

I would like to clean up this section; I'll probably combine it with 'Unit Conversions'.

In particular, the entry '1 μm is approximately half a tenth, or 50 millionths.' is roughly 20% inaccurate, and I'll remove it.

Any objections?Benthatsme (talk) 01:48, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

The reason for the section's existence (and separation from the precise unit conversions) is explained in its opening paragraph, and in my opinion, people who aspire to be good CNC operators (as opposed to pushing buttons blindly and spinning the roulette wheel to see whether scrap results) can learn valuable "feel" from it. It's about gut-level, intuitive, horse-sense comparisons—quick mental arithmetic while under pressure to be thinking about other things at the same time. To "feel" from moment to moment whether the numbers in front of you are wrong or right. Imagine the digital mic says your last wear offset change yielded a .003 mm difference in the part size. Quick!—tell me *now* (not 8 seconds from now)—how does that compare to .002"? Without thinking hard—without a calculator—without "doing a math problem". Can you do it? Did you know *instantly* it was way smaller, something like 1/15th to 1/20th the size—as opposed to 1/4, 1/2, or 1.5× the size? If so, you did it with arithmetic horse sense—not with a multiplication or division of a 3- or 4-digit number by a 3- or 4-digit conversion factor. Precise unit conversions, which are not instant mental math, are covered in the other section. The sections have different goals. The reason the least accurate mnemonic ("1 μm is approximately half a tenth, or 50 millionths") isn't more accurate is that half a tenth (often expressed as 50 millionths) is the closest landmark that means something to the machinist's gut instantly. "3.937008e-5 inches" may be more accurate, but it means nothing to your gut instantly. You "translate" the latter to "feel" it mentally; the former is "palpable" as-is. Meanwhile, as for "a tolerance of ±0.25 mm is about the same as a tolerance of ±10 thou"—that's both useful to the gut and also so accurate that the last 2 tenths are nearly meaningless. If they gave you a tolerance of ±10 thou, then you shouldn't be on the edge at 9.8 thou arguing about whether the last 2 tenths matter; if you are, then "you're doing it wrong", with "it" referring to your setup, tooling, or operating in general. Not that those 2 tenths are legally negligible—legally, at receiving inspection, you either are less than 10 thou or over it. But the point is, can you teach a student to feel that ±0.25 mm is about the same as ±10 thou, as opposed to ±2 thou, and to know in the gut upon first glance at the drawing, hey, this is a different animal regarding operating and inspecting? With the first one, the resolution of my caliper (half a thou) doesn't matter (I'll check periodically to confirm I'm staying well inside—whether it reads .0035" or .0045", either way I breeze right past it). Whereas with the second one, the resolution alone may trample both sides of the borderline between good and scrap, and I better carefully measure every third piece with a tenth-reading mic, instead of breezily measuring every 10th piece with a caliper. I better check the mic against a gauge block repeatedly throughout the day (whereas for the caliper, meh, I just confirmed that .250 drill this morning, it read .249—I have no doubt the drill and the caliper are both still good enough, we're not going to inspect closer to find out where the other thou went). — ¾-10 03:36, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

NOTMANUAL

The following was deleted because "very clearly WP:NOTMANUAL; removed".

For machinists who need to maintain a continual "horse sense" of relative size, it is useful to have a gut feeling for the following. (Each of these "equivalents" is off by an amount that is negligible for most practical purposes—for example, 2 tenths on a plus-minus-10-thou tolerance. But the point here is horse sense on the fly—quick common-sense mental math to keep oneself oriented when machining and inspecting.)

• 1 thou is about 0.025 mm.
• 10 thou is about 0.25 mm.
• 1 tenth is about 2.5 μm.
• 1 μm can be thought of as half a tenth (although a bit smaller, 40 millionths versus 50 millionths).
• 1 mm is about 40 thou.

