Prime
Background
Wikipedia has been a reliable resource for me over the years, and its content is primarily maintained by the community. I browsed through some very detailed and helpful articles on various topics in vision and optics while I was brainstorming project ideas. At a certain point, I came across some rather short and unfinished articles that had been tagged as pages needing additional information and references. I decided to update several Wikipedia articles pertaining to vision and optics because there was a need to improve many articles on some lesser-known topics, and it would give me the opportunity to research those concepts along the way. I had not edited any Wikipedia articles prior to this assignment, so it was also a chance for me to give back to the community for the first time.
Conjugate focal plane
The article on conjugate focal planes was the first page I came across that needed to be updated, and I thought that the explanation could use some elaboration. Since this was a geometrical concept, it was a challenge to understand and explain just using words, therefore I included a diagram to illustrate conjugate points. Some more references were added as well.
Original article
Updated article
Vergence (optics)
Vergence was a page that was tagged because it didn't have any references, and the explanation was also incomplete. I used Milton Katz textbook Introduction to Geometrical Optics as my main reference.
Original article
Updated article
Binocular summation
After working on a couple of topics on optics, I searched for and found an article on vision that was in need of some updates. There was very little information about binocular summation on wikipedia suggesting that it was just an obscure topic, but there has been a great deal of study on binocular summation. Even Erwin Schrödinger dedicated time to try and understand some of the mechanisms that allow for binocular summation.
Original article
Updated article
Conclusion
Even though I spent the more time trying to learn about and understand binocular summation compared to the other topics, I felt like I barely scratched the surface. The farther I traveled down the rabbit hole, the more questions I had. Not having the proper technical background in the field proved to be a major barrier since much of the terminology was foreign to me. It is an area where many theories exist that attempt to explain the mechanisms behind binocular summation, however we are still far from fully understanding how it works. Despite all of that, I do feel as though I learned a lot while researching the topic.
Since Wikipedia is accessible to everyone on the internet, I tried to take great care in explaining the concepts clearly and concisely. It took me many iterations for each item, and I now know how hard it is to come up with a good explanation on a non-trivial concept. My hope is that these updated articles will be more informative and helpful to anyone who might come across them.