Talk:Laboratory glassware

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[edit] Accuracy issues

Or maybe "semantic precision concerns". These are all really minor issues, but they need to be addressed by somebody who's more familiar with lab jargon than I am.

• Many of the items mentioned are often made from quartz or plastic, not glass. That doesn't necessarily mean you can't call them "glassware" -- usage is more important than etymology. But do lab workers typically refer to, say, a plastic test tube as "glassware"?
• "Tools" is vague and misleading. But what's a better word? Containers?
• "Used by chemists and biologists in performing scientific experiments" seems to leave out a lot. Do other kinds of scientists never use glassware? What about non-scientists working in a laboratory? Non-experimental lab procedures?

---Isaac R 16:08, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I took off the disputed tag; that's really for situations where people are involved in a heated argument over the material and it can't easily be resolved. I don't think that's the case here (at least not yet...)

Rather than try to pick the right few words, I expanded on lab glassware and what it's for. Hopefully this will explain the idea to someone who comes by.

As for your specific points, they're a bit tricky. I don't know if people call a plastic test tube "glassware". I think (not that I work in a lab) that people say "glassware" when they're speaking generically (even if all the glassware is made of plastic) but when speaking about something as specific as a test tube they'd be more specific about what it is ("test tube") and what it's made of "plastic").

Of course they're not just used by scientists, and not even just for scientific experiments; hospitals use them, people drink out of beakers, bell jars make great display cases, and so on. But this an encyclopedia, after all, not a dictionary, and so our goal should be to explain what it is, where it comes from, why it's made of glass, when people started using glass, and so on. --Andrew 16:35, Apr 27, 2005 (UTC)