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::::{{ping|DePiep}} Yes, since you asked. Give me a moment to put it together, most of it is from where something almost like it was proposed above as Compromise 3. [[User:Double sharp|Double sharp]] ([[User talk:Double sharp|talk]]) 20:49, 30 November 2020 (UTC) |
::::{{ping|DePiep}} Yes, since you asked. Give me a moment to put it together, most of it is from where something almost like it was proposed above as Compromise 3. [[User:Double sharp|Double sharp]] ([[User talk:Double sharp|talk]]) 20:49, 30 November 2020 (UTC) |
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:::::No hurry, take three moments (especially if that serves the "briefness" part of concise ;-) ). Oh and may I add: pls also describe the content nuts, and how they were cracked. -[[User:DePiep|DePiep]] ([[User talk:DePiep|talk]]) 21:03, 30 November 2020 (UTC) |
:::::No hurry, take three moments (especially if that serves the "briefness" part of concise ;-) ). Oh and may I add: pls also describe the content nuts, and how they were cracked. -[[User:DePiep|DePiep]] ([[User talk:DePiep|talk]]) 21:03, 30 November 2020 (UTC) |
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=== Rationale === |
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I will ignore the parts of the periodic table that were not changed. |
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Mostly, sources that present periodic table colourings are working more or less at an overview level, not delving deep into the chemistry of a single element. They also are usually meant as a didactic introduction to signal out groups of like elements, especially the easy-to-cover ones that will be introduced early in chemistry. Therefore, priority was given to such sources as [https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/education/whatischemistry/periodictable.html ACS], [https://periodic.lanl.gov/index.shtml LANL], [https://www.rsc.org/periodic-table RSC], and [https://www.britannica.com/science/periodic-table Britannica]. Priority was also given to IUPAC (as the relevant authority) when it had something to say, which is unfortunately not always. Further down the list were textbooks and monographs (e.g. Greenwood & Earnshaw, Holleman & Wiberg as very common reputable textbooks), and finally individual research papers for the "difficult" superheavy elements that are not well-known. |
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'''Group 12 as transition metals.''' This is something that has been strongly argued against. However, even Jensen who was [[http://www.che.uc.edu/jensen/W.%20B.%20Jensen/Reprints/091.%20Zn-Cd-Hg.pdf strongly against this] in 2003 had to admit that nearly all introductory general chemistry textbooks were doing it, and that it was only the advanced monographs on specific topics that sometimes demurred (but even then it was 50-50). So do all four of ACS, LANL, RSC, and Britannica. IUPAC presents the definition including them ''first'' in the [https://old.iupac.org/publications/books/rbook/Red_Book_2005.pdf Red Book 2005] (their latest word on the matter): {{cquote|For example, the elements of groups 3–12 are the d-block elements. These elements are also commonly referred to as the transition elements, though the elements of group 12 are not always included}}. That is also evidently their primary definition, as when they discuss the organometallic nomenclature in pages 228 through 232, group 12 is ''not'' discussed with the main group elements. Greenwood & Earnshaw as well as Holleman & Wiberg both consider group 12 as transition metals, though Cotton & Wilkinson demur. Therefore it seems more justifiable to follow the more general perspective. This also matches what we had in 2010. |
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'''Other metals rather than post-transition metals.''' Between ACS, LANL, and Britannica (RSC classes by group in this area, which is a rarer choice) there is not agreement on which to use: there are also a bunch of other names in the literature such as ''poor metals'', ''chemically weak metals'', ''p-block metals'', ''B subgroup metals'', and so on. As such it seems more prudent to not take a side and simply use ''other metals'', which is indisputable as a catch-all qualifier. This also matches what we had in 2010. |
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'''Metalloids.''' There is not agreement between ACS, LANL, and Britannica about whether there should be a metalloid category. The first two have one as {B, Si, Ge, As, Sb, Te, Po}; Britannica lacks one, splitting {Ge, Sb, Po} to metals and {B, Si, As, Te} to nonmetals. Most English-language sources do have one, but are often a bit hazy about which elements are in there. The literature survey done by {{u|Sandbh}} whose results are at [[lists of metalloids]] was consulted: here {B, Si, Ge, As, Sb, Te} emerge as the most common six inclusions by far, with a huge drop to the next inclusions {Po, At} that have always had a certain amount of iffiness hanging around them due to their intense radioactivity. In general, it seems that most sources that focus on polonium do treat it as a metal: in this special case of a difficult-to-study but still ''fairly'' well-characterised element (unlike most radioactives, Po is not ignored or quarantined off into its own special section in Greenwood & Earnshaw), following them seems reasonable. |
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'''Other nonmetals.''' ACS, LANL, and Britannica are unanimous about splitting out the noble gases ''and'' the halogens from most of the nonmetals. Both are, after all, some of the first examples of group trends an average chemistry student encounters, and make sense to highlight at this overview level (that's not true for the pnictogens and chalcogens, say). There is not agreement as to whether these should just be called "nonmetals" or "other nonmetals" between them, but since "other nonmetals" is the only accurate one anyway (everybody agrees that chlorine and argon are nonmetals), we have used it. This also matches what we had in 2010. |
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'''Halogens, with reference to At and Ts.''' The problem is that there are two definitions of "halogen" running about, as there seems to be for a lot of these categories. In the literature ''focusing'' on the superheavy elements, there is some feeling I detect that you have no right to call an element a "halogen", a "transition metal", or a "noble gas" before you have actually characterised it chemically, and that if the properties are badly matching enough it's possible that Ts is not a halogen (e.g. [https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2018/cp/c8cp05690k/unauth#!divAbstract here]). So that's the specialised practice. However, outside the subset of chemists focused on these issues (which is very tiny given the short half-lives of the problematic elements At, Ts, and Og), nobody cares. ACS, LANL, Britannica, and RSC are unanimous about calling At and Ts halogens. Greenwood & Earnshaw and Holleman & Wiberg have no qualms about calling At a halogen (they were published before Ts was discovered). The 2005 IUPAC Red Book is absolutely clear that the halogens include At. It was published before Ts and Og were discovered, true, but IUPAC reports in [https://www.degruyter.com/view/journals/pac/88/4/article-p401.xml?language=en 2016] made it clear that for them Ts and Og were in the halogen and noble gas ''groups''. Indeed, that's the very reason why they are called ''tennessine'' and ''oganesson'' with the -ine and -on suffixes of their groups, and not -ium like for other elements. So clearly for them it means the whole group. |
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I feel that on the above grounds using the definition in which Ts is ''not'' automatically a halogen, and Og ''not'' automatically a noble gas, and using an "unknown chemical properties" category, is catering only to the superheavy-element community and not the rest of the chemical world that does not seem to care about such issues. I'm sad about that because I think the superheavy-element community has the right idea here, but they're not usually in the business of colouring periodic tables as an overview of the elements people actually care about. |
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Finally, I think it is simply premature to classify astatine as a metal, metalloid, or a nonmetal. [https://cen.acs.org/physical-chemistry/Astatine-chemistry-puzzle-shows-anticancer/98/i31 As far as is experimentally known], it sometimes reacts characteristically like its lighter buddies in the halogen ''group'' which are all clearly nonmetals (fluorine, chlorine, bromine, and iodine). But sometimes it reacts more like a metal instead. Experimental results on copernicium appeared to suggest metallicity – but later theoretical calculations pointed out that the result was also consistent with nonmetallicity. Therefore I feel that any metallicity category here is an overreach, and that it is a good thing that we have a group category to save the day. We ''only'' have predictions telling us that At is probably a metal, that Cn is probably a nonmetal (like a noble gas), that Ts is probably a metal, and that Og is probably a semiconductor (so maybe a metalloid like silicon?). We can hardly use these predictions without some element of original research for Og, and the predictions have changed before for elements like Cn, Fl, and Og: who's to say they may not change again? |
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'''Noble gases, with reference to Og.''' All of the above on Ts applies here to Og. |
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'''Colouring Mt through Lv.''' I agree that somehow it looks problematic with colouring them with category names that include "metal" when it's not actually sure if these elements are metals. On the other hand, ACS, LANL, RSC (for Mt through Cn), and Britannica all do that anyway. Besides Cn, no one seriously expects anything different, and for Cn, predictions have changed back and forth and they may well do so again. I also feel that it is not a problem that the category names become "formal" and a bit divorced from the actual meaning when everybody is making them so anyway. No one asks how bismuth is "choking" when that's where "pnictogen" comes from (well, I suppose you could choke on a large piece); no one asks how polonium can be an "ore-former" when it's too unstable to form ores; no one wonders why Be and Mg are "alkaline earth metals" ''in English'' (I know they do in Russian and Japanese, but that's not exactly the practice the English Wikipedia should probably be prioritising); no one wonders why the ''rare earth elements'' are not rare. With all this behind us, what's wrong with Og as a "noble gas" that is neither noble nor a gas? |
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Therefore this colour scheme seems to be one of the best solutions within the bounds of what can be justified from sources to the whole problem. It was worked out as a compromise in the first place, seeking to follow the sources but at the same time try to be as "correct" in a way that both of us could agree on (and you know we sometimes differ very strongly about what exactly is "correct"). Because of the support I got for it on my talk page, I have decided to launch it. |
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Note that subtleties regarding how the status of Mt is not actually experimentally known, as well as the problematic metallicity of At, Ts, and Og and possible lack thereof for Cn, are all discussed where appropriate in the infoboxes. See {{tlx|infobox meitnerium}}, {{tlx|infobox astatine}}, {{tlx|infobox tennessine}}, {{tlx|infobox oganesson}}, {{tlx|infobox copernicium}}. For the everyday reader, I submit that what we show is enough as an overview, and that there is no need to footnote elements that to a first approximation no one cares about and that no one will get to see for a long while if ever. |
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Finally, we note for clarification that: |
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*So as to avoid having to rush a discussion at the last minute when elements 119 and 120 get discovered, we will add that ''unless'' sources do something massively different, element 119 will be coloured as an alkali metal (like Fr) when discovered, and element 120 as an alkaline earth metal (like Ra) too. Future elements may require a big reshuffling of the PT because of the double footnote to fit in, and will likely take a while to come on the horizon; therefore what to do with them will be discussed at a future date. |
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*This scheme only decides the ''categories''. In particular, it makes no decision about the precise colours used for the categories. Those may be discussed separately. It also makes no decision about the composition of group 3. That is a subject that will be returned to hopefully when Scerri's article appears in ''Chemistry International'' outlining what has gone on at IUPAC, as it is expected soon. |
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[[User:Double sharp|Double sharp]] ([[User talk:Double sharp|talk]]) 21:39, 30 November 2020 (UTC) |
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I admit that I haven't read all of the above. I am aware of the La v Lu and related debates in the literature and here, and also on the style of colouring the PT on WP. I have also looked through our article on the periodic table, and I am wondering if the debates here are the most important, or whether they go to the issues from the perspective of encyclopaedic content. We are writing for the average of 30,000+ page viewers per day, most of whom will not be chemists with broad knowledge of the topic. Some examples:
Going on from there, the PT article goes into categories, metals v non-metals, etc, which seems more like the content for an article on the history of the elements than for an article on the PT. After outlining what the PT is, doesn't next come history (how it came to be that way) with element properties history that led to changes in the PT appearing at the appropriate point in the development of the PT? Do others see that we have a problem with the structure of the PT article itself, and that we should discuss this first? For example, I can see how the debate about colouring and blocks v. categories in the PT in the overview arises. For me, the table given is too complex, though it is suited for the lede image and the article, but in reorganising the overview in some way (perhaps as I suggest off the top of my head), there becomes a natural presentation with the categories complicated one at the end and a blocks option preceding it. Thoughts \ Comments \ Suggestions \ Criticisms \ etc? EdChem (talk) 03:19, 17 October 2020 (UTC)
DS comment@EdChem: I think you are almost totally right, both about what you suggest, and that the debates here are strictly speaking less important than how the lede and the overview are not doing their jobs. (In fact, there's at least one statement in the lede that is flat-out wrong. Six groups do not have accepted names, because IUPAC never said that the names applied to the whole group. Only for the alkaline earth metals did they name all the known elements in the group, and when element 120 is discovered that also goes out the window. ^_^) In fact you remind me of my somewhat-naughty-for-WP user subpage when I tried to write as an example what I'd do if I had my pedagogical hat on rather than my encyclopaedic hat on: User:Double sharp/Teaching periodicity! That's certainly not OK for WP, but I now think it was worth doing as an exercise because even though the language changes a lot, it certainly sheds light on what the logical sequence is supposed to be. I just have two little pet peeves with what you propose (albeit ones I can substantiate by reliable sources). Please don't take my expounding on this at length the wrong way; I love everything else about it. I just really really dislike especially the first one being gotten wrong when we actually have reliable sources getting it right. ^_^
This is something that I have had to complain about for ages, but no, the blocks do not come from the electron that differentiates an element from the previous one. I am sure of course that you know this, but I think we should not simplify this in such a way that the resulting statement is incorrect. Simplify yes, but we have to keep things correct; this is an encyclopaedia, we will get readers of every level, and we should probably not lie to children. To substantiate my case, I give some reliable sources below. Yes, I know some books say that blocks come from differentiating electrons. But I think this is outweighed by the fact that reliable sources are in agreement that electrons are literally indistinguishable. (Not to mention that I have never seen any reliable source that succeeded in defining what a differentiating electron is in such a way that the definition actually applies to cases like vanadium d3s2 proceeding to chromium d5s1, or lawrencium d0s2p1 proceeding to rutherfordium d2s2p0, but that's a minor additional point.) Serious sources covering physics understand this. If you look at them, they may use the sloppy language, but they make it very clear and apologise that it is sloppy. Like Feynman's lectures on physics:
So we cannot single out the 2s electron in a lithium atom and call it the differentiating electron because we cannot even distinguish which electron is the 2s electron. Yes, he talks roughly about the "third electron", but he says it's a rough way of talking, and explains that in reality we cannot distinguish which is the third electron. I realise that using the sloppy language is very tempting. I am often tempted to use it too. Some people who know better do it, like Eric Scerri who in 2009 made the point "electrons in any particular atom cannot be distinguished, which means that speaking of an atom as actually having this or that d electron for example is also strictly an approximation", but in 2019 still talked about differentiating electrons. But we're not a textbook and I don't think we should simplify things down to a level that is too likely to cause a misunderstanding. And, you know, we have a precedent for ignoring the textbooks when studies are clear that what they say isn't right. That would be hypervalence, where I'm sure you'll still find textbooks explaining SF6 and friends with expanded octets and d orbitals because it's apparently still in some syllabi. The only problem is that we've known for a while that that's not true at all and that there is no significant d involvement there. So, as an encyclopaedia, we in fact reflect that understanding in our article on hypervalence even if textbooks are being sluggish. And that would be because school-level textbooks have something else constraining them other than the facts: they need to simplify things to the reader who is only just encountering something new, and even if they want to do things right, they may have to conform to the official syllabus in their country. Similarly, reliable sources understand that the situation with d and f block configurations is actually not too significant, whence I quote Feynman again:
So it's not really that important that the configurations don't match. What we have, and every periodic table poster shows, are gas-phase configurations. This is a situation that is about as far from chemistry as you can get: a single atom with nothing else around. As Feynman quite clearly states, for many d elements the configuration can change depending on exactly what elements are around. This is also stated for f elements in Christian Jørgensen's lecture-paper The Loose Connection between Electron Configuration and the Chemical Behavior of the Heavy Elements (Transuranics). In the same author's review Influence of Rare Earths on Chemical Understanding and Classification he writes:
So, finding reliable sources to refute the simplification is not a trouble. The only trouble is that this is mostly explained in textbooks near the beginning of a chemistry course when d and f elements are not on anyone's mind, and so I suspect many textbooks will be sloppy about it just because the oversimplified version works perfectly for main group elements and the rest of the table can be swept under the rug. I know there is someone who explains it properly, and that's William B. Jensen:
Now, it's true that Jensen very strongly supports the Lu option, and that his criteria were stated in the context of that support. On the other hand, Lavelle in his reply (on the next page of that article) is a strong La supporter, and he also wrote "I agree with Jensen’s four points on classifying elements in the periodic table". Not to mention that the La vs Lu dispute is basically related to the foundations of what the PT is all about: outside textbooks, I suspect this is one of the few places where those things will be talked about rather than disregarded as obvious stuff known since school. Therefore I think we can use this one. It accords with the generally accepted science rather than being a pedagogical simplification; since we do not have our pedagogy hat on here, I feel we should focus on the former So I'd replace some of your points in the middle (italics for what I've changed) with:
This way, we avoid having to mention the electron configuration outright in the lede and need to explain exactly what needs to be fixed about that picture for the d and f elements; we cut straight to an easily explained version of the correct statement. A sentence on the problems with gas-phase configurations for d and f elements might be fine here only as a footnote. In the main body, of course, we can talk about this in a little bit more detail and promote it to the actual text. And I say "elements with some chemical similarities" rather than "chemically similar elements" to avoid having wiseacres at the back of the classroom wonder how nitrogen and bismuth got into the same group even for Mendeleev. (I know, it's not a classroom, but probably the same personality type. ^_^) He was looking at the valence there, if I am not mistaken: for both elements maximum valence is +5. So that's a chemical property that matches even though many others don't, which is why I think my wording may be a bit better there. Again, it's just a fine line for me about being both simple and right.
This thing at the very end segues into what I think is one of the two issues we are discussing. I don't even think we should colour to signify categories in the first place because nobody can agree on what categories to use and what their boundaries are. Yes, most textbooks show categories. But what categories? Anything we colour, like Se as a nonmetal rather than a metalloid (which one quarter of sources do!) or as a metal, picks a side. In the absence of a warning for just about any element near this borderline I feel that any colouring along a metallicity line gives undue weight to one side. Worse still, we outright put in places like I think you are correct, EdChem, to prioritise pnictogens and chalcogens in the lede over those metallicity p block categories, because the former are actually IUPAC-approved and the latter are not. But I think that for the above reasons, what is best is to display nothing but blocks as a general thing for colouring our general PT images. Outside the group 3 issue (which is something else in itself), which elements belong in which block is at least something that is 100% agreed on by everybody. Many textbooks colour more than that indeed; but I find it likely that most of those textbooks also know what a block is and talk about it when explaining the structure of the periodic table. Once that one almost-universally agreed thing is done, then we can talk about categories. And by talking about them, we eliminate the sticking point that many of them overlap and that chemists don't agree on the scope of each category. Sandbh has already given two sources that disagree with the WP colour scheme. The fact that the literature is split 50-50 on whether the Zn group should be considered transition elements or not should already caution us about any colour scheme in the first place! Those are hard to reflect in a picture where we have to colour each category clearly. But if we just want to describe where each category lives in the table with text, then everything is 100% fine! So we can talk about the chalcogens category (O, S, Se, Te, Po), without in any way jeopardising other categories like metalloids that commonly includes Te and sometimes Po, or post-transition metals or the myriad of other similar categories that quite often include Po. And we can talk about the transition metals as a category while making it clear that there's disagreement in the literature about group 12, without having to pick a side when colouring. I feel that would reflect the large spread of what the sources do far better than any colouring choice would do. So I would prefer to replace your last sentence with: "The PT below presents one widely-used layout, with colourings to signify blocks; many tables also colour in specific categories, many of which are described below." Looking forward to your comments. And sorry for spending so long on what amount to such minor proposed changes from what you've very kindly suggested when I love almost everything about what you've written; it's just that once you know that the first thing is not quite right, you get slightly annoyed whenever you see it wrong. ^_^ Double sharp (talk) 10:16, 17 October 2020 (UTC)
DePiep commentFollowing up EdChems post.
