Talk:Azure

message: I don't think it's useful to disambiguate Azure (color) from the use of Azure as a tincture. Tincture is merely a specific application of color, and could easily be discussed in all its intricacy in the same article. Please discuss at Talk:Azure. --Dystopos 19:39, 4 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Proposed merge

message: There is a move discussion in progress which affects this page. Please participate at Talk:Azure - Requested move and not in this talk page section. Thank you.  —RM bot 23:00, 6 April 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Move discussion in progress

message: There is a move discussion in progress which affects this page. Please participate at Talk:Azure (heraldry) - Requested move and not in this talk page section. Thank you.  —RM bot 00:40, 7 April 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Move discussion in progress

message: Three paragraphs above, User:PamD wrote: "it's mystifying to a non-expert that an article on one shade of "blue"...itself includes mentions and samples etc of so many other "shades of blue"..."
The error in Pam's logic is that azure as a color description is commonly misused in English and so has become ambiguous. 
It's cited in various references as signifying a color anywhere from cerulean to ultramarine.
Another ambiguous color example (and this one intrinsically so) is sky blue.
Anyone who has witnessed a cloudless, daytime sky from a Manhattan sidewalk, from mid-ocean and from an elevation above 10,000 feet knows that sky blue varies dramatically from place to place.
However, azure has an advantage as a color descriptive buried in the very word's etymology.
If properly used, azure designates a definite color which even has its own natural reference standard for comparison.
Azure is derived from lapis lazuli i.e. lazuli stone. Taken literally, the name signifies not only a particular mineral composition, but its provenance as being the Lajward region of Turkestan. Although a mineralogist, gemologist or geologist would have to confirm this, in general a mineral lode from a discrete region has a unique signature, i.e. a quite uniform and often definitive profile of impurities and conditions under which it was created and altered over time, all of which affect a gemstone's exact hue.
I believe it would be correct and informative for Wikipedia to go so far as to state that many synonyms for this color are misleading and actually misnomers.
I cite here Wiktionary. (See http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/azure/)
* Old French azur, derived from Arabic لازوَرْد (lāzaward, “lapis lazuli”), dropping the l as if it were equivalent to the French article l'. The Arabic is from Persian لاجورد (lajward, “azure”), from the region of Lajward in Turkestan.
As a point of interest, I suspect that the usage of azure to signify various shades of sky blue, e.g. cerulean, likely stem from confusion with the word ozone as it was often used prior to public concern about environmental issues. Expressions such as "Off in the ozone", "Take in the seaside ozone" were popularly meant to signify fresh air, fresh breezes and by inference, fresh, clean sky.
Mykstor (talk) 17:55, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: I think you're reaching a bit.  Lots of color names have, over the years, come to signify a much wider range of colors than their namesakes would imply.  Or do you think that "purple" is only Tyrian purple and no other hue between blue and red?  In fact, many cultures (like Russian) treat azure as a separate color rather than as a type of blue.  It's hardly a misnomer to use it to describe the color of a typical sky.  Powers T 00:40, 15 May 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Color Squabbles and Solution 

message: Regardless why people end up at this particular page, one thing is glaringly missing as far as pointing readers to knowledge. (We're foremost about learning, right?)
I strongly suggest a link be added to the list for those who want to learn what color azure technically and unambiguously refers to.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/azure
Mykstor (talk) 17:55, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: It's actually already there, in the template on the right, per MOS:DAB Wiktionary linking. This section has a very long heading, BTW. But the general info on source and ambiguity seem fitting for article on the color, or at least the Talk page there. ENeville (talk) 15:11, 12 May 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Azure: The Word's Very Etymology Specifies a Precise Color & Clears Up Much of the Babble Above 

message: The above exchange seems to get far off-topic from the original RfC.  Let's try to focus on the question being laid before RfC respondents - which is "Should the disambiguation page entry for azure (color) read "azure (color), a hue of blue"? Should it include "HSV"?'".
* Not include HSV.  Two reasons:
*# The dab page isn't supposed to contain any more information than is required to allow readers to understand which of several articles is the one they want to read.  We don't want dab pages to grow longer and longer descriptions for each option - so we prune those descriptions to the minimum necessary to get the reader to where they need to go.  If there were many articles about different colors that were all named "azure" - then we would need to provide more information in the dab page to help them do that.  But even in that case, I kinda doubt that giving the HSV values for it would help more than a teeny-tiny fraction of our readership.  However, this isn't a problem.  There are only two articles that talk about this term as a "color" - and one of those is clearly about special nomenclature in heraldry.  If I'm interested in some shade of blue called "azure" then the description for this article in the dab page (without the HSV values) makes it perfectly clear that this is the correct article to look at.  That's enough - so we don't want to add more because it's a dab page.
*# We don't add HSV values for other colors in their dab pages - I see no reason why azure should be any different. (Check, for example Blue (disambiguation), Red (disambiguation)).  Uniformity within the encyclopedia is a good thing.
*: SteveBaker (talk) 13:02, 22 May 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  RfC