Wikipedia editors have some powerful advantages over the author of a hardcover book. But where he has a distinct advantage is his ability to choose his favorite conventions and adhere to them consistently throughout the book. Unfortunately, the next book a student reads is likely to have different "conventions", but that's just a harsh fact of engineering life... not for idealists.
"Signal processing", in Wikipedia, suffers from an identity crisis, because it overlaps the realms of both mathematicians and engineers. Thus, in one article frequency is represented by ω in units of radians/sec, and in another it is represented by f in units of cycles/sec (hertz), and in yet another f is replaced by
Where some articles would say
others say
And in some signal processing articles,
is a Fourier transform, but in others it is a Hilbert transform.
IMO, a "signal processing" project should aim for more consistency than general Wikipedia is able to provide. I don't even know if that is in the project's scope. But if it is, the engineering flavor, a là Oppenheim & Schafer, is my personal preference.
--Bob K (talk) 19:01, 8 March 2013 (UTC)
- I agree, Bob, and I hope you'll help make it so. Not that the more mathematical stuff will be excluded or demoted, but it should be more in the depth dimension, not at the top level where concepts are introduced and breadth (of topic and audience) is important. I hope we'll go with an engineer-friendly notation everywhere. Dicklyon (talk) 20:18, 30 May 2013 (UTC)
- I am happy to help. But I don't yet know what that means. I've never been on a project before. --Bob K (talk) 23:08, 30 May 2013 (UTC)
- It's true that signal processing is a multidisciplinary subject and that engineers, mathematicians, physicists, and chemists all have their own notation conventions. A recent epic discussion in Talk:Convolution well illustrated to problem of editors of the different cultures talking past each other. My own two cents is that whatever notation is chosen for an article or set of articles, that notation should be explained and common alternative notations should be mentioned if warranted. While a textbook author can ignore any field of study they choose, I think we have a mandate at WP to the inclusive and descriptive of the different approaches, with due weight. For electrical engineering DSP notation, I agree, Oppenheim & Schafer is a classic. --Mark viking (talk) 20:59, 30 May 2013 (UTC)