YBG comments@EdChem: Thank you for giving a fresh review to our PT article; I agree largely with what you say, but I have a few questions. Where to from here? Here are some ideas, in no particular order.
The common thread in these items is my desire to get the most reader-bang-for-the-editor-buck by finding changes that improve our corner of WP without waiting for some hard-to-reach consensus. By all means, we should tackle the more difficult issues, but at the same time we should intentionally find non-controversial efforts that provide us with significant improvement. This will maximize the benefit the readers receive from the effort we editors put in. YBG (talk) 18:13, 17 October 2020 (UTC)
I'm happy with pretty much everything in EdChem's list that I didn't comment on. ^_^ In other words, other than some peeving in the middle about the exact significance of electronic configurations and how there is no such thing as a differentiating electron as agreed by such an august reliable source as Feynman, I pretty much like everything he wrote as it stands. (The second disagreement is just that I don't think we should colour categories at all.) So if it went through with just that one minor thing amended it would be fine. It just looks like a bigger disagreement than it really is because I quoted a bunch of reliable sources to back up what I'm saying. I am pretty sure that Lists of metalloids#Appearance frequency clusters falls under WP:NOR. Specifically because it's statistical analysis per Wikipedia:What_SYNTH_is_not#SYNTH is not numerical summarization. Of course I would prefer User:EdChem to opine on that since he likely has a firmer grasp on policy than I do. Personally, I don't understand why we have to give categories this much of a pride of place. As used in the literature, their names are mostly fuzzy, their existence can be fuzzy, their boundaries can be fuzzy. Everything is fuzzy! That's not a situation I think the infobox is worth using. And many of the category names that have been mentioned here are not even ones that would be widely recognisable. I still strongly suspect that "reactive nonmetal" is going to give chemists the question "reactive relative to what?" That's not so much a category in usage as it is a two-word phrase. And exactly which category name are we picking among the multitudes of names given for categories that are sort of like but possibly not quite the same as post-transition metals? Do we have to list all sixteen from Post-transition_metal#Related_groupings when listing the categories tin is in, or what? Common names, that are in textbooks, that are approved by IUPAC, yes, those can be spared. We can still write in the articles things like "Sodium is an alkali metal", "Cobalt is a transition metal", "Holmium is a lanthanoid and one of the so-called rare earth metals". Those are all fine. And in the more problematic p block we can write things like "Arsenic is a pnictogen that has both metallic and nonmetallic properties; it has variously been classified as either a metal, a nonmetal, or a metalloid." Or maybe "Tennessine is a member of group 17 of the periodic table, but it is expected to behave quite differently from the halogens fluorine through astatine and should have predominating metallic properties". (Note how I avoid saying there if Ts is a halogen or not.) That is all fine with me. But let's not put them in the infobox as if such category assignments are fundamental to the element. They really are not. And they really are not agreed. Basically: I feel this is a way better job for article text than an infobox. Yes, if you asked me to put on my pedagogy hat, then yes, I can very easily define for you clearly what a metal is. And I can very easily define for you some categories. And that can solve all those problems. But the literature isn't unified behind that, and it isn't even split up between a few options, and that isn't even a particularly common option. So, we can do that as we please in our own books, in our own articles, but not here on Wikipedia. Now, the rest of it. Regarding "building up the PT": I am not sure how an animation would help. Because the way to build up the PT in reality depends on getting each element by itself, looking at its electron cloud structure. I am not sure how an animation really helps with that. Generally how it's done is to show the first few elements and then periodicity appears because Na-Ar match properties of Li-Ne (the first clear example), but for that it's easier to do if you see everything at once. If we mostly agree that the section needs a redesign, I can dust off some of my mental drafts and produce something. Basically like a scientific description of how this whole thing was set up, i.e. not how it historically was discovered. But, now I need time again for RL. Later. ^_^ Double sharp (talk) 19:47, 17 October 2020 (UTC) DraftingSince the Inspiration Fairy has struck, here is a first draft of the lede section. Overview to come at her next visit. It is a rushed first draft, it is too long, and it does not read perfectly yet, but I think it does a better job at getting across the important stuff than what we have so far. ^_^ Double sharp (talk) 20:47, 17 October 2020 (UTC)
P.S. A minor request about that lede PT: could you help me (1) remove the stray line below period 1, (2) if possible add atomic numbers, and (3) if possible deliberately misalign the f block rows so that there is no vertical alignment with the d block columns? I do not want to give the readers the impression that La belongs in group 3, Ce belongs in group 4, etc. They have similarities (secondary relationships) but I feel it just confuses the particular readers that are not super advanced yet (and anyway in the 32 column form this all disappears). Double sharp (talk) 22:52, 17 October 2020 (UTC)
Wow... that stimulated some discussion!Thanks to everyone who has commented, and for having done so in a constructive and collegial manner. I was hoping to find support for the idea that the overview needs a re-write, but I guess after ANI was not expecting the idea to be enthusiastically embraced. I am grateful and encouraged, so thank you. That having been said, I think some of the above is going in directions that I didn't expect. In no particular order:
Finally, which of my thoughts / suggestions ends up being used is always subject to consensus. I know that's obvious by policy but I want to be totally clear that I don't believe my thoughts should have any more weight than anyone else's, nor do I expect that they will. I do think deciding what in the article should be kept, what should be changed, and what is contentious is worth identifying fairly soon, in part as it avoids work being reverted, etc. Thanks. EdChem (talk) 00:43, 18 October 2020 (UTC)
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@EdChem, Double sharp, and YBG: I have no concerns about any of these, as far as postings on this page go. The latter live or die according to their reception, here. I'll qualify that by saying our project is very small and sometimes, IMHO, good ideas get stuck due to personal, irrational dislikes (which have no place in an encyclopedia) rather than any basis in scientific merit, no matter how many supporting sources are provided. I've posted about this previously. But that's life; you have to manage it and learn from it, as best you can; it's likely no different in other forums; and how people feel or think can enrich your own perspective on whatever it is that is being discussed. There is WP:RFC in any event which I'd never chance my arm on without first testing the water, including here and with other chemists, physicists, scientists, and in other forums. WP:IAR. I'm more interested in WP:IAR, in pursuit of a better encyclopedia. The quality of an encyclopedia doesn't rest on quoting WP policy to one another. Much more relevant is Wikipedia has no firm rules:
This is particularly relevant, I feel, in chemistry, where there is much fuzziness not helped by the disinterest of the IUPAC, when it comes to terminology. Principles, spirit, and knowledge gathering and summarising are what count, rather than quoting WP policy. Obfuscating knowledge. A particular peeve of mine is seeking to hide knowledge that exists in the literature on the grounds that explicit consensus is lacking in the literature. These are some of the most interesting aspects of chemistry IMO, and they deserve ventilation. If we'd still been hiding behind a say-nothing do-nothing see-nothing approach our metalloid article would still be subject to repeated back and forth editing as to which elements are metalloids. If there is no explicit consensus in the literature I seek to accomodate that fact in the best, most pragmatic way I can, consistent with the principles and spirit associated with improving Wikipedia, as an encyclopedia. That is the commendable approach the founders of our colour category periodic table took in 2003, in the absence of complete consensus in the literature, and in the best tradition of encyclopedia building. Irony. In writing all of this I realise the irony of myself quoting WP policy. I plead making an exception in this case since the policies I refer to are antithetical to interpreting other WP policies in black letter law fashion. Categories. On categories, we have some kernels of agreement. I support YBB in merging AM and AEM; Double sharp has expressed some support for this; R8R is not keen. On splitting the reactive nonmetals, I support this, Double sharp too, and R8R has expressed in principle support. YBG is not keen since he is interested in reducing the number of categories per 7±2. EdChem, I see you don't have a strong view on it beyond that the lens to examine it from is (IYO) how it assists / supports readers, which I agree with. So there is some reasonable support, with a few o/s concerns. Sandbh (talk) 03:07, 18 October 2020 (UTC) R8R
@R8R: The common reader will have effectively no idea what e.g. AM, or AEM are, or halogen N, for that matter. There may be a few who have heard of older "halon" fire extinguishers, and perhaps read the label and noticed a reference to e.g. chlorine or bromine. There is effectively nothing to confuse the common reader. As for astatine, effectively none of them will have heard of it. I once again note the references in the literature to the less active, moderately active, and highly active nonmetals, and that a chemist, who has written about nomenclature, suggested the name moderately active nonmetals to me. Here are the examples again:
The lengths you will go to in avoiding or ignoring literature, even if it is ugly, are extraordinary. Sandbh (talk) 04:17, 20 October 2020 (UTC)
@EdChem: I believe User:R8R, User:Sandbh, and I are having a disagreement in this section that you could help with by providing a perspective. ^_^ Double sharp (talk) 09:20, 20 October 2020 (UTC)
@EdChem: Just drawing your attention to this for your view. @R8R: And yours too, since it relates to you. Double sharp (talk) 08:45, 22 October 2020 (UTC)
@R8R: Thanks. My comments follow. Noting your closing comment, if I feel a need to continue discussing this interesting topic, as opposed to starting an RFC at the periodic table talk page, I’ll start a new thread. 1. Regarding the common reader, I make no assumptions about what they may or may not know, nor their motivation for looking up or reading any particular article. An encyclopaedia is an encyclopaedia. We are not in the business of second-guessing the nature of individual readers, nor their motivations. What one will find familiar another will find boring, and vice-versa. It’s none of our concern. A quality encyclopaedia focuses on consistency of its articles and a consistent reading level approach, that’s all. 2. We do not include a category of moderately active metals because the “transition metals” category is about 30,000 times more commonly encountered in the literature. If there was no such thing as a transition metals category I expect we would look at what terminology the literature uses to refer to the metals involved, and choose a category name on that basis. We took the same approach with the PTM category name. 3. There is nothing confusing about “halogen nonmetals”, given we chose to colour categorise astatine, having regard to the literature, as a PTM. Astatine is still a halogen according to IUPAC, of course. Cleary, some halogens are nonmetals, and at least one is a metal. So what? The confusion you are concerned about is a manifestation of what I wrote about before i.e., “…we are knocking ourselves out…striving to attain unattainable consistency and terminology standards which just don't exist in chemistry”, rather than focussing on what the science tell us, as per EdChem’s suggestion (and I include classification science here), even if we find the outcome to be unpalatable or ugly, according to our subjective personal experiences, which have nothing to do with science, per se, nor with an encyclopedia. 4. I agree that you and Double sharp, and I, are committed to developing a better encyclopedia. 5. It occurred to me that our encyclopaedia has > 6,000,000 articles. I presume there would be room in such an encyclopaedia for an article on halogen nonmetals, and another one on moderately active nonmetals or another equivalent from the dozen or so alternatives there are. Certainly there would be no shortage of literature to draw on; ditto metalloids, and noble gases. Oh, not forgetting that “moderately active nonmetals” was suggested to me by a non-WP editor chemist who has written on nomenclature matters. Sandbh (talk) 09:27, 28 October 2020 (UTC) EdChem
Double sharp
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Fresh energy for the periodic table: A bold start
@Double sharp, DePiep, YBG, R8R, ComplexRational, EdChem, and Andrew Davidson:
- This is an experiment in cooperative continuous improvement editing (CCIE).
- I've made a start on bringing the periodic table article back up to FA standard.
- IMO, part of the issue was that the lede and overview sections overlapped.
- So I removed the overview section!
- The structure of the lede now matches the structure of the whole article, as it should.
- If there's something you feel is missing, that I trimmed, that's OK: give some thought as to where it would be best postponed, then go ahead and add it back in.
- This experiment in CCIE won't work if their is a mass revert, or mass reverts.
- The aim is continuous improvement editing i.e. ready-fire-aim, rather than ready-aim-fire.
- User:EdChem provided plenty of fresh energy for our PT article, here, which is ripe for harvesting.
--- Sandbh (talk) 05:07, 15 November 2020 (UTC)
- I have attempted to compliment the effort by reducing the part on the group 3 dispute to the size that subsection should have always featured. Everybody is welcome to check after me and see if I removed something of tremendous importance. I have removed the bifurcation option as it's not common yet; we can discuss it in group 3 element.--R8R (talk) 09:18, 15 November 2020 (UTC)
- That looks not bad as an overview to me, R8R. Although maybe we should have just one extra sentence about approximately how long this has been going on? Double sharp (talk) 10:48, 15 November 2020 (UTC)
- @Double sharp: maybe, but the way you're putting this question, I don't know the answer to it myself. If this has been going on for XX years, what event did it start with exactly? I suspect it hasn't really been going on all these years, so I'm not sure. But maybe you have a sentence in mind?--R8R (talk) 11:14, 15 November 2020 (UTC)
- @R8R: I wrote in what I had in mind; what do you think? I based it on what the IUPAC project says about it, with just a vague "decades" combined with a citation to Hamilton 1965 (it talks about the issue, argues in favour of one side, and it's from 1965, so that probably proves it's been going on for decades ^_^). Double sharp (talk) 11:44, 15 November 2020 (UTC)
- Fix ping: R8R Double sharp (talk) 11:45, 15 November 2020 (UTC)
- @Double sharp: I think the debating part is fine, I think it's good to stay. However, I have removed the mention of the first measurement of the 1st IE of Lr because it is an extremely marginal thing to mention.--R8R (talk) 12:25, 15 November 2020 (UTC)
- @R8R: I wanted to include it because the IUPAC project mentions it as having provided the impetus for making the thing big again. But since it is indeed a minor part of the entire story, I think your approach also works. ^_^ Double sharp (talk) 12:36, 15 November 2020 (UTC)
- @Double sharp: I think the debating part is fine, I think it's good to stay. However, I have removed the mention of the first measurement of the 1st IE of Lr because it is an extremely marginal thing to mention.--R8R (talk) 12:25, 15 November 2020 (UTC)
- @Double sharp: maybe, but the way you're putting this question, I don't know the answer to it myself. If this has been going on for XX years, what event did it start with exactly? I suspect it hasn't really been going on all these years, so I'm not sure. But maybe you have a sentence in mind?--R8R (talk) 11:14, 15 November 2020 (UTC)
- That looks not bad as an overview to me, R8R. Although maybe we should have just one extra sentence about approximately how long this has been going on? Double sharp (talk) 10:48, 15 November 2020 (UTC)
In the spirit of R8R's bold actions; maybe we should cut the section on period 1 similarly? I have not done so yet, but have copied the current content over to period 1 element as a preparation. Double sharp (talk) 11:48, 15 November 2020 (UTC)
- I suggest we do just that, yes.--R8R (talk) 12:25, 15 November 2020 (UTC)
- @R8R: Done And maybe we should link the two somehow by mentioning that somehow this seems to be a conflict between exactly what decides placement of elements on the PT. Double sharp (talk) 13:02, 15 November 2020 (UTC)
- @Double sharp: great. I don't think that's needed, that's not too hard to figure out, though if you think otherwise, I won't object, either. Another thing that appears overly inflated to me right now is Periodic_table#Categories; maybe I'll get to it tonight.--R8R (talk) 13:09, 15 November 2020 (UTC)
- @R8R: Looking forward to seeing what you do with it. If you ask me, the thing about sets of elements needs to be worked on to make it more clear that it's about the PT. As of now it maybe reads too much like an article about chemical elements. I think this is the material that EdChem's draft covers better, if you ask me.
- Regarding categories, I also think that the group 12 in transition metals thing is not a periodic table controversy, despite where it is placed. The periodic table looks the same regardless of whether you think they are or not. I rather think it is something that should be mentioned in the overview when categories are briefly discussed as an example of how their boundaries are fuzzy, saying that while in basic literature they are often included, a significant portion (but not all) of the advanced literature excludes them based on them having different properties. Then maybe say that in general, the categories in use will depend on the situation, and we simply show a scheme that is generally close to most sources. I think that's all we really need to say about it there, with an aim to say much more about categories at chemical element whenever that article gets developed better. But we can think about it. Double sharp (talk) 22:38, 15 November 2020 (UTC)
- @Double sharp: this edit represents what I had in mind. I have established the relevance to the topic of the article and stayed loyal to the idea of having to write an overview article. The section is underreferenced now to say the least (something we should fix), but the idea behind the edit should be clear.--R8R (talk) 18:25, 19 November 2020 (UTC)
- @R8R: I like what you did and edited it a bit (some parts shrank, other parts grew, but mostly stayed the same size). I tried to stick to the idea of just giving a few examples.
- Do you think, metals/metalloids/nonmetals should just be considered under this section as well rather than having its own? Because (1) many category schemes seem to be not too fussed about whether they are metallicity or group-based schemes (witness how At, Ts, Og got treated by LANL/RSC/ACS/Britannica/IUPAC etc.), and they are equally supercategories. I understand that currently we have the idea that we have subcategories of these three supercategories, but most people in the literature seem not too fussed about that. Double sharp (talk) 19:26, 19 November 2020 (UTC)
- P.S. I am starting to think that the organisation is problematic enough that we should rewrite the entire first two sections starting with EdChem's proposal as a base. For one thing, since so many categories match groups, and the group structure "comes first" in the sense that a PT is still a PT no matter how you categorise it (even if you randomly assign things, in which case it's silly but still a PT), but one can ask questions about which elements "belong" in which groups and just randomly placing anything anywhere will not give you a PT anymore, I feel that the whole business typical general chemistry textbooks go into about how the PT comes from electronic configurations and the Aufbau principle should come first. I don't know if I have time to do it today, but my feeling is that it should be done. Double sharp (talk) 19:29, 19 November 2020 (UTC)
- @Double sharp: I like your edit very much.
- Come to think of it, you're right; the discussion about metals and nonmetals we have now is more fit for chemical element than it is for periodic table.
- I haven't been thinking of what I'm doing so far as of a part of the effort to rewrite the article, merely as a preparation for that. I find it important to lose the irrelevant bits first (this will help the readers who are going to read the article in the next few days before we finish our rewriting, and it will help the editors who will take part in this rewriting to remember what not to include), and then, a rewriting will follow.--R8R (talk) 19:40, 19 November 2020 (UTC)
- Yay! ^_^
- I agree with you, the discussion about metals and nonmetals belongs mostly in chemical elements. OTOH, the transition from metals to nonmetals is itself also a trend on the PT. So I guess it deserves a mention, just not a big one. In fact, the greatest difficulty I have had in thinking about how to even start writing the whole section is how to strike a balance between talking about chemical elements (a cool topic and all, but not the one of this article) and the periodic table. And in doing the latter you need to be careful about how much you devote to the periodic law (the statement about the chemical elements, saying the properties of the elements and the compounds they form are a periodic function of their atomic number) and the periodic table (which is a tool to organise the elements). So I feel like I have to go back to the really basic textbooks to see how they do it. Because the problem is that I have known this stuff for so long that I've forgotten how it was explained in the first place.
