Talk:Traction (engineering)
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This article should be changed to Traction (physics). While it's used more in engineering, it's still a physical concept. It's the same as friction--no one would consider friction to be considered with engineering. Also, while I'm no engineer, I'd say that "heating losses" isn't a good way to express the reason why gears need to have low friction. a) The need for increased torque would decrease a machine's efficiency, and b) certain kinds of gears could be heavily worn, which would lead to decreased performance or failure. Also, "where the friction is used to provide motion" at the beginning is ambiguous. I've only looked at a few sentences of this, and it seems as though it needs heavy revisions.
I just wanted to point out that "tire" is the U.S. English spelling and "tyre" is the British spelling.
I'm not sure why someone went through and changed it everywhere from "tire" to "tyre". Wikipedia is not a British only encyclopedia.
I personally don't care which way it is spelled because Wikipedia is global. My concern is someone editing another's work simply because their culture spells things differently. If someone has a problem with proper spelling from a contributor, then add a new heading to point out that another culture spells a term differently. Just don't change the original work simply because it was written in a different country than yours.
When I read an article and it has a word spelled a particular way, I then realize the article is coming from a particular world view. If someone goes through and changes things here and there to suit their own culture, the "context" becomes muddled.
When the day comes that the world shares a common language then we should go back and update the articles.
[edit] Slips or sipes?
It looks to me as though the word "slipping" in the second paragraph in section 2 ("Friction trade-offs") should be "siping", which refers to making small narrow voids in the tread of a tire to increase traction, especially in wet conditions. It makes more sense in the context of the sentence. See the Wikipedia article Siping.
Avider (talk) 22:26, 2 June 2008 (UTC)
