Editing Significant figures (section)

== Relationship to accuracy and precision in measurement ==
{{Main|Accuracy and precision}}
Traditionally, in various technical fields, "accuracy" refers to the closeness of a given measurement to its true value; "precision" refers to the stability of that measurement when repeated many times. Thus, it is possible to be "precisely wrong".  Hoping to reflect the way in which the term "accuracy" is actually used in the scientific community, there is a recent standard, ISO&nbsp;5725, which keeps the same definition of precision but defines the term "trueness" as the closeness of a given measurement to its true value and uses the term "accuracy" as the combination of trueness and precision.  (See the [[accuracy and precision]] article for a full discussion.)  In either case, the number of significant figures roughly corresponds to ''precision'', not to accuracy or the newer concept of trueness. <!-- The smaller digits are not significant because they effectively random noise generated by the measurement process having little to do with the true value; they, they can be omitted for some reporting purposes. (This approach ignores techniques such as averaging to produce a higher-precision result.) *****NOTE: Aside from being broken grammatically, the previous blanket statement is unlikely to be true—it depends on the precision of the instruments and the exact situation. -->