Talk:Electron microscope#RfC: what next with this page

{{To|Materialscientist|Martin Ošmera|FuzzyMagma|Plantsurfer|Esem0|Niashervin|Graham Beards|Putneybridgetube|Meno25|JoachimKippenberg}} this is a ping to people who might be interested in EM. This is the main entry page for all the other electron microscopy pages, and has a significant number of daily views. It has two parts:

• Overview of electron microscopes and operating modes
• Sample preparation

I am going to leave the second out of this missive as the issues for that can (should) come later. I have been slowly adding to the overview, mainly text with links and a few sources (more still needed). I want to open a debate about what more should go in, if anything. Remember that this is an encyclopedia, not a textbook and we definitely do not want long sections on all the modalities -- that is what subpages are for (see {{lt|Electron microscopy}} and {{Category:Electron microscopes}}). For discussion:

1. Do we include all the techniques in the Template, or a one-sentence description of each?
2. More SEM?
3. Less of something?
4. etc

N.B., while I put "RfC" in the title, I did not make this a formal RfC. I am going to cross post to WT:Physics and WT:Chemistry and maybe one or two others. Ldm1954 (talk) 19:35, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

:I don't think I can contribute much to writing atm, but should there be a delineation between Electron microscopy (a redirect here) and Electron microscope, similar to Microscopy and Microscope? The potential Electron microscopy article could be a WP:BROAD-type article that summarizes techniques/lines of inquiry and this article could focus on the equipment itself with more emphasis on physics/engineering alongside history. This isn't how the TEM and SEM articles are organized. Transmission electron microscope redirects to Transmission electron microscopy. Scanning electron microscopy redirects to Scanning electron microscope... Maybe, all I have the appetite for is to harmonize the article naming on this side of microscopy. ⇌ Synpath 20:16, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

:@Ldm1954: note that Template:Electron microscopy is not shown to more than 50% of the readers of this page (mobile users). So yes, there should be a list of all techniques Ponor (talk) 07:00, 14 March 2025 (UTC)

:I agree with @Synpath on the delineation between "microscope" and "microscopy". The inclusion of every EM modality and sample preparation method is what really bogs this page down imo.

:Maybe the page for Transmission Electron Microscope could be focused on history, theory, and modern hardware; whereas the Transmission Electron Microscopy page would be focused on the history of TEM methods including sample prep. I think SEM could be separated into its own set of pages as well, but a more complicated question is whether STEM should be kept with TEM, I would probably think so but I have no strong opinion. Niashervin (talk) 17:21, 14 March 2025 (UTC)

::I was leaving sample preparation out of the discussion, but since you raised it my thinking is that it should be separated out into a different page (as I suggested a little earlier). This page then becomes more manageable. We can still split further content out of here...so lets continue this discussion to get a good consensus first. Ldm1954 (talk) 17:33, 14 March 2025 (UTC)

:{{to|Materialscientist|Martin Ošmera|FuzzyMagma|Plantsurfer|Esem0|Niashervin|Graham Beards|Graham Beards|Ponor|Synpath}} I finally found time to finish this page with some sources. It is not my best work, but good enough for the government. I will leave it to you or others to take it further; I do not have the energy to go through a GAN on this, although it is not far off. Ldm1954 (talk) 17:40, 14 May 2025 (UTC)

1. Remove the workflow section, it seems out of place
2. Add SE & BSE imaging

I think it is then just the boring job of references and some updated figs. Added here for comments. Ldm1954 (talk) 02:26, 9 April 2025 (UTC)

This image :File:Jeol_Transmission_and_scanning_EM.jpg is useful because it is the only one that shows the size of the instruments. Why is it being removed from the article without a consensus? Graham Beards (talk) 20:28, 20 May 2025 (UTC)

:I removed it because it is completely obsolete, no modern microscope looks like that. It is a 50 year old image, and while it may have historical relevance as the instrument Sumio Iijima used for his first atomic images at ASU (and what I learned on), it is not close to representative. If you really want a scale there are a few images in Wikimedia commons such as https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Advanced_Microscopy_Laboratory_(49941605241).png which is what modern instruments look like. Ldm1954 (talk) 20:46, 20 May 2025 (UTC)

::The microscope is still in use. Graham Beards (talk) 05:48, 21 May 2025 (UTC)