- There is one other thing I have thought about that I feel I should run by you first. I am not really comfortable with the section on TMs and unknown chemical properties in the section on controversies. This is really a categorisation issue, we have already discussed it. Why single out TMs and superheavies when there are so many other disputes (e.g. which elements are metalloids?). I feel like we have already addressed this simply and should not do it again. I am also unsure about how the rest of this section should go actually, but at the very least I also get the feeling that we talk way too much about the extension. So I have made some drastic shortenings and removals over there, asking myself "have we already said this, and even if we haven't, is this something we need to tell the beginners?". Hope to hear your opinion. Double sharp (talk) 20:44, 19 November 2020 (UTC)
- @Double sharp: this edit represents what I had in mind. I have established the relevance to the topic of the article and stayed loyal to the idea of having to write an overview article. The section is underreferenced now to say the least (something we should fix), but the idea behind the edit should be clear.--R8R (talk) 18:25, 19 November 2020 (UTC)
- @Double sharp: great. I don't think that's needed, that's not too hard to figure out, though if you think otherwise, I won't object, either. Another thing that appears overly inflated to me right now is Periodic_table#Categories; maybe I'll get to it tonight.--R8R (talk) 13:09, 15 November 2020 (UTC)
- @R8R: Done And maybe we should link the two somehow by mentioning that somehow this seems to be a conflict between exactly what decides placement of elements on the PT. Double sharp (talk) 13:02, 15 November 2020 (UTC)
P.S. Since IUPAC mentions both 18 vs 32 column on their homepage, since some 32 column tables appear even before the matter is discussed, and because explaining the 32 column form is literally a matter of explaining the asterisks like we will have to do anyway, I feel like we should not actually have a section about 18 vs 32. They are, after all, supposed to be the same, just whether or not the asterisk is in there or not. Rather I feel we should simply explain it in the overview: say that to fit on the page, the f block elements are usually cut out and placed at the bottom, though this practice is not universal. Honestly, as far as which tables get a section there, I feel like the Russian-style 8 column table has far more of a claim there than the 32 column one: it is unarguably different. 18 vs 32 is, rather, a question of whether to cut out Alaska and Hawaii from a map of the USA so that the map does not include a ton of ocean in between. But I haven't changed anything on that front yet. Double sharp (talk) 20:56, 19 November 2020 (UTC)
And the more I look at this article: the more I think we have been somewhat remiss in overusing primary sources. I think that we should really be following what is given mostly in textbooks and/or popular-science treatments, so I currently am iffy about sections like Periodic_table#Linking_or_bridging_groups and whether they should really be there or not. I advance this with hesitation because use-of-sources issues are what caused the latest flare-up, but to reach a shared vision of improving the article, it must be raised. I add that my section on Periodic table#Kainosymmetry has a similar problem, and the only reason I have not removed it yet is because IIRC the double-periodicity result is mentioned in Scerri's The Periodic Table: Its Story and Its Significance. So, that seems to qualify for listing as one of the trends as that's a rather popular popular-science treatment, although the basis of it probably should be axed from this beginning article. (Besides, now I'd probably treat it in one sentence, something like "There are also other intragroup trends on the periodic table, such as the double periodicity in which certain properties tend to alternate between even and odd periods." I think that's more or less the level the beginner really needs anyway.) Double sharp (talk) 20:59, 19 November 2020 (UTC)
@Sandbh: I feel that you should be aware that, in the spirit of being WP:BOLD and trying to adhere to Jehochman's statement at User talk:YBG Imagine you are explaining chemistry to a first year high school student. What do they need to know? Any extra complexity an be explained in the article text (who say this alternative, who says that alternative), or footnotes
, we have deleted some of the content that I remember you previously added. This includes some text supported by citations on the grounds that either of us feels that it does not adhere to Jehochman's statement that we find reasonable. I have also deleted some of my own old text, which should clarify that this is not and was not intended as a personal matter. If you object to any of the removals, then please feel free to revert and discuss. Double sharp (talk) 21:54, 19 November 2020 (UTC)
- Double sharp, All good. Being bold is what I intended. I'll catch up with it eventually. Sandbh (talk) 03:50, 20 November 2020 (UTC)
Discussion
The actual formal group 3 proposal
Extended content
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Should the periodic table on WP be presented in this form (Sc-Y-La): or this form (Sc-Y-Lu)? Note that this is not going to be about the categorisation. The only topic I plan to have discussed here is the group 3 issue.
Added later: the precise wording of the footnote is open to discussion, and the important thing is just that there be one. So even if you don't like the footnote in either option, you can first write which form you prefer to have in terms of the main PT, and afterwards discuss how to change the footnote. The important question is which form you support as the main one and relegating the other to the footnote. Double sharp (talk) 00:04, 19 October 2020 (UTC)
OpinionsRequested from @R8R, YBG, DePiep, Droog Andrey, ComplexRational, Sandbh, Officer781, and EdChem: who have discussed things on the ELEM talk page recently and are still active. Double sharp (talk) 15:20, 18 October 2020 (UTC)
SupplementsAnyone can write a long wall of text here supporting a position. I prefer the opinions above to be kept short (one paragraph of justification, maybe) to avoid confusing the issue, but here we can go on as long as we want. Double sharp (talk) 16:38, 18 October 2020 (UTC) Long justification by DS for his !voteWhen asking this, we need to look at reliable sources by policy. So what do the most reliable sources say? Here's my view. In contrast to my previous postings on it, I am not going to mention the scientific arguments at all because they are not relevant for WP: only the sources. IUPAC Well, there's the rub. They haven't exactly decided. Since 2015 they have had a project specifically to deliver a recommendation on which it should be. Some sporadic progress updates have been posted, but there is no indication on a time schedule. Given that IUPAC has not actually approved any form of the periodic table (link is to their website), this is maybe not surprising. Now, it is true that they currently do show something. They show a compromise form with all fifteen lanthanoids, and all fifteen actinoids, in group 3 below yttrium. The only trouble is that if you look at their project page, this compromise is specifically not among one of the two alternatives that will be picked. All they say there is:
So, what we can say is that IUPAC has acknowledged that there is an argument and has set up a process to make a decision. In my opinion that shows clearly that we should not present any one form as if it is uncontested. The only problem is whether to make it:
We can also ask where this compromise came from. That seems to be from the 1988 IUPAC report New notations in the periodic table prepared by Ekkehard Fluck.
The arguments for Sc-Y-Lu in the literature, judging by this, seem to have been considered convincing by an official process of IUPAC. (One may argue that Fluck prepared the report, but IUPAC also published it and others gave comments.) This is suggestive, although weak because it did not lead to its adoption. The reason for Sc-Y-* to be adopted seems to be just to compromise between this and the fact that Sc-Y-La was more common. However, that is also a bit moot because the IUPAC project is specifically not going to pick the compromise option; evidently it is not a compromise that actually made anyone arguing about this happy. So this doesn't strongly support anything very well in my opinion: surely it eventually decided in favour of showing Sc-Y-*, but apparently now this is not going to be the final decision; and surely it suggested that some people at IUPAC were convinced by Sc-Y-Lu arguments, but it didn't translate to its official acceptance. I personally read this as a point mildly in favour of us showing primarily Sc-Y-Lu over Sc-Y-La (since Sc-Y-* is due to be deprecated), but it is not the strongest one. The report refers to the 1988 Red Book. Now, there wasn't actually one. But there was a 1990 Red Book (maybe it got delayed?), which contains 8, 18, and 32 column periodic tables. The 8 and 18 column forms shown indeed follow the compromise arrangement just as Fluck said. However, in a 32 column form this compromise is simply impossible without stretching scandium and yttrium. And lo and behold, on p. 283 it shows a 32 column table with a Sc-Y-Lu group 3. With "3, IIIA, IIIB" very clearly presented above the column with Sc, Y, Lu, and Lr, and nothing above the column with La and Ac. The only subsequent Red Book is from 2005, and there only the 18 column form is presented: they write "Lesser omissions include ... the several different outdated versions of the periodic table." So the significance of the Sc-Y-Lu group 3 in the 1990 Red Book is in doubt, since it is for the 32 column form that they call outdated. OTOH, that 32 column form is actually still used, and our navbox templates actually show it, so it's not really that outdated. One could equally make the argument that since we show the 32 column form sometimes, and that is the latest 32 column form shown officially by IUPAC, that we should follow it. I do read this as a minor point in favour of showing primarily Sc-Y-Lu over Sc-Y-La, but again it is not the strongest one. Which is maybe not surprising because they have not recommended anything yet, so we cannot read too much into this. A paper by Holden that was supposed to be presented to the IUPAC general assembly in 1985 clearly supports the Lu under Y option. But IUPAC has not yet officially recommended it. Therefore, the situation with IUPAC seems to be:
This suggests to me that:
So IUPAC isn't so helpful as it doesn't clearly support anything at the moment. All we can get from it is confirmation that the dispute exists. Textbooks A IUPAC survey of textbooks shows that while the La form dominated in the past, support for it significantly weakened with the start of the new millennium. We have now reached the point where it does not have a majority. Indeed, no form seems to have an overwhelming advantage anymore:
I have given percentages that were not in the original, but that is WP:CALC I guess. It's not a full-blown statistical analysis. Although the set of texts with lanthanum in group 3 is still a majority, it has significantly lost its former plurality. Moreover, the set of texts with lutetium in group 3 has quite a few well-known texts in it (not a complete list):
Excluded from the survey but also extremely well-known is
There is also
I think it's clear that the Lu form cannot be dismissed. It has to be mentioned in some fashion with such adopters. Of course, the La form also has very significant adopters, such as Greenwood and Earnshaw; I just list more Lu adopters to make it clear that these things do exist. I draw from this situation the conclusion that:
So textbooks aren't so helpful either. We can get confirmation that the dispute exists, and that we have significant names on both sides, but we still don't have any idea which should be primary. Specific articles, texts, books, etc. focusing on the issue We now come to what I feel is the most important argument. Probably most textbooks do not have their focus on this issue, and so it is necessary to look at articles also that do. Probably one of the most cited articles about this is William B. Jensen's from 1982 supporting Lu. That is the one that even IUPAC referred to above. In fact even La advocates have complained about how often it is cited (e.g. Lavelle). In this article he brings together much supporting evidence from various articles by physicists and chemists. Among those that he cites are:
Another source from this time period (maybe less cited) that additionally support this placement is:
Today, many articles focusing on the question refer to Jensen (1982) or some of his sources, such as Thyssen and Binnemans (2010) which clearly refers to Jensen (1982), or Labarca and Gonzalez (2019) which clearly refers to Jensen (1982) as well. As can be seen from the above, this took some time to percolate into chemistry textbooks. Jensen complained in his 1982 article that chemists were at that time generally unaware of the dispute. But now it has been getting quite somewhere. In the 2000s even more articles came in, and a particularly strong voice in favour of lutetium has been Eric Scerri who chairs the IUPAC project mentioned above that is aimed at resolving this question. In recent years his rhetoric has even gone so far as saying that the paradigm of lanthanum in group 3 "must die".
In particular, note his books The Periodic Table: Its Story and Its Significance and The Periodic Table: A Very Short Introduction. Both are popular treatments and both supports the Lu under Y option. Of course Scerri is not the only source supporting it. We also have quite a few more:
And what of lanthanum arguments? Well, from before Jensen's 1982 article there is:
The only ones present in specific articles or sections of books focusing on it, dating from after 1982 when Jensen brought things to chemists' rather than just physicists' attention, are those of Lavelle; Restrepo; and Vernon (= User:Sandbh).
Of the last two, I cannot complain; they are legitimate reliable sources supporting Lu. But Lavelle's three articles have all been strongly rebutted by Jensen in his articles of 2008 and 2015. His verdict on Lavelle's La advocacy is particularly devastating:
And he also points out that, contrary to Lavelle's charge that his 1982 article is outdated, the support for Lu in group 3 has significantly increased since he wrote that article, pointing to Ouyang et al. (2008) and Fang et al. (2000). Although Jensen clearly has a stake in the matter himself as a strong Lu supporter, I feel this should be taken into consideration in some way. Disagreements where one source rebuts another's arguments are of course nothing too special (e.g. Vernon does so to Alvarez), because these are literally opposing views. But the scale of this rebuttal is pretty huge compared to Vernon's rebuttals of a few recent Lu arguments in his paper. So is its tone. Looking at the fact that La supporters among articles that address the problem in some way are fewer in number, contain one that has gotten a very devastating rebuttal, and the fact that Lu supporters are greater in number and are having a clear effect on what textbooks show (it was slow at first but it's getting somewhere), I submit that the literature-based case is in favour of lutetium as a default. It has the support from most of the articles discussing the issue, and that has already percolated into support by some significant, established textbooks such as Clayden et al.'s Organic Chemistry (hardly fringe), as well as significant, established popular treatments of the periodic table such as Emsley's Nature's Building Blocks and Scerri's The Periodic Table: Its Story and Its Significance. This isn't just a bunch of articles saying B is true and railing against A when textbooks continue to say A in spite of them, like it would have been in the 1990s. It's a bunch of articles saying B is true and railing against A when a significant number of noted textbooks have followed them and have started to say B. And creating an argument that IUPAC has acknowledged. Note that Scerri, Jensen, Lavelle, Restrepo, and Ball are all on the IUPAC project! That is not to say that we should sweep the whole issue under the rug and pretend that Lu has already won and gotten the IUPAC approval. Of course we shouldn't do that. But it does mean that I think the best way to deal with this situation is to present lutetium in group 3 as the main thing, and to mention in the footnote that lanthanum in group 3 is also a common placement. For a generally used template, this could be done like so as I proposed above. That nicely reflects the situation: IUPAC hasn't yet made a decision, and the literature is undecided as a whole, but the subset of it focusing on this issue skews towards Lu in group 3. When IUPAC makes a decision, we can revisit depending on what they say and how many chemists listen to them. Finally, insofar as that is worth something, this layout is exactly that of the 32 column form given in the IUPAC 1990 Red Book (expect that it doesn't have the colours, has the old alternative group numbers also, lacks the note on group 3, and lacks the elements past Lr which had not yet been officially named at the time). Double sharp (talk) 10:15, 18 October 2020 (UTC)
Although my personal inclination is already swayed by the above argument, focusing on the sources focusing on the group 3 question based on my reading of WP:CONTEXTMATTERS, User:YBG gave another argument I agree with in his !vote. The point of that argument is that Sc-Y-Lu in group 3 is definitely more consistent with the Aufbau principle in that it clearly puts the 4f elements before the 5d elements. That is in the sense of just filling in electrons: so when trying to guess the electron configuration of erbium in the ground state, you see 68 electrons as Z = 68, and fill them in from lowest energy orbital up in the order 1s, 2s, 2p, 3s, ... demanded, and get [Xe]4f126s2 as it correctly is. This is, in general, the sense in which Aufbau is discussed: not about differentiating electrons, but about whether the total ground-state gas-phase configuration matches what happens if you do that. This is why molybdenum [Kr]4d55s1 is universally considered an Aufbau anomaly even though it has the correct 4d differentiating electron from niobium [Kr]4d45s1, because Aufbau used in the accepted sense would predict it to be [Kr]4d45s2 (which is a little bit up in energy). But technetium [Kr]4d55s2, the next element, is never considered an Aufbau anomaly even though it has the wrong 5s instead of 4d differentiating electron from molybdenum. The argument therefore is that since it is pretty universally agreed that the Aufbau principle has something to do with the shape of the periodic table, it is significantly easier to do the sort of explanations typically found in textbooks on periodicity if one uses a Lu table. If one uses a La table, one often ends up with the "pedant's hand raised at the back of the classroom" phenomenon: one has to note that the table does not follow Madelung there, that La is the one transition metal of the third transition series that is not affected by the Ln contraction, and so on. Yes, some sources happily self-contradict (Greenwood and Earnshaw actually does it for the second issue I mentioned), but it's an easily avoidable self-contradiction. That seems to me to be a case where WP:IAR could be reasonably applicable: both La and Lu have some reasonable source-based cases going for them, but it is just easier to write the article without lurking self-contradiction to be swept under the rug if Lu is given first place. Double sharp (talk) 22:32, 6 November 2020 (UTC) A couple of notes from beforeI originally posted this as a discussion thread, but we have discussed this to death already, so I decided to turn it into a !voting thread since no one else has posted !votes / opinions yet. I posted an extremely long rationale for my !vote, but the actual question itself seems pretty neutral to me. Mostly, I just want to get this through, having discussed this topic in various iterations on WP pretty much since the year started. Some earlier discussion took place and is below. Double sharp (talk) 15:17, 18 October 2020 (UTC)
@EdChem: Forgot to ping you, sorry. Double sharp (talk) 10:47, 18 October 2020 (UTC) @Double sharp: One question, if I may: is the proposal only about the group 3 debate or is it also about moving the primary categorization scheme to blocks only? I had the feeling it was the former but the illustrative table uses new categories, too.--R8R (talk) 10:54, 18 October 2020 (UTC)
Moved from Opinions to SupplementsComment by EdChem and ensuing threadThis subsection moved from § Opinions with the permission of its two contributors, EdChem & Double sharp: as noted in § A small question. YBG (talk) 02:23, 21 October 2020 (UTC)
End of copied thread. YBG (talk) 02:23, 21 October 2020 (UTC) Details of Sandbh's opinion and ensuing threadThis subsection moved from above (in § Opinions) with the permission of Sandbh as noted in User talk:YBG § Another small question.
End of details of Sandbh's opinion moved from above (in § Opinions). YBG (talk) 01:39, 23 October 2020 (UTC) This subsection moved from above (in § Opinions) with the permission of its two contributors Sandbh & Double sharp: as noted in User talk:YBG § Another small question. YBG (talk) 01:39, 23 October 2020 (UTC)
End of Double sharp's response and Sandbh's replies moved from above (in § Opinions). YBG (talk) 01:39, 23 October 2020 (UTC) Discussion on YBG's reasons for supporting LuYBG's post, hereunder, as copied from here.
@YBG: If I may rain on your parade ^_^:
R8R's considerationsLuckily, by the time I found enough spare time to write down a response, the most prominent supporters of both versions have spoken up. Double sharp's position amounts to a few key points:
Sandbh's position boils down to the following points:
I do not entirely agree with either line of reasoning.
Given that we are a tertiary source, a phrase I used a number of times over the last few weeks, I believe the arguments still show there hasn't been a game changer (one may consider a possible future resolution of the IUPAC group 3 project in favor of -Lu-Lr such a game changer), and we should stick to -La-Ac for the time being, as much as I would have personally preferred to pick the other option.--R8R (talk) 15:40, 25 October 2020 (UTC)
@Double sharp: IMO:
Sandbh (talk) 06:25, 29 October 2020 (UTC)
@Double sharp: Was that ping for me or R8R?? Sandbh (talk) 05:10, 9 November 2020 (UTC)
Other discussion@Droog Andrey: I'd like to read your article about the group 3 issue. The images linked by User:Double sharp (thank you!) are too low quality to enable a translation into English. Is there anything that could be done about this? Sandbh (talk) 21:29, 19 October 2020 (UTC)
Aesthetics and symmetryIntroduction As promised, here is a discussion on the (non-)relevance of aesthetics and regularity in the context of the Group 3 question. It is taken and adapted from my peer-reviewed open access article which now has 400 accesses, in Foundations of Chemistry. The editor is Eric Scerri, who is also the chair of the IUAPC Group 3 project.
My conclusion is that, akin to a game of whack-a-mole, attempts to improve regularity in the appearance of the periodic table increases the number of irregularities amongst various other properties and relationships across the table, and cognitive dissonance with respect to chemical relationships between or within groups or series of elements. Further, while Nature does not care about aesthetics, the composition of Group 3 as Sc–Y–La–Ac appears to be more consistent with the texture of the world. Scerri sets the sceneScerri (2008, p. 57) has argued for lutetium under yttrium (and helium over beryllium), since the periodic table can then be arranged, from a philosophical point of view, so that it shows the greatest degree of regularity and symmetry. Such a table may better reflect the regularity of the periodic law. He cites as an example, the left-step or Janet periodic table (Fig. 9). Such a table facilitates a regular array of vertical triads (Fig. 10), in which the middle element of the triad has an atomic number that is the average of those of the first and third elements. Scerri does not support lanthanum under yttrium since, in a 32-column table, and on the basis of regularity and symmetry, this once again results in awkward split d-block (Fig. 11).[n13]
Scerri's argument remains inconclusiveHis argument remains inconclusive as there is no basis to regard regularity or symmetry as fundamental requirements (Scerri 2004, p. 149; 2019, p. 385). Stewart (2018b, p. 75) observed that, “Triads are a consequence of the structure of the system and cannot at the same time be its cause.” Scerri (2020a, pp. 387, 401) acknowledges that we should be aware of arguments based on regularity or symmetry. Jensen (2019), whose 1982 article in the Journal of Chemical Education kicked off the debate on the composition of Group 3, recently attacked the relevance of [vertical] triads. Curiously, as discussed later in this article, increasing regularity in the shape of the periodic table increases the number of irregularities amongst various other properties and relationships across the table.[n14] Indeed, as Imyanitov (2016, pp. 153–154) observed: If one seeks for the maximum chemical utility…[one] should opt for the more ‘unruly’ tables. If one seeks maximum elegance and orderliness above all…[one] should favor the more regular representations.
