Talk:Non-abelian gauge transformation

First sentence of the article: "The specificity of a non-Abelian Lie group is that its elements do not commute." So this means that the elements work from their home offices?--Seriously, this is the most confused and confusing article I've seen in a long time. It also doesn't help that a reference to the very basic term constant is the only outgoing link on this page. It would be really great if someone with understanding of the subject could bring this closer to being comprehensible for the average reader. Thanks a lot. Geheimdienst 18:56, 23 July 2006 (UTC)

I put a link from Abelian group to here and back. People there did a great job, and this page is related. 20:22, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

-- I changed the first sentence; hope its more understandable now for readers unfamiliar with the topic. Also added another example for a non-abelian group which FMPOV is easier to understand. Maybe an example using permutations would be even simpler? Isn't the section on gauge transforms rather technical for an articale headed non-abelian?

--Benjamin.friedrich 16:26, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

The problem is that this article was originally about non-abelian gauge transformations. But instead of giving it an appropriate title, the person who wrote it put it here (which had previously been a redirect to abelian group). Other people have have since added stuff about non-abelian groups, resulting in the current strange article. It needs to be sorted out, but I'm not sure of the best way to do this. I don't really see much point in having an article about non-abelian groups, and if we do have such an article it should be at non-abelian group anyway. --Zundark 17:51, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

I see the point. What about setting up an article titled non-abelian gauge-tranformations using the content of this article. Any article about non-abelian groups could be indeed very short, but I think it could be useful for readers who stumble across the term non-abelian for the very first time. --Benjamin.friedrich 12:47, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

I suggest breaking the article in two articles, Non-abelian group and Non-abelian gauge tranformation, and making the current page into a disambiguation page (as is done for Abelian). --Zundark 13:45, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

I don't see why we need separate articles on non-abelian groups and abelian groups, or separate disambiguation pages non-abelian and abelian. I'd agree with Benjamin: delete the bits on non-abelian groups and move this article to non-abelian gauge transformation (or merge into gauge transformation). -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 14:24, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

That's what I would prefer to do. (My suggestion above was designed to accomodate Benjamin's desire for an article on non-abelian groups.) --Zundark 15:17, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

I somehow managed to miss the "I think it could be useful" in Benjamin's comment. Guess it's time for me to go to bed … But to make it clear: I don't think it's useful - anybody will realize that a non-abelian group is a group that is not abelian, or won't they? -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 16:18, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

Well, I've gone and moved the page without thoroughly reading the talk page. Shame on me. I would support moving this to non-abelian gauge transformation and redirecting non-abelian group back to abelian group. Either that, or just have a short blurb here defining non-abelian groups, with appropriate links. -- Fropuff 07:18, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Since everybody seems to agree, I did this a short while ago. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 08:21, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Shouldn't non-abelian redirect to abelian, rather than abelian group? --Zundark 14:41, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Actually, I changed it to a disambig page, with a link to abelian. -- Fropuff 17:12, 3 November 2006 (UTC)