I reinstated it but it was deleted again because "Not a textbook".
Yet just above the deleted lines was the following:

1 thou is equal to:

• 0.001 international inches (1 international inch is equal to 1,000 thou)
• 0.0254 mm, or 25.4 μm (1 millimetre is about 39.37 thou)

I don't understand what is manual like or textbook like about the delete lines but not manual or textbook like about those left behind. One group is approximate and the other is exact but both are useful for readers. WP:NOTMANUAL is meant to avoid us placing procedures and methods in articles - but that is not the what is happening here.  Stepho  talk  10:31, 14 April 2020 (UTC)

I was not involved in the removing, but I find the phrases "For machinists who need to", "it is useful to have a gut feeling for" and "can be thought of as" a bit un-encyclopedic. ⛐Boivie (talk) 10:54, 14 April 2020 (UTC)

True, but it can be reworded rather than outright deleted.  Stepho  talk  11:20, 14 April 2020 (UTC)

Direct and exact unit conversions are encyclopedic for obvious reasons. Though while we're at it this is already in the infobox so we could remove the redundant section (or expand and keep it, as in, example: Inch#Usage). Approximate equivalents for practical purposes do not fall into this category, as it is not the purpose of Wikipedia to serve as a practical guidebook (anyway, what kind of machinist (the groups it would be "useful" to...) would need Wikipedia for an approximate conversion??); see WP:NOTMANUAL: "6. Wikipedia is an encyclopedic reference, not a textbook. The purpose of Wikipedia is to present facts, not to teach subject matter." 107.190.33.254 (talk) 16:04, 14 April 2020 (UTC)

There are 2 points that I do not understand here.

1. Why do you consider exact units useful but not approximate units? For myself, I was raised on metric units, so I have a hard time visualising thousand's of an inch. Something that helps to visualise them would be useful.

2. Why do you consider approximate units as part of a textbook but do not consider exact units as part of a textbook?

Please note that I am happy to shrink the horse sense verbiage down to something like "Some approximations are:"  Stepho  talk  11:01, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

Exact conversions are encyclopedic material as they give a factual equivalent - this is done at literally every article about a measurement unit; ex. Kilometre#Equivalence_to_other_units_of_length, Newton_(unit)#Conversion_factors, Gram#Conversion_factors. Approximations could be presented, but, per what I quoted above ("The purpose of Wikipedia is to present facts, not to teach subject matter."), there would be little reason to do so in as excessive a fashion as it was (maybe a simple statement in the lead). More common metric approximations of imperial units have their own page, ex. Metric inch (25 mm), but that is clearly not warranted here. 107.190.33.254 (talk) 14:24, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

Musical Instruments String Gauge Reference

Someone replaced a reference to a free site with a specific reference to the topic ("string gauge") with a link to a general book that does not talk about string gauges at all. This did not add value to the page. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Gianca1976 (talk • contribs) 06:42, 12 November 2021 (UTC)

Sure, the book talks about it, on page 164 as the citation indicates. Swapping out self published websites for published books is a good thing. MrOllie (talk) 22:45, 14 November 2021 (UTC)

So the reader has to go out to the library and buy the book, instead of clicking on a link and find immediately, for free, the information he/she needs. Brilliant.— Preceding unsigned comment added by Gianca1976 (talk • contribs) 14 November 2021 (UTC)

I've added another book reference that is viewable online: https://www.google.com.au/books/edition/Mini_Music_Guides_Guitar_Care_and_Gear_E/2jWqBAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=guitar+string+%22gauge%22&pg=PA146&printsec=frontcover

Please remember to sign your comments by adding 4 tildes (~~~~) at the end.  Stepho  talk  11:27, 15 November 2021 (UTC)

Nice job, but the link I've entered provided more complete information. Also, the whole idea of "a thousandth of an inch as a measure of musical instruments strings" was associated with that link and added value to this page. Now, I understand the battle against spammers, but not all the external links are spam. And I've noticed on many pages many links that are clearly spam, but still allowed. At this point it would be better to forbid external links at all, otherwise it is easy to think about some form of manipulation. Gianca1976 (talk) 12:42, 15 November 2021 (UTC)