The historical obsession with symmetryThe obsession of the Greeks with the concept of symmetry retarded progress in astronomy for at least 1500 years (Yang 1996, p. 271). They perpetuated the idea of the Harmony of the Spheres and the Dogma of the Circles. According to these works, the heavenly bodies must observe the most symmetrical rules, and the circle and the sphere are the most symmetrical forms. But the heavenly bodies do not make simple circular motions. So they tried to fit their motions with circular ones superposed on circular ones. When that did not work either, they tried circular ones on circular ones on circular ones, and so on. My shock and realisationThe first time I saw a 32-column table with a split d-block (Fig. 11) I thought it must have been “wrong” since it appeared so awkward; I later came to realise that I’d subconsciously adopted the Western cultural obsession with symmetry.[n15] Jensen earlier referred to the abuse of (Platonic) symmetry considerations in the construction and interpretation of periodic tables in general, including to the extent of triumphing over the inconvenient facts of chemistry (Jensen 1986, passim; 2003, pp. 953–954).
Symmetry breakingAn emerging field of thought is the importance of symmetry breaking,[n16] rather than pure symmetry:
As Eugen Schwarz (2019, pers. comm., 8 Dec) stated, "The real, rich pattern of elements’ chemistry does not fit into a clear-cut rectangular grid." This view is consistent with that of Dias (2004, p. 375), who asserted that:
Real chemistsIn this vein, Mendeleev used horizontal triads when he predicted the properties of the then undiscovered elements scandium, gallium, and germanium. He discussed his technique using the horizontal triad arsenic-selenium-bromine to estimate the atomic weight of selenium (Scerri 2008, pp. 585–589). A high degree of orderliness, and explanatory power, can nevertheless be found in Rossotti’s (1998) split d-block periodic table template (Fig. 12). Rossotti shows where each subshell starts; how the lanthanoids and actinoids are interpositioned between Groups 2 and 4 and, in this instance, the electron configuration make-up of gadolinium and its predecessor, europium. Here, the lanthanoids run from cerium to lutetium; and the actinoids from thorium to lawrencium. The split d-block is thus integrated into the overall design of the table. The domain of chemistryA related consideration is that the internal structure and external shape of a chemical periodic table is determined by chemical facts rather than considerations of regularity, beauty or symmetry (Cao et al. 2019, p. 26, passim). Here, the use of multiple considerations to triangulate a solution is consistent with the role of classification science, as well as the premise that “Classes are usually defined by more than two attributes…” (Jones 2010, p. 169). In other words, in the absence of a categorical solution we are obliged to use quantitative or qualitative arguments to establish a solution.[n24]
ConclusionIt is ironic that, akin to a game of whack-a-mole, attempts to improve regularity in the appearance of the periodic table increases the number of irregularities amongst various other properties and relationships across the table, and cognitive dissonance with respect to chemical relationships between or within groups or series of elements. While Nature does not care about aesthetics, the composition of Group 3 as Sc–Y–La–Ac appears to be more consistent with the texture of the world. That said, since periodic tables or systems form a continuum-like series of representations, different approaches to the Group 3 question (even that used within the IUAPC) will continue to have their uses. And please remember to explain the relevant context to your students. ClosureI would like to propose that this thread be closed with no action. We have since heard from Sandbh that Scerri is writing an article for Chemistry International which will contain some information about how the IUPAC project is going. Since things are happening on schedule there, it seems to me that it doesn't make sense to pursue this line further when the doings of that project are going to be of utmost importance when it comes to affecting the situation one way or the other. We may revisit it once that article is published. The thread can then be archived with the understanding that we'll not re-broach this topic till then. It simply records our current positions and rationales with no prejudice at all to changing them when new information arrives in the form of news from the IUPAC project. So, we will have a friendly understanding (I hope) that say, I lean Lu and Sandbh leans La, but we will not discuss it again until something really new happens off WP on it. Double sharp (talk) 20:50, 13 November 2020 (UTC) |
New periodic table: implementation
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I have a proposal about what we're going to do once we've established what changes, if any, we want to see in our future periodic table. So far this includes the group 3 question and the question about categories. I'd like us to implement those changes, if they are approved, simultaneously, and on top of that, there is one more pending change which we could also implement at the same time. We have established that the current color scheme has potential for improvement. I propose to change the coloring scheme once we have figured out what categories it should have and what their composition would be. As soon as we have agreed what categories the periodic table should have and what their composition would be, we should not change the periodic table instantly. Instead, we note that a conclusion has been reached and we start a sufficiently long period of time, say, two months, in which all editors who would like to propose a new coloring scheme for the periodic table can craft one. When the period ends, we discuss the submitted schemes and choose the best coloring option. Once we have chosen the next coloring scheme, all changes we have agreed upon go live. I submit this idea to the project and I would like to hear what other editors think. @Double sharp, Sandbh, DePiep, YBG, ComplexRational, and Droog Andrey: comments are welcome. Sorry if I forgot anyone.--R8R (talk) 14:46, 18 October 2020 (UTC)
I converted my immediately prior thread to become the consensus-gauging thread for Q1. So you and everyone else can !vote there. I kept the question neutral, I left my opinion to my !vote. Hopefully to remain open until all major participants of this project and this discussion have !voted. Double sharp (talk) 15:23, 18 October 2020 (UTC)
Since there has been some discussion on the exact form of the footnote, we may add a Q11⁄2 between Q1 and Q2 regarding how the footnote should read. Double sharp (talk) 20:01, 21 October 2020 (UTC) |
Coloring principles
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Here are the requirements that I can discern; everyone is welcome to add more ideas.
The following principles must be fulfilled for a legitimate attempt to recolor the periodic table:
The following conditions do not constitute a barrier for proposed scheme, but it is nonetheless highly desirable to fulfill them:
DiscussionThe only idea that I am not certain about is whether we want to have colors for predicted elements or not. We currently don't use them, but we might want to rethink on that.--R8R (talk) 17:30, 19 October 2020 (UTC)
Since I have decided that categories are actually OK, I feel I should answer R8R's question from the beginning: no, I don't feel that we should have predicted colours. Such an avoidance releases us from the burden of how to deal with conflicting predictions (as gets common for heavy enough elements) and elements for which current predictions means they fit poorly in any category scheme (Cn, I am looking at you). I also think that the amount of effort that would be needed to scour the literature and decide on a single colouring for some specific elements here (copernicium and oganesson) is not proportionate to how little the post-108 elements really matter for the average general beginning reader. Anyone who wants to know can click on the individual articles where these things are discussed in detail. Double sharp (talk) 23:05, 15 November 2020 (UTC) |
Astatine
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I suspect that there are many readers who vaguely recall their high school chemistry who would be surprised to see astatine classified as a metal. Am I correct in saying that astatine shows properties that are halogen-like and also that are metal-like? WP's article lede states that "most of [astatine's] compounds resemble those of iodine" and that it is "usually classified as either a nonmetal or a metalloid." Does the article need an update or is putting it as a metal another choice where multiple perspectives are reasonable? I note that we also state that "astatine is the least reactive of the halogens," citing an article from 1959. Is it predicted Ts would be less reactive still? Or not a halogen? Should the table or PT article cover the classification of elements like At and the more recent discoveries? I know the hassium article includes that the properties were consistent with its expected position in the PT, for example. Would a reader expect Og to be a noble gas? If we are talking about changes to the PT article and display table, I think it's worth looking at other potential topics / issues. Thoughts? EdChem (talk) 21:41, 18 October 2020 (UTC)
@EdChem: Immediately following its production in 1940, early investigators considered astatine to be a metal. No surprise there considering iodine looks like a metal under white light and is a semiconductor with a band gap of about 1.3 eV. Batsanov in 1971 gave a non-relativistic calculated band gap for astatine of 0.7 eV i.e. a semiconductor with a metallic appearance. Relativistic calculations in 2013 predicted astatine would be a full-blown fcc metal. This article has been cited 35 times without dissent. As far as the p-block is concerned, there is no drama and no fuss. We know from RS that the elements commonly recognised as metalloids are B, Si, Ge, As, Sb, and Te. To the left are the post-transition metals. In the literature, group 12 are treated as TM or PTM on about a 50-50 basis. Since group 12 have a predominately main group chemistry, not to mention the dramatic weakening of physical properties going from group 11 to 12, we count the latter as PTM. To the right of the metalloids are the noble gases, and the halogen nonmetals. The residual nonmetals, H, C, N , O, P, S, Se exhibit a rich array of shared attributes and some or all of them have been referred to by as many collective literature-based category names, some of which are not unique to the nonmetals involved, including:
Some other terms that are about to appear in RS are:
The last of these arises since the seven nonmetals concerned have properties that are neither too extreme, nor too weak, but just right to support life as we know it. Further, each of them nonmetals have their own WP biogeochemical cycle article. Sandbh (talk) 11:45, 19 October 2020 (UTC)
A better quote about astatine from C&EN News rather than just a chemist's blog: "is astatine more like a halogen or like a metal?" So there's proof that it is not clear cut if "halogen" is a group name or a category name, and that it is not even clear cut if At is a halogen in the first place. Double sharp (talk) 20:52, 19 October 2020 (UTC)
@EdChem, R8R, and Double sharp: The general reader. I'm reminded of EdChem's comment, somewhere, that we're writing for the general reader. In this context it doesn't matter what a chemist thinks. What does science say? EdChem, I support your approach of considering what the science says, rather than what our personal preferences are. Fuzzy thinking. On the science front, fuzzy concepts are, as I understand it, a part of chemistry and explain why, to some extent, chemistry cannot (not yet, anyway) be fully reduced to physics. That said, sharpish and fuzzy categories have always played a part in the development of science, generally. In chemistry there are fuzzy concepts like acidic-amphoteric-basic; metal-metalloid-nonmetal; or ionic-polymeric-covalent. Despite their fuzziness, these basic groupings include some of the most powerful ideas in chemistry. The breadth of a discipline. I cannot speak for chemistry but in my own area of professional expertise (strategic people management; learning and development), I know a lot and I don't know it all. And I was never worried about unfamiliar jargon; there are too many models, theories, luminaries, and sub-disciplines, to be across them all. The good thing was I never stopped learning. In strategic people management you can always fall back on something called the people management life cycle (capability > raise > train > sustain > capability > repeat). Anything else you either learnt doing your post-grad, or you pick it up along the way, as required. In chemistry, as far as I have read, the PT serves as the organising or learning icon, plus whatever you learnt at university, and you pick up the rest along the way, as required. H, C, N, O, P, S, Se. The WP situation strikes me as being akin to post-transition metal territory. There are several nomenclature possibilities found in the literature. Scientifically, my pick would be moderately active nonmetals. It’s an ugly, clumsy and relative term. But it’s generic; not tied to any particular sub-discipline, like biochemistry (important as that is); doesn’t have significant overlap issues; and is conceptually anchored in the left-right activity progression seen across the period table, as widely recognised in the literature. For the nonmetals this of course refers to the chemically weak metalloids to the left and the highly active halogen nonmetals to the right. I no longer support other nonmetals. The great majority of Ngram hits are to vague and irrelevant expressions like “plastics and other nonmetals”. Ambiguity. When it comes to situations where there is ambiguity or disagreement or the like I strive to make reference to all the possibilities. See, for example, metal; nonmetal; post-transition metal; metalloid; heavy metals; and lists of metalloids. Sandbh (talk) 10:55, 20 October 2020 (UTC) |
Duplicate article
Introduction to superheavy elements is a duplicate of Introduction to the heaviest elements; only the latter is transcluded in element articles. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 16:47, 22 October 2020 (UTC)
A WikiGnome writes
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One interest of a fellow gnome, Certes, is fixing bad links to WP:PTOPICs. I lunged with krypton, lithium and neon, and he fixed 150-odd bad links. He parried with chromium, lead and palladium. I riposted with copper, gold, radium and silver. (Discussion here.) Are there any other elements which may have collected bad links? Narky Blert (talk) 20:37, 28 October 2020 (UTC)
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RFC proposed: Nonmetal categories
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Colleagues, I intend to put the following RFC, at Periodic Table talk:
I’ll draft some accompanying notes. Comments please. Thank you. Sandbh (talk) 08:14, 29 October 2020 (UTC)
1. Yes, I'll add some notes about the two new categories, including along the lines you requested. 2. A funny thing: I looked at the 2 column in the above table and wondered how so many nonmetals could be "lumped" together in one category, given their diverse attributes. 3. I feel there's no need to e.g. add "Se" after "CHONPS", since S can be read as S and Se. Not forgetting S and Se are in the same group, and share an appreciable number of properties. For example, selenium is found in metal sulfide ores, where it partially replaces sulfur; both elements are photoconductors—their electrical conductivities increase by up to six orders of magnitude when exposed to light. The two nonmetals form about a dozen chain and ring entities of composition S(1−7)Se(1−6). As well, CHNOPSSe doesn't sound or look quite as good. 4. There are some citations in the table. Note the three variations: CHON (this one is very old); CHNOPS and CHONPS. 5. We have an article on the CHON elements. This article, sans attribution, notes "The acronym "S.P. Cohn" was also used in high school biology classes to represent the six chemical elements." 6. Here is the link to the Wiktionary entry. 7. The WP PT is a metallicity based PT, showing the L−R progression in metallic to non-metallic character, so a group name such as chalcogen is not so relevant here. 8. I've asked some chemistry teachers if they use CHONPS. One said, "Yes, I have used CHNOPS for years." @EdChem:, a chemist, is familiar with it too. --- Sandbh (talk) 03:39, 30 October 2020 (UTC) |
Relocated to a subpage of mine, in order to reduce the edit load here. Sandbh (talk) 01:40, 20 November 2020 (UTC)
Comments on draft RFC
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Narky BlertCHNOPS looks to me like a wholly anthropocentric, and therefore arbitrary, selection, based on biology not chemistry. 99.9% or better of biologically important compounds (on Earth, at any rate) contain nothing else. Most of the remainder include a metal cation. The number of compounds which contain any other element covalently bound is tiny. All the ones I can think of (other than the I-containing thyroxine) are peculiar specialist defences against predation, or are manmade pharmaceuticals or things like nerve agents. How many biological molecules can you think of which contain covalently-bound B, Si, Ge, As, Sb, Se or Te? Narky Blert (talk) 19:56, 30 October 2020 (UTC) @Narky Blert: Thank you.
--- Sandbh (talk) 01:44, 31 October 2020 (UTC)
DePiep
@DePiep: The word category is found three times in the IUPAC Red Book, including:
Fowler's modern English usage (1998) says:
Here in WP, we refer to "Chemistry" as a category, [5] with 72 subcategories. --- Sandbh (talk) 03:02, 31 October 2020 (UTC) R8RThere is no comment on the content of the RfC proposal I could give (I think it's fine), but I am wondering what Double sharp has to say. My understanding is that Double sharp has effectively suggested there should only be four categories, namely, the s-, f-, d-, and p-blocks, and expressed his desire to have an RfC on that topic, too. That proposal directly conflicts with this one, and my thinking is, there should ideally be an attempt to coordinate the two given that they are mutually exclusive.--R8R (talk) 12:08, 1 November 2020 (UTC)
@Sandbh: I am seriously concerned about the changes introduced to the draft since I commented on it. The idea that a vote for a different change the one being implemented can be still counted as a vote for a change is very disturbing. Votes may not be counted the way they were intended to be counted. That's a serious problem. There are better ways to conduct a multiple-choice poll. For example, when New Zealand was considering a flag change, citizens first voted on which new flag should be adopted if there was to be a change at all, and then they voted on whether there should be a change to that selected flag. This seems much fairer to me; however, I am concerned that participating a two-stage RfC is a bit much to ask from outsider participants, which is why I think the first round (selecting the favored option) should happen within our project, and then the agreed upon name should be offered to outsider participants. It was my impression this was what was going to be proposed the first time.--R8R (talk) 12:28, 4 November 2020 (UTC)
EdChem
An RfC is meant to offer a simple question for outsiders to consider and offer a comment. The background should neutrally present the arguments / evidence for others to consider in forming a view. Advocacy belongs with comments / views / !votes, etc. The above list points to potential issues that an outsider might wonder about and which thus are worth considering in constructing an RfC. Also, an RfC cannot override what the consensus of RS is... and so should not offer such an option. For example, we wouldn't hold an RfC to decide on metalloids as a separate collection / set if the consensus of literature is that they are; rather, we'd document the RS consensus and (as needed) discuss its implementation. We may hold an RfC, for example, if RS given DUE consideration support two possibilities and we choose which to present and which to discuss as the alternative. Some of the issues are ones I haven't reached a conclusion with my Wikipedian hat on. As an educator and thinking pedagogically, I can't see the benefit that comes with "halogen non-metals" over "halogens" given the insignificance of astatine. As a chemist, I can see the benefit of precision but wonder if chemists will simply understand when astatine is included / excluded by implication. As Wikipedian, however, as RS are drawing such distinctions I have to wonder about the appropriate inclusion of such terms... but at the potential cost of over-specialising encyclopaedic content and in so doing rendering WP less accessible for non-specialist readers. Not an easy one, either to decide or even to construct an RfC about... but the draft needs some re-drafting, IMO. EdChem (talk) 22:20, 1 November 2020 (UTC)
--- Sandbh (talk) 00:42, 2 November 2020 (UTC)
Sandbh@Narky Blert, DePiep, R8R, EdChem, Double sharp, and ComplexRational: I intend to go live with the RFC on Friday 6 Nov, my time (Eastern Australia). Sandbh (talk) 03:42, 3 November 2020 (UTC) @Sandbh: I hope the issue of the collusion between your proposal and Double sharp's will have been resolved by then, and a way to coordinate the two proposals will have been found.--R8R (talk) 13:45, 4 November 2020 (UTC) @Sandbh: (1) I presume the RfC text to be centralized will just be Q1 and Q2. (2) Do you want to explicitly request that people not respond to !votes in threaded discussions (3) You said @YBG: (1) Yes. To be clear, I intend that the RFC will include everything between the two pairs of double lines. (2) I believe this is covered by the "Survey instructions", namely "Anything beyond a simple !vote for either two categories; or three categories (+ your Table 2 pick/s), should be placed in the "Discussion" sub-thread, following." (3) Yes, quite so. The full question was, "Have any chemistry teachers heard or used this term?" To which one responded, "Yes, I have used CHNOPS for years." Sandbh (talk) 22:14, 6 November 2020 (UTC) @Sandbh: (2) I agree it is covered, but I'm not sure sufficiently that people will "get" it. But your choice. (3) Right, my joke only worked by eliminating the term "term". YBG (talk) 23:00, 6 November 2020 (UTC) @YBG: Roger that re (2). I'll look at it. Brevity is everything in an RFC, but. Sandbh (talk) 23:41, 6 November 2020 (UTC) DSI guess people may be surprised to hear this since I have been arguing strongly against categories, but I actually think Sandbh's current version of this RFC is very good. I have absolutely no objections to this being raised. Double sharp (talk) 15:17, 13 November 2020 (UTC)
Double sharp, I logged on this am and there were 13 messages for me (roses rather than brickbats, I hope). I had thought about an RFC for three to two. Then I thought about "fear of the unknown" and why someone would vote for three, unless they knew what they were voting for. Hence the current RFC. If three gets up, then the name with the most ticks, will be the name. I've explained this in the draft RFC but if you missed it I may need to bring this out more, so that it's clearer, Sandbh (talk) 22:33, 15 November 2020 (UTC)
On trifurcation, noting I haven't caught up with all my pings, the last I heard was that R8R was not supporting this. I recall you were supportive reasonable early on, and that was welcome. It was a good example of the fact that we still spoke to one another, and we do agree on some things, never mind our philosophical differences. And the funny thing is that that's all you can do with philosophy i.e. argue about it, since their are no absolute answers. Not that R8R's view was not welcome; it's always good to hear from him. Your idea about other nonmetals is a good one. I can see where you're going with that one. Personally, I don't think much about other nonmetals. OTOH I now appreciate that what I like or dislike doesn't matter. If that is the state of the literature, then we should reflect that. Similarly, I'm not too happy about e.g. biogens, given the involvement of F, Cl, Br, and I in biology. But again, I'm not responsible for the state of the literature, and my likes and dislikes don't count. And it seems that, according to literature, the halogens were late arrivals on the biological involvement scene, after the SeSPONCH non-metals. My impression is that is why the organogen name was introduced, with biogens as a subset of same. The other thing I don't like about biogens is that it's biology specific. Then again all the Noble prizes in chemistry these days go to the biochemists. And it once again doesn't matter what I like or dislike. A misgiving is that "other nonmetals" is not a fair(?) reflection of the literature given the panoply of other names. I'll think about this some more. Sandbh (talk) 23:24, 15 November 2020 (UTC)
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RFC supporting information
Relocated to my subpage. Sandbh (talk) 01:44, 20 November 2020 (UTC)
WP:ELEM Protocol (very draft)
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As mentioned at WP:ANI here’s a suggested protocol setting out aspirations for the way we do things around here. I've strived to keep the word count as low as possible. Less is more, in my view. In no particular order, after item 1( = no change):
These items have been informed (and biased) by my recent experience here and at WP:ANI. Feel free to shoot, salute, amend, suggest or add your own items. --- Sandbh (talk) 01:14, 1 November 2020 (UTC)
@EdChem: Thank you; I'll certainly be taking on, and considering your carefully put thoughts. A quick comment. Consistent with WP:IAR, there is no "absolute" prohibition on anything at WP. Sandbh (talk) 04:45, 2 November 2020 (UTC)
@EdChem: Oh my. I just looked at Wikipedia:Talk page guidelines and ran head long into a 6,400+ word count extravaganza. Talk about a wall of text.
@Sandbh: I do not find that this protocol will aid the development of the project as it stands. I do appreciate the effort put into it but I think that many points need a greater level of precision before we could discuss them because they are very open for different interpretations. 2. "keeping in mind that the purpose of our rules and guidelines is to make the best encyclopedia possible" -- people will inevitably disagree on what this means. Say, there has been disagreement about that between you and me. This phrase will hardly help us resolve the differing views because it's rather vague, and you and I will fill it in differently. 3. "Being sharp, at times, does not constitute incivility" -- I, again, fear that this phrase lacks sufficient substance to make sure it means the same thing to all editors. 5. "Nobody owns any article, template, table, content or domain of knowledge." -- the same comment. What does it mean exactly? Is WP:OWN not enough? 8. I feel my previous concern has not been resolved. We are not supposed to focus on science, we are supposed to focus on reliable sources. Wikipedia:Reliable sources is a core policy of the English Wikipedia. We can't adopt a guideline that would contravene that. We shouldn't have such a guideline. 9. My concern has not been resolved, either. What is "undue WP:POLICY citing"? Again, you and I differ on what is undue policy citing and what isn't. How is this guideline going to help us? One thing I agree with is explicitly stating that lack of beforehand consensus is not a sufficient reason to revert someone's bold edit unless there is an established consensus behind the current standing that such a bold edit would contradict.--R8R (talk) 14:12, 4 November 2020 (UTC)
I have another concern about adding project-specific guidelines in a small project such as ours. Whenever you have guidelines, there is the possibility of differing interpretations. If a dispute over project guidelines arises, our ability to find uninvolved project members to mediate is severely limited. But if we have a project disagreement on the interpretation of some site-wide guideline, it is much more likely that we can find uninvolved mediators who can resolve the issue. Even with the ugliness of our project's recent experience at ANI, I still prefer that forum to a free-for-all just amongst ourselves. YBG (talk) 16:47, 4 November 2020 (UTC)
Sit rep comment by Sandbh: I haven't recently commented or edited here pending the outcome of ANI #3. I may do so if I have some spare time. Sandbh (talk) 05:03, 9 November 2020 (UTC) Straw poll@Sandbh, Double sharp, YBG, EdChem, R8R, ComplexRational, and DePiep: Do you think we should spend more time on this subject? Please add your signature below without additional comment. YBG (talk) 08:26, 13 November 2020 (UTC) Yes, I think WT:ELEM should spend time developing project expectations/guidelines
No, I think WT:ELEM should NOT spend time developing project expectations/guidelinesComments re straw poll
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Eric Scerri YouTube workshop
This workshop (1h 41m) was conducted remotely via Zoom. 150+ people from 16 countries registered. It was organized by the American Chemical Society in association with Yale University.
Topics discussed by Eric include:
- teaching 3d-4s orbitals
- Madelung Rule
- differentiating electrons
- Group 3
- HFSS (half-filled sub-shells).
--- Sandbh (talk) 01:27, 5 November 2020 (UTC)
Ten most influential chemists today
Here. --- Sandbh (talk) 21:49, 5 November 2020 (UTC)
IUPAC Group 3 project update
From Eric Scerri: "Before delivering a report I will be publishing an article in Chemistry International which discusses our preliminary conclusions and will be asking for comments and feedback. I'm still writing the article." "By all means share this update." --- Sandbh (talk) 09:07, 8 November 2020 (UTC)
- @Sandbh: Thank you, this is useful information to keep in the back of our heads. We can start to consider it for content discussions when his article appears – which I hope happens soon. Double sharp (talk) 19:11, 9 November 2020 (UTC)
On the inevitable misunderstandings that arise from giving individual elements single category colourings
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Textbook example. Double sharp (talk) 19:10, 9 November 2020 (UTC)
This thread merits further consideration. On the status of B there is this article (by me), Which elements are metalloids? [8] with 29 GS citations. It appeared in the Journal of Chemical Education and concluded that B is one of the six elements that are commonly recognised in the literature as metalloids. There has been no dissent across the 29 citations, as to my conclusion. More to follow. Sandbh (talk) 22:28, 9 November 2020 (UTC)
--- Sandbh (talk) 22:25, 10 November 2020 (UTC)
An article on the use of colour in periodic tables: [17]. Sandbh (talk) 10:41, 10 November 2020 (UTC)
A related article: Looking for an order of things: Textbooks and chemical classifications in nineteenth century France [18]. Sandbh (talk) 04:37, 11 November 2020 (UTC) @Double sharp: I want to address some questions you raised earlier: 1. Is it "lanthanides" or "lanthanoids"? Consensus (majority opinion, not unanimity) appears to exist for all of these things in the literature. On Og we tread cautiously and show it as unknown properties; presumably we will do the same with 119, 120. Encyclopedia Britannica, the World Book Encyclopedia, RSC, ACS, and LANL take similar approaches, allowing for the fuzziness of chemistry, which we acknowledge in our periodic table article. So too does the most popular online PT [19] itself modelled after WP.
@Double sharp: Our PT represents a form of words in graphical form. If a reader, cookie-cutter stye, chooses to focus on those words alone, absent of their context, that is their choice. We note the otherwise missing context i.e. the fuzziness of the categories in the periodic table article. I've suggested adding a small note to the graphic to this end and have not done so, due to opposition expressed here. I'll draft an RFC about this, and post it to the periodic table talk page. On Q6, WP:ELEM chose those spilts, IGF, via consensus, on the basis of our understanding of the literature, as did the founders of the WP colour category table. I've proposed overlapping categories for the WP PT, only to meet staunch resistance from colleague here. I recall you even pointed out one of these tables on another of the WP's, the German one if I recall right? I looked at the 149, by my count, non-English WPs. I found three showing just metal-metalloid-nonmetal; and two block-only tables. So 96%+ show colour categories, such as we do. Cool tables:
I casually mentioned frontier metals in passing, as a way of referring to the metals that occupy "frontier territory: abutting the metalloids. The term itself comes from a peer-reviewed open-access article in the literature (that I wrote), now with 5,400+ access. As the PTM article notes, the name frontier metal is adapted from Russell and Lee, who wrote that, "…bismuth and group 16 element polonium are generally considered to be metals, although they occupy 'frontier territory' on the periodic table, adjacent to the nonmetals."[20]. --- Sandbh (talk) 03:55, 11 November 2020 (UTC) |
Time out (1)
This discussion is unclear about its central question or postulate. It is unuseful because of its unstructured and chaotic flow & layout. It is unhelpful because of extremely long texts that do nothing to make an argument or a point. Unless restructured, we can leave it alone without consequences. I call it basically senseless. -DePiep (talk) 17:24, 12 November 2020 (UTC)
- @DePiep: OK. Double sharp (talk) 18:25, 12 November 2020 (UTC)
- Eh, nothing personal, nothing wrong with your early contributions Double sharp, even when lengthy. This is about the overall thread so far. Have a nice edit. -DePiep (talk) 00:34, 13 November 2020 (UTC)
- @DePiep: Oh, that's good to hear, but I do think I was a little too verbose. I admit I found it difficult to formulate succintly – but I should have tried harder. Have a nice edit too. ^_^ Double sharp (talk) 00:40, 13 November 2020 (UTC)
- NO! my statement is: you did nothing wrong, it's the thread itself that exploded! DePiep (talk) 00:44, 13 November 2020 (UTC)
- @DePiep: Oh! Okay, I understand what you mean now. Thank you. Double sharp (talk) 00:47, 13 November 2020 (UTC)
- NO! my statement is: you did nothing wrong, it's the thread itself that exploded! DePiep (talk) 00:44, 13 November 2020 (UTC)
- @DePiep: Oh, that's good to hear, but I do think I was a little too verbose. I admit I found it difficult to formulate succintly – but I should have tried harder. Have a nice edit too. ^_^ Double sharp (talk) 00:40, 13 November 2020 (UTC)
- Eh, nothing personal, nothing wrong with your early contributions Double sharp, even when lengthy. This is about the overall thread so far. Have a nice edit. -DePiep (talk) 00:34, 13 November 2020 (UTC)
A nice pair
Noble metals | Noble gases |
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--- Sandbh (talk) 00:25, 12 November 2020 (UTC)
RFC register
Current
Proposal | Sponsor | Notes |
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Should there be two or three nonmetal colour categories? | Sandbh | Here |
Should the lede PT graphic include a notation noting the fuzziness of its categories? | Sandbh | |
Should the ACS/LANL/2010 categorisation scheme be adopted? | DS | Here |
Frozen
Proposal | Sponsor | Notes |
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Should group 3 be La or Lu? | Double sharp |
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Withdrawn
Proposal | Sponsor | Notes |
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Double sharp | Withdrawn | |
YBG | More focused wording than what I suggested here. WithdrawnYBG (talk) 02:38, 14 November 2020 (UTC) | |
Sandbh | As per discussion |
Discussion
General
I believe the table sets out where things are up to.
If anybody would like to take over as sponsor for any one of these proposals, please speak up.
I suggest a current sponsor may choose to decline a take over request.
IMO, the best place to host these RFCs is at Talk:Periodic table. Our project is too small, insufficiently representative, and does not represent an NPOV "venue". Since the RFCs are about the periodic table, they ought to take place at that talk page. Sandbh (talk) 02:20, 13 November 2020 (UTC)
That said, anyone can put an RFC at any time. Sandbh (talk) 01:29, 13 November 2020 (UTC)
- Sandbh, I believe this list is accurate as well, and I do not object to putting up the RFC's at Talk:Periodic table. Since you have given us information that suggests that some preliminary information about the IUPAC conclusion may come out soon, I feel that we can put the La vs Lu one on hold at least until Scerri's article appears in Chemistry International. (That doesn't mean I intend to bring it out immediately once that appears; rather it means that his article, when it appears, will be an important point to be considered as to where to proceed next.) I was previously going for it because we didn't have informationI a about a timescale for IUPAC to make its decision and very little progress was being publicly displayed, so I was worried that we might be in a permanent "limbo" of sorts; however, since it seems that progress has indeed happened, I feel it makes sense to wait now. As for the categories one – as stated in my section below I think this is simply an issue regarding two conflicting interpretations of WP:UNDUE. Since I can now see a policy-based argument for keeping the categories, and in all honesty I wasn't so much against them because I didn't like them as because I was worried about the policy-based thing, I think that we can withdraw this issue as well. Hopefully it was just a good interesting icebreaker that let us reexamine the situation and conclude that indeed, policy lets us keep on with what we're doing.
- That being said, however, I think EdChem is right that there are other issues with the article that are not covered by this, that would be more useful to solve first for the benefit of the average reader. Double sharp (talk) 14:37, 13 November 2020 (UTC)
- I have taken the liberty of adding a note to your table saying that I intend to "freeze" the La vs Lu one at least until Scerri's article appears. Please revert if you think this addition was inappropriate. Double sharp (talk) 14:44, 13 November 2020 (UTC)
- @Double sharp, Sandbh, DePiep, EdChem, ComplexRational, and R8R: I have added a re-worded RfC about WP policy issues related to our current color scheme. I recall years ago thinking that our color scheme was an acceptable violation of WP:OR, but I have become increasingly uncomfortable with that. But I don't like the abvious consequences of that POV, the elimination of the beautiful colors on our PT. I would welcome any policy-based effort to convince me otherwise, ideally at User talk:YBG. I will gladly mark this RfC proposal as withdrawn under either of two conditions (a) someone convinces me that it does not violate WP policies; or (b) a clear majority of WP:ELEM members support retaining the colors. But apart from those two conditions, I think we should get WP-wide input on this one. If we go down that path, it should IMO be before the nonmetal question. Also, I think it should be decided on policy based considerations alone, not preferences, and so the question of what to replace it with should be a separate issue to be considered only after a definite decision of the policy issue. But I would much prefer a scenario that allows us to retain our color scheme. YBG (talk) 18:49, 13 November 2020 (UTC)
- Noteworthy post. Standing out, to me, is "acceptable violation of WP:OR". I think this is the discussion plan (or one of them) we need. -DePiep (talk) 19:21, 13 November 2020 (UTC)
- @YBG: I've tried at your talk page. I thought it might be good for me to try, because as you know I agreed with the view that it's problematic till today. Double sharp (talk) 19:25, 13 November 2020 (UTC)
- @Sandbh: I suggest not holding the recoloring RfC. There are two major reasons for this: 1) this is not an RfC question, and 2) we have already established a way forward (that I am quite content with).
- 1) This is not the sort of question that should be resolved via an RfC. An RfC can be useful if we find ourselves in a procedural deadlock and seek more comments to establish a way forward, but there already is a way forward. Another situation when an RfC could be useful is when we don't know what should be done, and we seek a solution, but I fear what opinions we may attract will be based on personal preferences, and this will likely not be very helpful for this goal. One more case is that we seek more legitimacy for a desired solution, but I think that we as a project should take agency for our decisions unless there's a reason why we can't.
- 2) There already is a way forward that we have established, and I am quite content with it. First of all, we hold the RfCs that may change the structure of our PT. If that happens, my old scheme becomes irrelevant, so we have to find out first whether it will. Then we know what kind of a PT we want to have, and we hold a contest open for everyone that will last two months (unless we agree that the submission period should be longer). When two months have passed, we as a project decide whether we want to replace our current PT for any suggestion, and if we do, for which one. And if we decide for having a new scheme, it goes live. DePiep may present their own scheme at a later date, and upon presentation we will decide whether we want to replace the scheme we will have at that point for DePiep's scheme; if we decide we do, it goes live.--R8R (talk) 09:15, 14 November 2020 (UTC)
- @YBG: I've tried at your talk page. I thought it might be good for me to try, because as you know I agreed with the view that it's problematic till today. Double sharp (talk) 19:25, 13 November 2020 (UTC)
- Noteworthy post. Standing out, to me, is "acceptable violation of WP:OR". I think this is the discussion plan (or one of them) we need. -DePiep (talk) 19:21, 13 November 2020 (UTC)
- @Double sharp, Sandbh, DePiep, EdChem, ComplexRational, and R8R: I have added a re-worded RfC about WP policy issues related to our current color scheme. I recall years ago thinking that our color scheme was an acceptable violation of WP:OR, but I have become increasingly uncomfortable with that. But I don't like the abvious consequences of that POV, the elimination of the beautiful colors on our PT. I would welcome any policy-based effort to convince me otherwise, ideally at User talk:YBG. I will gladly mark this RfC proposal as withdrawn under either of two conditions (a) someone convinces me that it does not violate WP policies; or (b) a clear majority of WP:ELEM members support retaining the colors. But apart from those two conditions, I think we should get WP-wide input on this one. If we go down that path, it should IMO be before the nonmetal question. Also, I think it should be decided on policy based considerations alone, not preferences, and so the question of what to replace it with should be a separate issue to be considered only after a definite decision of the policy issue. But I would much prefer a scenario that allows us to retain our color scheme. YBG (talk) 18:49, 13 November 2020 (UTC)
ACS/LANL/2010 categorisation scheme
Intersting. I'll post some comments. Sandbh (talk) 23:16, 18 November 2020 (UTC)
ArbCom filing
So as of yesterday, WP:ELEMENTS is up for Arbcom [25].
I won't (have to) reply to any talks, nor 'engage'. I consider all edits in this WP contested. For lack of discussion and lack of consensus. -DePiep (talk) 02:03, 13 November 2020 (UTC)
- I changed the name of this section, from WP:ELEMENTS, since the filing named five "involved editors", rather then the entire WP:ELEM project as such. Sandbh (talk) 02:12, 20 November 2020 (UTC)
Comments from EdChem
As all the current regular contributors to WT:ELEM are well aware, but for the sake of those unfamiliar with the project, there have been discussions at my user talk page that have led to me offering specific advice on Arbitration. ArbCom cases are never easy or pleasant and they can be brutal. It is a necessary process for intractable disputes that is something to avoid if that is possible, not least because outcomes may satisfy no one and can end disputes in ways that are wounding for many or even all of the editors involved. I advised that a path that may avoid a case being taken now, and hopefully avoid it ever being necessary, required those who have participated in reaching the present point providing ArbCom with a reason to delay taking a case or even declining it for now. I also said that this needed to come from the participants.
I am very encouraged to see the effect that my words have had. Discussions on user talk pages and in the section below have included many expressions of interest in rebuilding the collaborative spirit that WP:ELEM once had. I have been reading what I see but not commenting as I believe it is best that you can collaboratively decide what you want and how you want to do it. There are many 'right' ways to do this and I have not been asked to provide input, which I see as encouraging, and so am glad to see progress happening between you. When I wrote that I thought working together to give ArbCom an alternative was desirable or necessary, I do so without being certain what would happen. I knew there was a risk that a project-centred attempt for a settlement would degenerate and prove to ArbCom that their intervention was necessary. I am very pleased to see that the risk in my suggestion was worth taking. This project can emerge stronger (and with more participants) so long as the desire to rebuild remains strong.
I have also been watching to see which (if any) of the steps that I see as necessary in some form for this to work are happening. It is good to see that most have arisen in some form, though I believe that there are some difficulties that need to be faced for this to work ahead. These may not happen before ArbCom makes a decision, which I see as fine. One issue I have had concerns about since becoming involved is the way that efforts in multiple directions are pursued simultaneously. It is difficult to progress in many directions at once without a large team that will divide naturally into sub-groups based on interests, ideally with mutual respect and confidence between the groups. Sub-group membership is flexible and fluid, with outcomes returning to the whole project for ratification by acclamation or RfC. I see different issues coming up below, all of which are relevant / important, but which we might need to organise to approach sequentially rather than simultaneously. In no particular order, I think we need to consider:
- placing some of the existing conflicts on hold – Double sharp has offered a path forward here that seems to be getting good support
- clearing the air between editors – some excellent starts here, though I believe a frank and fearless discussion of ourselves and our concerns about others may be desirable. As an example, I was glad to see that R8R felt able to raise a concern about DePiep and did so in a reasonable way, and DePiep has undertaken to respond but wisely chose not to do so immediately and based on "first primitive
reactionreflexes." This is certainly a step in the right direction, IMO. - discussion on how we want to handle disputes, both content-based and conduct-based, and those with overlaps – the ideas for project guidelines fit here.
- contemplation of how we got here and what we have learned – in this regard, I suspect that binary thinking and dichotomies are one cause of issues. Double sharp writes below on categories that "(1) Refusing to use categories is in some sense undue weight because most sources use them, but (2) using any one particular set of categories may make things a little dicey around the boundaries where categorisations in the literature don't always agree (so, things like polonium or astatine). It seems to me that Sandbh has been more concerned about (1) while I have been more concerned about (2)." In this case, I have been wondering if the solution was not actually (π^2 − e) / 4.37 (and so between 1 and 2): using a set of categories that suit the particular application for the best support to our readers in the relevant context, and if a different set is more appropriate in another context, use that. Having a default for consistency need not mean that every circumstance uses the default. This also means that there are places where the La / Lu debate arises that showing PTs in both forms may best support our readers.
- an objective look at what content problems there are in the project's articles – I pointed out issues with the early parts of the PT article, which produced general agreement that there was a problem. I had hoped that working together on a confined piece of text where the science is not disputed would allow us to not only make progress, but also hold discussions of policy issues where we should be able to find consensus. What references are needed for such information? Which RSs to choose, or are any ok? Are we using multiple references to SYNTH what we want, and if so, how do we fix it? What does a reader need to know (ie what is DUE), and who is our 'typical reader'? Is the presentation NPOV? Does the text meet the criteria in GA and FA? All these considerations and more are relevant for uncontested text and in areas where the answers are not clear, so making sure we are on the same page for non-controversial text can (a) help remind us of being a team working together to mutually-held goals and (b) help us to see what we have in common on policy and application. This can be extended later to more contentious areas.
- I'm sure there are more.
Many will have noticed that brevity is not a strength of mine, though I do better in working on article space text. :) My short message here is:
- Good job so far, keep it up – and I think that at least delaying an ArbCom case, and ultimately avoiding one, is increasingly likely
- This is the start, and it is most important that we keep going in the same general direction together
- Thank you for showing me that you do want end the conflicts (disagreements are inevitable at times, but they need not become wars) and strengthen this project, and thank you for doing so by showing everyone that you can work together and do want to work together
EdChem (talk) 03:46, 14 November 2020 (UTC)
- Another fine overview of the situation :-) but keeping track of the many locations you put them is getting difficult :-(
- I replied at #Deciding_between_ourselves, though maybe not along the line you expected.
- I feel the need for a freeze of those wide-ranging and TL;DR discussions currently at hand. And a status quo report for them. This may be hugely important, e.g. see this 25k removals today, by people who did not contribute to the talkpage yesterday. Nor did this editors adhere to the (your) principal issues & solutions with FA periodic table.
- So far, Sandbh is the only one pingend who has not replied to Double sharps #Deciding_between_ourselves initiative; while still editing wide and rough. -DePiep (talk) 22:06, 15 November 2020 (UTC)
- @DePiep: The discussion behind this was and is taking place at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Elements#Fresh_energy_for_the_periodic_table:_A_bold_start, in which EdChem's summary is indeed being referred to as a guide for a replacement section. As for Sandbh, I am personally completely satisfied with his response to me at his talk page. Double sharp (talk) 22:59, 15 November 2020 (UTC)
Deciding between ourselves
I have read EdChem's excellent comment at his talk page, and I think he has an excellent point. Therefore I would like to start the discussion that he suggests.
Firstly: I think we should put aside existing differences. We have been squabbling over how the sources should be reflected for the layout and colouring of the periodic table. And while I can see why we did it, since this appears on every element page, we have allowed our sometimes strong views there to vastly overbake the importance of this issue. As EdChem has correctly noted at the top of the talk page: the periodic table article lede still isn't succeeding at giving the reader the needed information. I think we should seriously think first about the important things from the reader, instead of turning the issue into a WP:BIKESHED.
Secondly: I think we should make an utmost attempt to solve the issues between ourselves. EdChem has already told us that going to ArbCom has no good outcome for us. At best it just extends hostilities, and at worst there is also the risk that everyone involved gets banned from chemistry topics. I don't think anyone wants that, because all of us are enthusiastic about the topic area and have a good deal of knowledge. To that end, therefore, I feel that we have to somehow get the content and behavioural disputes separated.
Therefore, I would like to put aside all existing differences. We sometimes have very different views on the matter, but at the core, we all want to improve Wikipedia. Since Wikipedia works by consensus, we have to let go of any residual desires to "win" the debate. That should not be our goal. Our goal should be high-quality encyclopaedic content. Everyone here is aware of RS, and we just have different viewpoints about what exactly is DUE or SYNTH or OR.
To that end also, I would like to let go of any strong feelings about the issue when it comes to what Wikipedia shows. For example, yes, it's true that outside WP I do strongly feel that the Lu form is somehow "correct". But I recognise that this is not a universally held view. It is no longer important to me that I "win" this and manage to install the Lu form as the standard situation – because regardless of how many RS I throw at the issue, the point is not to "win". Wikipedia is indeed not a place to right great wrongs, as EdChem helpfully linked. The point is simply that Wikipedia should describe the dispute in a neutral way that serves the reader – which may be quite short. Whether that means Lu or La is shown is not in any sense the important thing. I would like to make it clear that from now on, I make no claims to OWNership of any of the articles. Let's think first about the reader instead of trying to "win".
Additionally, I would like to ask that we all reflect on our own problematic behaviours while doing so. While I did have concerns about the behaviour of User:Sandbh in particular, I do feel that I have gone too far into being "against" him. I would like to end that. From now on, let's agree to end all hostilities, and not to restart them again. Let's not squabble about who was "right" in the behavioural dispute just as we shouldn't squabble about who was "right" in the content dispute. Let's instead work together. And I would like to say the same for myself towards everyone else here. I may disagree with you sometimes, but I respect you and what you bring here, and I will not see anyone as an opponent. Let's draw a black line and say: that's all over and we'll work together now.
So far, we have mostly confined ourselves to the talk page instead of the article, which is a good start. But we have allowed the talk page discussions to spiral endlessly and degenerate, which is not good. Therefore I would like to suggest that we resolve things together and not fight.
To that end I would like to invite User:R8R, User:DePiep, User:Sandbh, and User:YBG to join in this discussion. I have behaved badly here and failed to consider the readers first, but EdChem has explained it to me and I pledge to follow and change. I hope everyone also does so. I am confident that this can succeed.
Now, let me explain how I propose to solve this by compromise.
First of all, let's leave the La vs Lu thing aside. Sandbh has presented to us information to the effect that progress is happening on IUPAC's end and that the preliminary results of their discussion will soon appear in Chemistry International, so my previous concerns that we may be stuck in a "limbo" with no good answer have proven unfounded. In any case, reactions here suggest that this issue is only polarising for no good reason, and also that it will probably only result in a no consensus to change. Therefore I feel it makes sense to wait for Scerri's article to come out, because that can alter the situation, and then decide briefly what to do next. After all: anything IUPAC says will certainly clarify the situation. I will not pursue it till then and we may consider the case of changing the table closed. Since Sandbh has recently published an article supporting La, I also think that not trying to change it until something new happens from IUPAC may also be appreciated as a goodwill gesture. We will probably have to visit how to describe the situation in the periodic table article, but hopefully this will not cause too much of a problem (EdChem has already given us an idea).
Second, I think the main issue about the categories thing is because of a somewhat unfortunate complicated situation in the sources. (1) Many more sources provide categories than stick to blocks alone, but (2) the precise categories they use change between sources whereas the precise boundaries of blocks don't. So it seems to me that the issue is really about conflicting interpretations of WP:UNDUE. (1) Refusing to use categories is in some sense undue weight because most sources use them, but (2) using any one particular set of categories may make things a little dicey around the boundaries where categorisations in the literature don't always agree (so, things like polonium or astatine). It seems to me that Sandbh has been more concerned about (1) while I have been more concerned about (2).
We could possibly discuss this with mediators like EdChem. But let me try to resolve it between ourselves first. I would agree to a compromise situation in which the categories remain, but it's made clear in the article text of periodic table that this is just one way of doing things and that sources sometimes don't agree on things. We could even keep the entire current classification this way. It would seem to me then that everything would be fine: we could continue to give major categories, and for problematic elements (are group 12 elements transition metals, for example) we could simply have something like we already do at the infobox {{infobox zinc}}
where it's mentioned. Same thing would happen for something like astatine, for which we could appeal to WP:CONTEXTMATTERS about the relevant sources to justify why we call it a metal (since the relevant sources are probably the ones who focused on its chemistry and physics itself, since it is so hard to actually investigate). I think this would address my concern about (2), while simultaneously not go so far as to result in reopening Sandbh's concern about (1). I propose this in the spirit of compromise and hope it could be accepted. In fact, this would mean doing nothing but mentioning on periodic table that the category boundaries are a bit fuzzy and some other possibilities are around. There wouldn't even need to be any perennial disclaimer on every PT in this proposed compromise of mine.
As for the proposed nonmetal splits: this may be discussed between ourselves. I think that it may be a similar issue: it's indeed common to call out the halogens as a category, but what happens when the halogens hit the metalloids and metals for relatively unexplored At and Ts is not quite agreed. So I would say that a similar compromise like "halogen nonmetals" would be acceptable to me. Hopefully these compromises get somewhere at resolving this issue.
Since this basically completely wipes out all the disagreements I had with Sandbh's approach to the colouring, and freezes the group 3 dispute until a new situation comes, it seems to me that this can likely totally solve the situation. The only thing left would be Sandbh's nonmetal RFC. Double sharp (talk) 15:10, 13 November 2020 (UTC)
- I am glad with EdChem's descriptions ('about ArbCom'), and this initiative by Double sharp. I think I can sign up for this. One question though: could we say something about discussion-discipline, like preventing TL;DR and unstrtuctured threads? Without checking for some WP:... guideline, there is some common approach needed to make then productive; I think it is about attitude now. -DePiep (talk) 16:30, 13 November 2020 (UTC)
- @DePiep: Glad to hear you like it. I am mostly waiting for Sandbh's reaction, but I think he will like it. I think the TL;DR syndrome is partly a result of the policy-interpretations issue; when you have one thing that is interpreted in two different ways by people, the usual result is that they talk past each other. So, I think it will be fine as long as we make it clear that the first step we take is to ask if in any doubt for how the editor sees policy applying to the case, and if still in doubt to ask an external third opinion. Double sharp (talk) 17:18, 13 November 2020 (UTC)
- Yes, I agree. We should try to settle this amongst ourselves. As I commented at ArbCom, I think it would be a great misfortune if our 3rd appearance at WP:Signpost turned out to be an ArbCom case. YBG (talk) 17:40, 13 November 2020 (UTC)
- @DePiep: Glad to hear you like it. I am mostly waiting for Sandbh's reaction, but I think he will like it. I think the TL;DR syndrome is partly a result of the policy-interpretations issue; when you have one thing that is interpreted in two different ways by people, the usual result is that they talk past each other. So, I think it will be fine as long as we make it clear that the first step we take is to ask if in any doubt for how the editor sees policy applying to the case, and if still in doubt to ask an external third opinion. Double sharp (talk) 17:18, 13 November 2020 (UTC)
- @Double sharp: this sort of discussion was the thing I had in mind when I proposed we discuss an internal guideline, so naturally, I welcome it.
- I like one particular phrase you said: "I would like to ask that we all reflect on our own problematic behaviours while doing so." While I have seen some self-reflection from both Sandbh and yourself, as well as expressed some of it myself, I particularly want to see some self-reflection from DePiep, but that remains yet to be seen. As far as I can recall, you were not told to grow up; didn't have a disparaging post written about yourself on a TFA talk page; were not a subject of a series of very serious but baseless accusations, for which you could not find any base even when you pushed for it, and the one time you cornered the accuser, you learned that your words "Please read my words more carefully" were the basis for the accusation that you had personally attacked them (not the whole basis, granted, but the rest of it was "attacks" of similar caliber); after the end of the ANI, you did not have yet another personal attack against yourself commence, this time on your own talk page. That would be a lot of behavior to reflect on. However, all of this happened to me.
- @DePiep: I am not looking for a satisfaction of any kind, but I am looking for your acknowledgement that this behavior of yours was not appropriate and for a commitment that you would not do any of this again. I am genuinely worried that whatever the evidence is, you do not see yourself guilty of anything; therefore, you don't feel the need to correct your behavior and therefore, there is no guarantee from something of this sort ever happening again. I would like it very much that you prove me wrong and dispel whatever doubts I may have about this. You said it yourself, you could sign up to Double sharp's words. The best proof of that would be the acknowledgement of your misdeeds and a commitment to not repeat them. I will not forget all of this, as you suggested in one of the sections above, but I will be very glad to leave it all aside, consider the matter settled, and act as if it hadn't happened as soon as I hear that. Can I expect to hear it?--R8R (talk) 19:23, 13 November 2020 (UTC)
- Will reply, but not by first primitive
reactionreflexes. -DePiep (talk) 20:46, 13 November 2020 (UTC)- @DePiep: I think that's a good idea. I slept on one of these issues last night and I think it did a lot of good. Double sharp (talk) 20:53, 13 November 2020 (UTC)
- @R8R:. I have come to the conclusion that I will not fulfil your request. The core reason is that when I wrote "I think I can sign up for this" I did not add reservations. The statement by Double sharp includes the topic of "problematic behaviours": "end ... and not to restart". I am very well aware that this is part of the proposal, and that the "self reflection" is included. However, it is not required or proposed to do so publicly — on the contrary: it says not to "squabble about who was 'right'". I read this to mean: be open to (self-)criticism into improvement, and that is what I can sign up to.
- There is an other reason. Your question raises the possibility that this thread too becomes a sort of ANI complaint-solving (or, more likely, -not-solving). That would take out all effectivity of the proposal, because that route is what has failed. And anyway, issues you mention already have been brought to ANI, and obviously no trespassing was concluded; it was even allowed to be brought to ANI again (I am still wondering how that was allowed but alas), and again no consequences were concluded. So I say no to a third time. Maybe you could consider to drop the stick of ANI-style questioning (here and on other talkpages), following the spirit expressed by Double sharp.
- And, a third and final thought. Please keep in mind that WP:ELEMENTS has left the ani-level of dispute resolution; as EdChem described the Project now is in more serious danger wrt (our) future editing options. This proposal requires a change of attitude of us all, and will take lots of energy, aimed upward, to make it work. -DePiep (talk) 16:26, 15 November 2020 (UTC)
- As for myself, in the spirit of my OP, I am happy enough with this statement by DePiep. If asking for public statements runs the risk of jeopardising this quick resolution, then I feel we should not insist on it. Hopefully, after a couple of weeks of no problems, we will not need them for any proof anyway. It is up to R8R of course on whether he's fine with it or not. ^_^ Double sharp (talk) 23:08, 15 November 2020 (UTC)
- Will reply, but not by first primitive
- Waiting for Sandbh to reply here. This is serious, I'd strongly ask you to consider this proposal. -DePiep (talk) 23:36, 15 November 2020 (UTC)
@DePiep, Double sharp, and R8R:
- Faced with a choice of affirming R8R or DePeip, I affirm R8R.
- Faced with a choice of ArbCom or sorting out things here, I'd choose the latter.
- DePiep, you bring gifts to our project as well as aspects I find unwelcome, as reflected in your lengthy block record.
- With such a block record, including the prospect of an indefinite ban for another occurrence of misconduct, I'd expect to be walking on egg shells, yet you go about things, as I see it, as if nothing happened.
- For example, you reverted me here,[26] and provided no other comment than "No", in breach of WP:BRD.
- You reverted me at WP:ANI no less,[27] along with the comment: "rv for now. a clerck etc may deem this allowable and so confirm/reinstate (very inconveniant to me)".
- You have previously reverted me on the grounds of no consensus having being established, when no such consensus was required.
- After several years of inaction on our colouring the PT proposal you undertake to do something about it within a week and then advise our project that you were not able to do so "due to distractions".[28]
- Softlavender mentioned you at WP:ANI saying, "(I think at this point, DePiep is going to end up at ArbCom and/or or long-term blocked if he continues in the behavior patterns he has demonstrated all over Wikipedia". 07:18, 10 October 2020
- Four other editors at ARBCOM have mentioned you; one asked: "Is User:DePiep a net negative to the encyclopedia?".[29][30]. See also this essay on users with long block logs.
- My impression is that you are involved in so many aspects of WP that you are unable to keep track of things within our project and consequently ask for summaries or complain about e.g. unfocused threads etc., for example this edit [31] in which your edit summary is "basically senseless".
- My impression of your general role is that of a "blocker." For example, there is this post[32] in which you write: "I feel the need for a freeze of those wide-ranging and TL;DR discussions currently at hand." And you felt the need to add, that I am "still editing wide and rough" [33]even though, as DS posted,[34] I explained the my rationale for so doing [35].
- Here is another example of your combative attitude: "I consider all edits in this WP contested. For lack of discussion and lack of consensus. -DePiep (talk) 02:03, 13 November 2020 (UTC) [36]
- I have previously posted about some of these concerns wrt to your conduct; nothing changes.
- As I see it, your attitude needs to change, permanently.
- I support Double sharp in his preference for a quick resolution.
DePiep, you have ignored multiple, repeated warnings, over several years. You have shown no interest in changing.
You now find yourself, through your own actions and inaction, at ten seconds to midnight.
I ask you to reflect on the above, and consider the way forward.
You may decline to do so, of course. Sandbh (talk) 01:31, 16 November 2020 (UTC)
- @DePiep, Sandbh, Double sharp, EdChem, and YBG: My objective has been making sure that the behavior DePiep has demonstrated is not repeated. This goal is hardly unreasonable or undesirable. I directly asked for such a commitment---hardly an unreasonable request---and my request was declined. Since DePiep does not acknowledge their behavior as inappropriate and does not commit to not repeating it, there is nothing stopping DePiep from doing this again.
- I don’t see what part DePiep intends to play in that change of attitude they’re citing if they’re not recognizing any of their past behavior as bad and are not committing to not repeating it as bad behavior.
- If I’ve been too inquisitive, the whole reason of it was so that I don’t mistakenly assume the worst of you when you didn’t mean it, in the spirit of WP:GF. The inquisition is over now; there is no room for misinterpretation. I asked for a commitment and the response was, “I will not fulfil your request.”
- I will be bringing this over to ArbCom. I did not initiate it, and I thought the mere possibility of an ArbCom action should have had an effect to do as little as recognition of old bad actions and a commitment not to repeat this ever again. This would’ve been enough. It wasn’t done. I have heeded to EdChem’s warning that this could backfire horribly. I still think that accepting that this behavior has not been even admitted, let alone been promised to not occur again, is the worse option. I’m sorry this didn’t end well if though it was looking like it could.
- DePiep, I want to be absolutely clear. I don’t identify you as a problem, despite you suggesting that previously. I identify your behavior as a problem. I am still open to admission that your behavior was wrong and a commitment you wouldn’t repeat this kind of behavior; if I get it, I’ll strike my ArbCom post and consider the matter solved if the case hasn’t been taken by then.
- I’ll leave a near-exhaustive list of your misdeeds over the last couple of months here for future reference. To the best of my knowledge, not a single one in the list has been admitted as such.
- I have been told to grow up. (WT:ELEM/Archive 50, DePiep, 2020-09-27) My edits have been reverted in what is strongly suggesting, and has been called out by other editors, to be ownership edits. (WT:ELEM/Archive 50#Alkali metal color; Talk:TFA 2020-09-09; ANI #2, EdChem, 2020-10-06) I have had a plain disparaging on a TFA talk page. (Talk:TFA 2020-09-09/R8R) I have had a baseless accusation that I had responded to good faith edits by personal attacks. (ANI #1, DePiep, 2020-09-27) I have been accused of a personal attack (ANI #2, DePiep, 2020-10-04) following my explanation (WT:ELEM/Archive 50, R8R, 2020-10-03) that you, by your own admission, hadn’t even processed (WT:ELEM/Archive 50, DePiep, 2020-10-04) by the time of the accusation. DePiep has demanded other editors seek approval for their edits in this free encyclopedia. (ANI #2, Sandbh, 2020-10-03) DePiep demonstratively refused to acknowledge my motivation to perform an edit (ANI #2, R8R, 2020-10-06), following which I had another baseless personal accusation (ANI #2, DePiep, 2020-10-06).
- Following the end of that ANI, there was yet another baseless accusation (T:R8R, DePiep, 2020-11-01).
- In the end, when I asked DePiep to admit their behavior was not appropriate and to commit not to do this again, and make it the end of the story, my request was turned down (WT:ELEM#Deciding between ourselves, DePiep, 2020-11-15).
- (A baseless accusation is, by definition, a personal attack. That was the thing DePiep has done a number of times (see diffs above, each of which features either the described action or a reference to it) but never recognized it, not to say make up for it somehow; however, that was a thing they kept insisting I was doing to them, something for which you never provided any serious proof even though I asked you to do so a couple of times.)--R8R (talk) 17:19, 16 November 2020 (UTC)
- R8R
You are treating the ArbCom case as another ANI report. Even worse, this is another repetition of earlier ANI reports. I can inform you: the ANI threads were closed, and you are invited to read and accept their conclusions. That an ANI (twice) does not return the result you want is saying something. Nowthis is about a WP:ARC, EdChem has described its setup which is different. Double sharp has made an initiative to respond to the Case. A pity you cannot agree with that. -DePiep (talk) 17:38, 16 November 2020 (UTC)
- R8R
I just posted a statement at Arbcom:
START OF QUOTE
Statement by Guy Macon
R8R's statement concerns me:
- "I asked DePiep to acknowledge past misdeeds and commit not to repeat them. This request was declined. The list of DePiep's misdeeds over the last couple of months alone is extensive, and DePiep refuses to even acknowledge them as such. This means there's nothing stopping them from happening again."
We have no requirement that anyone admit guilt. In fact, doing something that is unambiguously not allowed, followed by "I never did that" or "doing that was allowed", followed by them never doing it again is a perfectly acceptable result.
At Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Elements#Deciding between ourselves Double sharp proposed " I would like to put aside all existing differences. We sometimes have very different views on the matter, but at the core, we all want to improve Wikipedia. Since Wikipedia works by consensus, we have to let go of any residual desires to 'win' the debate. That should not be our goal. Our goal should be high-quality encyclopaedic content."
Double sharp, DePiep and YBG all agreed to this, and as far as I can tell have stuck to it. Alas, R8R and Sandbh did not agree and instead have continued posting complaints about past behavior. So I think Arbcom should accept this case. If Double sharp, DePiep and YBG continue to put aside all existing differences they should be marked as "resolved: no arbcom action needed" and Arbcom should examine the WP:BATTLEGROUND behavior of R8R and Sandbh. (248 words) --Guy Macon
END OF QUOTE
I have some advice:
Double sharp, DePiep and YBG, I advise that you completely stop responding to any comments about anyone's behavior. Lots of eyes are on this, and what is happening is blindingly obvious without any of you commenting on it. I realize that this will be really hard to do, so if you slip just strike your response and go back to disengaging with no further comments.
R8R and Sandbh, I advise that you stop this behavior immediately. Don't even reply to this post. Just stop. If I see that you have stopped I will says so in my arbcom statement and advise that the arbs drop the case.
I have been watching arbcom for over ten years. They love it when everyone disengages and put aside the past. Burt if they see WP:BATTLEGROUND behavior after a case is requested, they tend to start blocking the editors who are still fighting from the entire encyclopedia in cases where ANI would have blocked the editor from certain pages. --Guy Macon (talk) 18:37, 16 November 2020 (UTC)
On creating a compromise colouring
Collapse first compromise attempt, as I think I have a better way to deal with the problem; second one to come later Double sharp (talk) 21:48, 14 November 2020 (UTC)
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There's something Andrew D. said at the ArbCom case page that I think makes a lot of sense, too: "perfect is the enemy of good". Now, I've stated a way above in which one can think of the current colour scheme as policy-compliant. It reflects the situation in the sources adequately in the sense that most sources show some kind of colouring, and that it is usually not too far from this one. It seems to me that as long as this variation exists in the sources one cannot do better, but one is not doing too bad. Now, I'll also note that we've had almost this colour scheme since literally 2002. And it served us pretty well up to 2013: the categories there would correspond basically to alkali metal | alkaline earth metal | lanthanide | actinide | transition metal | post-transition metal | metalloid | other nonmetal | halogen | noble gas So let's ask: what's changed since then? Not very much, honestly.
Then there is the one element that caused all the trouble.
I think that, looking at Sandbh's RFC with so many plausible options, as a contrast to that linked 2017 RFC that dealt with group 12, this may be a case of "perfect being the enemy of good". It seems to me that the literature generally agrees that if a PT is coloured, halogens should be coloured, but it doesn't seem to have any agreement on what to call the other nonmetals. That would certainly explain why Sandbh was able to marshal some level of support for multiple options, but I don't think there is total dominance for any one of them. So I'd like to turn our eyes back to 2002 and think: suppose at that point, just having built a good enough PT, we had just heard that At turned out from early chemical studies and modern theoretical corroboration to be a metal. What would we do, now that it's not clear in the literature even whether halogens extend past iodine? I think there's a relatively simple solution. Just replace "halogen" with "halogen nonmetal" as has been suggested above. Then that actually manages to please all sides. If you agree with the part of the literature that thinks a halogen has to be a nonmetal: then it's just a pleonasm, but not wrong. If you agree with the part of the literature that thinks a halogen is anything in group 17: then it's actually necessary to be right. So both parties will agree it is right, and the general idea that F-Cl-Br-I are distinct enough to deserve being a category is there. For astatine, we invoke WP:CONTEXTMATTERS and say: OK, well, it's an element most people will never encounter, so let's look at the few sources that cared about it. In fact, that's going to create exactly Sandbh's 3-category solution, so I guess he may be happy. Although he may be less happy about what I propose to call the new-old category. ^_^ Sure, it's not "perfect". But it seems to me that many of us are actually looking favourably at restoring halogens just because that's what most sources have. I worry that in Sandbh's proposed RFC, because there are so many possible options for the remaining nonmetals, none will get a clear consensus. I also worry that the fact that there are so many possible options rather strongly suggests that the literature isn't unified and that it will scotch any possible consensus (in fact, I still can't bring myself to really strongly support any option that isn't "other nonmetals"). So I'd ask: why let the perfect get in the way of the good? Let's just do a small improvement that keeps things still OK, and it'll be better than nothing. If we try to go for the gold from the beginning, we'll get nothing. Therefore I would like to ask: could everyone accept this compromise? It doesn't matter if you think it's not the best we could do, just whether you think it could be better than what we have now. I'd rather we have one modest improvement than try for a huge and great improvement that ultimately is too radical to pass. This way, we at least get halogens back on the table like they usually are, even if we don't have the name for the other category.
I edited this from a 2011 revision; obviously it'd be updated to current styles. We can change the colour scheme later, but that's a different topic. Thank you User:DePiep and User:R8R for your work there. ^_^ In that spirit, I would like to suggest that if this is acceptable, we "lock in" the categorisation and the layout for a while. No sense in arguing about it again when there's an entire article to improve and any further improvements run the risk of getting no consensus. That's inspired by what User:Jehochman said at User:EdChem's talk page: If need be, the name of the category "other nonmetals" can be revisited later, and that particular thing need not be locked in. But remember, the change from group 12 to leave the transition metals was tried twice. It failed the first time because then the category name was "poor metals" and its situation in the literature was more iffy than "post-transition metals". The second time, the new category name was "post-transition metals", and it resulted in a WP:SNOW success. Basically: if generally there did seem to be agreement between Sandbh and me at least in October IIRC that splitting out the halogens was justified (and that maybe counts for something because we generally post here more stuff than anyone else about all this categorisation stuff), I would prefer that that less controversial step not be jeopardised by mixing it with something more controversial. Do we need disclaimers? I guess on the main periodic table article we do, and for the infoboxes we probably do need them just as we do for something like No, this is not my personal favourite ideal colouring across the whole spectrum of colourings, but I think that probably speaks well for it being a good compromise: no one is completely satisfied, but people should feel it's better than nothing. And within the constraint of being close to the centre of what sources really give, I cannot think of any way to do much better, which makes me think that trying to better it is trying too hard. Why do I think this might be a plausible compromise? Because such a split of the nonmetals is something Sandbh has proposed, so it is presumably not going to cause an argument; because the name "other nonmetals" is one of the options Sandbh mentions in his RFC, so it is presumably not completely unacceptable to him; because it is my preferred option from his RFC and seems the most obviously non-controversial one; because IIRC most supported some sort of restoration of halogens; and because it is based on something that lasted for years uncontroversially before new information about astatine threw a spanner in the works. But most of all; because I think that these reasons give it a chance to stop the fight completely, as something like this was around for over a decade and no fighting resulted, so I feel like tweaking it the minimal amount possible now to correctly reflect new information about astatine is a plausible way to go. But we will see; the more important thing is to have some compromise stop the fight, rather than for it to be this one specifically. Anything that can solve this issue swiftly, take our minds completely off it, and let us work together on actually improving the parts of the periodic table article without controversy would be a good thing in my eyes even if it doesn't end up being this. Double sharp (talk) 20:23, 13 November 2020 (UTC) |
Could we perhaps agree to freeze this issue for a while too? It seems to me that so far, we have a couple of views on the current colouring, but it seems to have worked fine since 2018, and I don't think anyone's current idea is that radically far from it. So, I'd like to suggest we stop talking about it at least temporarily and get to work on the periodic table article itself as EdChem is suggesting to us. We may perhaps return to it when the memory of the difficult previous situation is not so close. Double sharp (talk) 22:30, 14 November 2020 (UTC)
- Yes please. Our today's discussion flow is not effective. (Is there something about 2020?). -DePiep (talk) 23:33, 14 November 2020 (UTC)
- Although if Sandbh wishes to go ahead with his proposed nonmetal-splitting RFC, I think it may not be too much of a problem provided we just !vote, explain ourselves, and don't argue with each other. Double sharp (talk) 00:39, 15 November 2020 (UTC)
- Yes please. Our today's discussion flow is not effective. (Is there something about 2020?). -DePiep (talk) 23:33, 14 November 2020 (UTC)
Philosophy: Coming to grips with the fuzzy nature of chemistry
NB: I’ve prefixed the section title with "Philosophical:" so that those of us less enamoured by such matters can skip the whole section.
In this JChemEd article from 2002 [37], about electronegativity scales, the author warns us that certain central notions of chemistry are broached, in chemistry textbooks, from a set of diverse and not always concordant explanations.
18 years later, a couple of philosophers analysed that 2002 article [38].
Here are some extracts and observations from their open access article:
- 1. …on certain occasions, such as for scientific and didactic purposes, in order to avoid confusion either in learning or in the development of an experimental process, the simpler option is better; that is why traditional scales are so popular even nowadays.”
- 2. OTOH, “Real science is home to a wide variety of scales, and associated conceptualizations, that coexist in the scientific communities...The question is not one about which scale should be chosen, but is instead about the reasoning for choosing only one.”
- 3. “Objective and univocal truth is not an aim of scientific practice.”
- 4. "The teaching of a 'mummified' chemistry, free of conceptual problems and the associated debates, does not reflect the scientific practice."
- 5. "At the same time, we believe that scientific monism, according to which there is only one scientific story about the world that can be told, should be avoided as far as possible as well."
- 6. "There is a vast philosophical literature and a scientific practice that supports this perspective…objective and univocal truth is not an aim of scientific practice. Pluralism must engage in cultivating multiple scientific systems and lines of enquiry, as science is a multi-aimed enterprise, not the search of literal truth…"
- 7. "But why is it better to be pluralistic? Why keep multiple systems of knowledge alive? The immediate reason for this is the sense that we are not likely to arrive at the one perfect theory or viewpoint that will satisfy all our needs...If we are not likely to find the one perfect system, it makes sense to keep multiple ones."
Suggested implications for WP:ELEM
1. Writing about e.g. the chemistry of the elements and the periodic table is hard.
2. In many case there is no one true way. At the same time, "for scientific and didactic purposes, in order to avoid confusion…in learning…the simpler option is better."
3. The question will not be about which approach should be chosen, but instead about the reasoning for choosing only one.
4. The teaching of chemistry free of conceptual problems and associated debates does not reflect scientific debate.
5. Some pragmatism and judgement will inevitably required in order to accommodate the desirability for simplicity and the fuzziness of chemistry.
Grateful for your thoughts. Sandbh (talk) 03:37, 14 November 2020 (UTC)
- Sandbh, when I said that your article touched on areas that are not sufficiently explored in the literature, this is exactly the sort of material that I had in mind. It is, IMO, central to some of the problems with writing an article on the PT, starting from considering who are the readers. It goes then to a more general question as to what the PT actually is. Is it a tool for summarising information about the properties of elements? Is it a tool for students to use to learn relationships between elements (like valency and what the formula of phosphorous(III) oxide is)? Is it a convenient summary form for relative atomic masses for use in carrying out stoichiometry? Is its purpose to provide electron configurations? Is it really meant for use by scientists and so should incorporate complexities even if these are confusing to students and lay people? Should there be different tables for different groups or different applications, each tailored to specific needs? Is including complexities an aid to student learning about multiple and co-existing models or is the confusion produced a hinderance – or is it both, an exemplar of the Perry Model in action?
- There are a wealth of interesting question here, ones that are well-suited to the literature and rather less well-suited to an encyclopaedia while the discussions continue unresolved. If we had an article on the Perry Model, this would be a suitable topic for it, but the question for the project (and certainly for discussion at talk:Periodic table is how to take what is in RS and give it DUE weight to present a clear and readable article that provides our readers with what they want / need to know about the periodic table.
- As a chemistry educator, I regularly think about these issues. I make sure to introduce students to the idea that a model is not the same as reality, that models are tools that do not fit / work well in all circumstances. A classic example (for me) is in introducing oxidation states. This is a model with great power for analysing redox processes, but at the same time is predicated on assumptions that are fanciful. I know that dichromate oxidation of 2-butanol to butanone involves reduction as chromium goes from CrVI to CrIII, but I also know that this model seeing dichromate as a Cr6+ cation surrounded by oxide anions and with no covalency in bonding is ridiculous. I value the model of oxidation state for its utility in understanding redox chemistry, whilst simultaneously looking at it as a tool with limitations and not as a reflection or representation of reality. I have the freedom when teaching to explore this concept. However, as a Wikipedian writing about oxidation state, I do not have the freedom to work in content on models and representations of reality without RS on the subject with sufficient coverage to pass DUE for inclusion. Otherwise, I am engaging in OR and SYNTHesising what I know of models and learning and the literatures of those areas and applying them to a chemistry topic in a way unsupported by the literature.
- For the Perry Model and multiple models, I introduce / explore these when discussing acids and bases as students often first try to choose between Arrhenius, Lowry–Bronsted, and Lewis models as if one is true. I encourage them to see each model as useful for different circumstances, each model being more complicated than the last but the simplest model that is valid being the wisest to choose for a situation. None of them are reality or truth, each is simply a model to understand reality, and choice of model is dependent on which best fits the situation. Like ArbCom being a sledgehammer and the right tool to use to crack some disputes, in circumstances where it is the wrong tool, its use may not have the desired result.
- I also explore the breakdown of models in discussing gas laws and explain that the ideal gas law is a mathematically-constructed model to approximate reality, based on assumptions, and that when those assumptions are unjustified, the model's approximations to reality become unreliable.
- I'm happy to chat more about such topics on one of our user talk pages, but for the continuation of the discussion here, I ask we concentrate on how the topic you raise can be implemented (if at all) in article space in line with policy, and to which articles it is supported by RS given DUE weight to apply. EdChem (talk) 04:19, 14 November 2020 (UTC)
- PS: This is also overlapping with the comments made by DGG at the ArbCom case request – Who are our readers? Students? Experts in Chemistry? Lay persons interested in Chemistry? And, what is it that they need from us in terms of what content we cover and how? There is the problem, however, that if the RS literature consensus sees the PT as (say) a tool for chemists / experts to use in their work then WP must say so, even if that group is not our typical reader... and raises consequent challenges of covering RS and giving DUE while producing understandable and appropriate encyclopaedic content. To your point, Sandbh: yes, writing about chemistry and the PT is hard but we have guidelines from what RS tells us on what to say and from considering our readers in deciding how to say it. EdChem (talk) 05:02, 14 November 2020 (UTC)
- EdChem, (btw, as background, I'm a biochemist who has also worked as a chemistry librarian). Since the PT is a tool used by chemists to organize and conceptualize their work, of course we should say so and explain how they use it. But the PT is also a teaching device, central to both the teaching of general chemistry and to what the public knows about chemistry, and we need to discuss this aspect also. (Similarly, we discuss other aspects, such as the historical aspects (best handled I think in the frWP article), and its use as the prototypical organizing device in other fields, sometimes seriously, sometimes humorously). This problem of the dual goals of being understandable and being accurate has long been a problem with all encyclopedic coverage in WP and in other encyclopedias of such fields as mathematicvs and much of physics. But I don't think this is so esoteric that it need to be split into two articles on the analogy of Introduction to general relativity .This problem of the dual goals of being understandable and being accurate has long been a problem with all encyclopedic coverage in WP and in other encyclopedias of such fields as mathematics and much of physics, and is now confronting us also with biology--and the subject of a recent arb case in which I did not participate--Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Medicine. DGG ( talk ) 06:08, 14 November 2020 (UTC)
EdChem; DGG, The PT article is not “mine”. I recall adding some content leading up to the FA process , but wasn’t the instigator of it.
The PT is a model, that’s all. The important thing is to explain the context for the particular model in use. This is relatively easy. The La form remains popular. The colour categories are the relatively popular ones: AM, AEM, Ln, An, TM, metalloids, halogens and noble gases. That just leaves the metals between the TM and the metalloids; and the nonmetals between the metalloids and the halogens (plus H).
Those categories illustrate the L-R progression in metallic to nonmetallic character going across the table, and the top-down increase in metallic character seen in most notably in the p-block. This is traditionally taught by contrasting the alkali metals with the halogens.
As long as I’ve used RS, I’ve never understood what the “undue” concern is about SYNTH and DUE etc. The RS keep me on track. As long as the end result is a better encyclopaedia. I’ve seen other editors who view minor IGF infringements of SYNTH and DUE as relatively harmless. YMMV.
Whoever said perfect is the enemy of good was right on the mark. Sandbh (talk) 08:47, 14 November 2020 (UTC)
- I kind of agree with everyone here. The questions EdChem raises are matters that are extremely interesting and, I daresay, peeve-inducing once you get to know about them. But the fact of the matter is that for many of those cases the situation is that the literature is not really settled and a lot of different things are taught to students. For example, just try finding a universally accepted definition of what a block is in the literature. The fact that you'll never find one doesn't stop people from using the term, however. And if that's the situation, then we should tread somewhat carefully and mostly follow the textbooks. Are they sometimes just plain wrong and contradicting themselves with specialised RS being able to prove it? Yes – but we can't say that here because that would give the issue disproportionate significance and rather defeat the point of explaining things to laymen. It might make a good commentary for JChemEd, but their goals are not ours. Does the way they write sometimes lead to inevitable hands raised at the back of the classroom? Yes – but I guess these things ought to be discussed, if at all, in footnotes. Because having tried to explain periodicity myself in a way that I would find completely accurate to literature esoterica and still understandable, it seems to me that while it's not impossible, what you end up with if you try it becomes far far far to the extremes when it comes to what most textbooks do. Which is not, I think, what an encyclopaedia should be doing. Double sharp (talk) 11:16, 14 November 2020 (UTC)
- Thanks for your comments, DGG, and I do agree that issues such as those raised here and elsewhere in the disputes / discussions have parallels in other areas and pose challenges that have been solved in other contexts on WP before.
- Sandbh, I agree that no one WP:OWNs any WP article. I did comment at talk:Periodic table that you and Double sharp are the originators of more than 50% of the bytes in that article, according to the history and page statistics tools, but that tells us nothing about which parts. It's an FA with strong and weak parts and I don't know who contributed what, nor do I plan to investigate. I just hope we can all work together to improve the weaker parts.
- As for your comment on RS, DUE, SYNTH, etc, I am reminded of the movie Reach for the Sky about WW2 fighter pilot Douglas Bader, where he and Harry Day exchange the maxim "rules are for the obedience of fools and the guidance of wise men." EdChem (talk) 20:59, 14 November 2020 (UTC)
- Keep in mind that any model is inevitably a simplification of reality that spares the reader overwhelming complexity. A central question for each article using the PT is "Who is the audience for this article?" What we often miss at Wikipedia is that for every editor there are hundreds of silent readers. We need to think about what will serve the reader best. Sometimes less complexity is more valuable. We can have daughter articles that go into greater depth. We can provide links to deeper treatments of the topic. Jehochman Talk 05:15, 15 November 2020 (UTC)
- The overall readership for periodic table is millions per editor. The pattern of readership is cyclical – a peak in September and a steady decline to August. As this aligns with the academic year, this indicates that the readership is mainly schoolchildren and students rather than professional chemists. Understanding of the periodic table is commonly tested in chemistry exams – see this syllabus, for example. This should inform our coverage of the topic. Andrew🐉(talk) 11:24, 15 November 2020 (UTC)
Group 12, on the basis of what Andrew D. said above about our audience
There may be some grounds for returning group 12 to the transition metals in the colouring like we had until 2017. In fact, here are all ten of them that I see, going from simplest to most complicated.
- We are writing for beginning students, and they don't really need the detail. Anecdotal evidence: in my first year in school chemistry, Zn, Cd, and Hg were called transition metals as they are part of the d block. Only in later years were they excluded on the grounds that they don't really have the transition metal properties. More on that point at #8.
- Group 12 is included in transition metals by Britannica, ptable.com, LANL, ACS, and RSC (the five sources Sandbh mentioned when justifying categories' inclusion above). I think this supports point #1 that it is generally felt that beginners don't need the detail. Rather strongly in my opinion because while they disagree on some details, this is one thing that they are all in unison about, and we can't say some of these aren't authoritative.
- Regarding the big three inorganic textbooks that Sandbh mentions often: Cotton & Wilkinson exclude the Zn group from transition metals, but Greenwood & Earnshaw (p. 905) as well as Holleman & Wiberg include it. So that's 2/3.
- According to W. B. Jensen, writing in 2003, "virtually every recent general chemistry text" (p. 952) he examined included the Zn group in transition metals. While he did mention that many inorganic texts that do this later contradict themselves, he also mentioned that most general chemistry texts simply did not even cover the chemistries of these elements in enough details for any real problems to arise. (Regarding whether or not there really are big problems coming from it, see #8, #9, and #10 if you are up for more chemistry as described in RS.) The 50-50 divide he referred to was about "advanced monographs on coordination chemistry and organometallic chemistry". (Note that Jensen opposes the inclusion of the Zn group in the transition metals and considers it wrong, but these are the results he admitted he got while surveying the literature. Regarding his argument, see #10.) I think this substantiates my point that beginners are usually taught that the Zn group is a transition group, and if it is excluded (which is not universal), then that is only done at a later and more advanced stage. So the 50-50 argument doesn't seem to hold that well in hindsight given the level we should be writing for. Besides, if something is universal at the basic level, and even at the advanced level half of all authors agree, then should we really be taking the view of the dissenters?
- Since this is basic, we should not just look at textbooks, but also at even more basic things like periodic table posters. It seems to me that in that sort of sphere, including the Zn group into the transition metals is absolutely the dominating option judging by Google Images results.
- We had it this way from 2002 to 2017 and no one complained that much.
- That's the definition IUPAC gives first in the Red Book: "For example, the elements of groups 3–12 are the d-block elements. These elements are also commonly referred to as the transition elements, though the elements of group 12 are not always included". And that seems to be their primary one, since on p. 228 onwards when they talk about naming organometallic compounds of main group elements, group 12 is not included as a main group (implying it has been shunted off to the transition groups).
The last three arguments involve some serious chemistry and are therefore collapsed to not scare everybody away
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The impression I get from #8 and #9 is that excluding group 12 is based on higher-level considerations from those our likely audience should concern themselves with. It opens up a can of hard-to-answer yet unproductive questions that are really not on the radar of that target audience (chemistry of elements that don't even last an hour, MO theory, weirdo compounds of mercury at cryogenic temperatures), and also has part of its basis on a definition that is not even taken at its word because it produces strange results like Th and U as transition metals. Moreover, the arguments often seem fairly qualitative and debatable (#8), since already group 11 (and especially Ag) are starting to be quite weak in showing some of the characteristic transition metal properties too but are rarely excluded anymore, and the clearest argument produced for the exclusion of the Zn group (#10) is based on what is apparently a false premise (as it's refuted elsewhere in the literature). On pragmatic grounds, group 12 in transition metals appears to be simpler and avoids such murky waters. This is substantiated by the fact that the exclusion of the Zn group is generally a phenomenon encountered at or close to the university level, is not even universal there (arguments #3, #4), and that basic things for beginners generally include it (#1, #2, #5). The fact that this was uncontroversial for an amazing fifteen years (#6) on the project, and that IUPAC seems to include the Zn group in the Red Book after paying a little bit of lip service to those who exclude it (#7), suggests to me that we should have left well enough alone. Which is a sentiment expressed by our founder mav way back in 2008 when the group 12 thing was first discussed; since it seems to me that the situation had not changed much in the literature since then, it strikes me that that should perhaps have been the end of it.
And remember, this is just for the beginning periodic table article. We do not need to follow it all the time if we are writing about a topic where the other definition makes things easier: after all, context matters for categorisation. Probably, however, that will be an advanced topic if the literature distribution found by Jensen is anything to go by. I submit that in the beginners' context, including the Zn group as a transition group seems to be the standard way to go. By excluding it three years ago we have opened up a complicated university-level can of worms into an article on a topic often taught to schoolchildren, when the issue at university level is not even fully agreed, and I think that we may have thus done our readers a disservice by introducing that instead of an absolutely standard simplification.
TL;DR summary. Excluding the group 12 elements from transition metals is based on advanced information that I do not think the reader actually needs to know, that this advanced information is not even actually agreed on the advanced sources, and that in general basic-level sources for beginners stick to calling it transition metals as we did from 2002–17. Considering that an average general chemistry book will discuss the different parts of the PT including transition vs main-group elements, I feel that we should follow what even Jensen admits to be a universal in that context.
As Jehochman noted: Keep in mind that any model is inevitably a simplification of reality that spares the reader overwhelming complexity. A central question for each article using the PT is "Who is the audience for this article?" What we often miss at Wikipedia is that for every editor there are hundreds of silent readers. We need to think about what will serve the reader best. Sometimes less complexity is more valuable. We can have daughter articles that go into greater depth. We can provide links to deeper treatments of the topic.
I submit that the place to go into this at greater depth is at the main articles on transition metal, post-transition metal, and group 12 element, and not periodic table.
Double sharp (talk) 13:22, 15 November 2020 (UTC)
- @Sandbh, R8R, YBG, DePiep, EdChem, and Andrew Davidson: Double sharp (talk) 13:26, 15 November 2020 (UTC)
Compromise 1: other nonmetals + halogen nonmetals
Extended content
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Nonmetal categories(The anchor for the old thread name, so it still works. Double sharp (talk) 13:21, 18 November 2020 (UTC)) Similarly, there may be some grounds for just deciding on other nonmetals and halogen nonmetals and calling it a day there.
In the past, judging from Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Elements/Archive 15#Polonium – metalloid or post-transition metal?, the way we solved these issues was just to post at the talk page, see how the response was, and if no strong objections were raised just carry out and do it without needing to RFC anything. That seems in keeping with how we treat the entire rest of the article: anyone can improve it, there's no need for anyone's changes to go through an RFC if it's not generally felt that they'd be controversial. So I try doing it this way to avoid (1) a bureaucratic logjam and (2) extending the issue when there's the whole rest of the article to work on. If people feel generally OK with it, that's good; if not, then that's also good. @Sandbh, R8R, YBG, DePiep, EdChem, and Andrew Davidson: Double sharp (talk) 13:42, 15 November 2020 (UTC)
@EdChem: Just asking you since you are a chemist: exactly how is astatine's status as a halogen treated in your experience by your colleagues? Is there any difference between views of organic and inorganic chemists? Does anybody really care much (outside I guess the few who work with it, since they probably care)? Have you ever actually gotten to work with astatine or know someone who has? Is it well-known that recent results (both theoretical and empirical) are leaning towards astatine behaving more like a metal than not? And if it is, does anyone think that that has anything to do with whether At is a halogen or not? Thanks for your answers if you decide to give them (since your statement about the group 3 thing at ArbCom was useful). I understand you would prefer to let us decide this among ourselves, but in this case I think any information you would give on this would be useful to let us do that. ^_^ Double sharp (talk) 16:43, 15 November 2020 (UTC)
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Conclusions
For those who are overwhelmed by the threads.
- Interpersonal conflict DS vs Sandbh is totally resolved and over.[39] Not sure about the other one, but seems to be developing promisingly.
- Argument over La vs Lu placed on freezer until IUPAC says something. DS is happy to have it at La for now, recognising he has made an attempt to change it already and that it has not resulted in a consensus in favour of his preferred Lu. He plans to revisit the situation when IUPAC says something (which based on info from Sandbh will probably start soon, albeit coming in various stages until the final IUPAC decision or lack thereof is made clear), as that will impact the source situation in a way that nothing else probably will . So that argument is settled.
- Remaining categorisation questions raised civilly here and seem very close to being resolved.
- Everyone is working together fine with no need to pass everything to external parties, although occasional questions where outside expertise might be helpful are of course still being brought up.
- Plans have already been set in motion to improve periodic table the article, with EdChem's excellent proposals being kept in mind as a guide.
Hopefully to be updated happily as news to ArbCom members that everything is settled without need for their involvement. Double sharp (talk) 23:17, 15 November 2020 (UTC)
Compromise idea 2: other nonmetals and halogens with At as a halogen?
Superseded by idea 3
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Here's another possibility: why don't we simply colour astatine as a halogen, with no quibbles about whether or not it is a metal? That agrees with IUPAC, first of all. It also happens to agree with Britannica, LANL, ACS, and RSC. This is, indeed a more group-like definition of what a halogen is. But it's consistent with what pretty much everybody else is doing, including with tennessine. That makes me think that actually nobody seems to be thinking that the metallic properties in any way block At from also being a halogen, particularly when it does sometimes act like a halogen. As R8R correctly notes, it is not common to specifically exclude astatine from the halogens. Indeed, as EdChem seems to be suggesting, the majority view among chemists is that astatine is a halogen almost as a default, and that its informal exclusion is not so much due to people having analysed At chemistry and what "halogen" means but more due to people just not caring about it. Perhaps we should follow suit if that is how the literature seems to be, rather than trying to be better than them for an element with a still relatively undeveloped chemistry. There is a con: doing this means we have to stop with the explicit "umbrella" categories of metals and metalloids and nonmetals. That's because "halogen" no longer implies "nonmetal" (not that it seems to have universally done so in the literature in the first place; maybe for some, by no means for all). So, instead of the legend looking like this:
it would always look like this: I think though that this is not a big deal, because the majority of categories still retain "metal" / "metalloid" / "nonmetal" in the name, and because this kind of compact navbox without the umbrella categories is already present in We thus end up with a totally consistent set of categories: IUPAC is used for the common categories (AM, AEM, Ln, An, TM, halogens, noble gases), with "does it appear in Britannica, RSC, ACS, and LANL" as a hopefully unassailable benchmark for "common" when it comes to beginners' literature. (Admittedly this does mean that group 12 could go either way. I have a thread about that, it is a separate issue.) Then for the region in between; the metalloids are charted by Sandbh's amazing work at lists of metalloids as just the common six, and then the ones to the right are called nonmetals and the ones to the left post-transition metals, which is also common. So everything is well-informed by reliable sources. So that should reflect the literature situation, in which At is considered a halogen nearly universally, but its status as a metal or a nonmetal is up for debate with most basic treatments thinking of it as a nonmetal like its lighter congeners and most more advanced treatments saying "um, that might not quite be the case for all of its behaviour". Faced with the situation of a poorly understood chemistry and reliable sources still not quite agreeing about whether astatine is a nonmetal, a metalloid, or a metal, the "halogen" category therefore neatly sweeps under the rug the problem of just what happens here, when it is not something the average layman should be too interested in. As YBG has already made statements about being neutral about whether or not to change, this is mostly meant for consideration by R8R and Sandbh. DePiep may be interested as well. Illustration:
(Avoiding the plurals is also me playing with semantics to be technically correct while being simple. Because if I see a legend saying "halogens", I get the impression that "oh, these are all the halogens". Whereas if it says "halogen", then one can argue "yes, it says these five are halogens, but it doesn't say that these are all of them". Or maybe this is getting a bit too desperately twisty. ^_^) As a final reiteration of the salient point: this table makes no claim at all about whether astatine is a metal, a metalloid, or a nonmetal. All of that can be discussed in the text where the appropriate context is listed. All this table says about astatine is the incontrovertible fact that it is a halogen. If readers focusing on astatine do not want to read the detailed text about it and assume what is not said here to classify it, then we cannot really stop them from not reading the fine print when the issue is a fine-print one. Double sharp (talk) 23:00, 16 November 2020 (UTC)
SandbhThank you for your very gracious reference to the lists of metalloids as being amazing. Considerations Proposed nonmetal RFC
Metallicity trends
ACS, EB, LANL etc tables
Astatine's category history
"Textbook errors"
Philsophy?
In light of the above considerations I prefer to ascertain the communities' position via the proposed RFC. Sandbh (talk) 00:10, 18 November 2020 (UTC)
@Double sharp: I tend to think the non-metal RFC should go ahead. You could vote to keep two categories, and in the discussion section explain your reasoning for doing so, i.e. that you have a separate RFC that you will put, following the nonmetal RFC, should consensus not be established for three categories. That may the easiest way going forward, but let me think about it some more, including your comments and request at my talk page. Sandbh (talk) 01:52, 18 November 2020 (UTC)
@Double sharp: I think the nonmetal RFC should go ahead. Whatever happens, it could be followed at any time by an RFC focusing on the status At. That seems to me to be the cleanest way to proceed. I support our historical decision to categorise At as a PTM. I haven’t read anything since then that merits revisiting this decision. The formation of a monocation in aqueous solution, without any inordinate difficulty, is a hallmark. Equally, At shows some non-metallic behaviour as could be expected from a PTM. Astatine could equally have been expected to be a metalloid (i.e. a semiconductor) but for relativistic effects. Upon reflection, our decision to go two nonmetal categories was less than optimal. I think WP:ELEM members recognised that. But nobody had a better option/s at the time. Now we do, IMHO. --- Sandbh (talk) 05:38, 18 November 2020 (UTC)
@Double sharp: If consensus is not achieved with the nonmetal rfc, you can follow with an rfc proposing the reintroduction of the halogen category including At. If consensus is achieved with the nonmetal rfc you can follow up with an RFC proposing the reintroduction of the halogen category. I don't expect their would be any drama trimming the "nonmetals" from halogen nonmetals. The nonmetal rfc has sufficient merit by itself. Other rfc(s) of course can be put forward; my feeling is that each deserves their time in the sun, preferably not at the same time. I'm happy to agree to disagree with you on the status of astatine an fcc metal. Sandbh (talk) 21:57, 18 November 2020 (UTC)
R8RI have to think about it some more, and I'm not ready to give an answer right now. I suspect, however, that even if we remove the metal/nonmetal distinction from the PT, it will still be thought to be somewhere there. It will still look like the categories to the left are metals and to the right are nonmetals, and astatine will still be thought of as a metal. Besides, is removing those two categories, metal and nonmetal, a good thing or is this loss at least outweighed in terms of encyclopedic value by having a new halogen category? I doubt it. On the other hand, even if it's unprecedented for us to have a category that has both nonmetals and a metal, that's still an interesting category name, and a popular one, too. I need to think whether I can justify having it in our new element system and whether I'll be able to call that scheme consistent. I'm currently leaning no, but your blocks-only proposal also seemed too much to me at first, but I grew to it over time and even wanted to support it had you ended up having an RfC on the matter.--R8R (talk) 06:34, 18 November 2020 (UTC)
@R8R: Please take this as superseded by #Compromise idea 3: ACS/LANL/2010. Double sharp (talk) 13:16, 18 November 2020 (UTC) |
Untangling element articles
I came upon Wikiproject elements after doing some cleanup on the lithium page, and being struck by the combination of two topics in one. It seems this is quite general to many articles, at least according to a quick scan of the first three rows of the PT.
I recommend that each article be divided into two.
1. New articles entitled, say, Elemental XXX. This article will be in exactly the same form as that recommended for all other chemical compounds in the Manual of Style/Chemistry. After all, elemental forms are only unique chemical compounds in that they only contain one element. No need to treat them differently IMHO.
2. The existing article will have information specific to the chemistry of the elemental form migrated out except where it illustrates the general chemistry of the element.
Looking forward to your reaction to the concept. Please don't bother wordsmithing the two sections below, they serve only to illustrate the principle.
Sections to be migrated out of the article "Lithium"
Infobox lithium:
- Move from Infobox 'Physical Properties' and 'Other Properties'
- Copy from 'History' In 1855, larger quantities of lithium were produced through the electrolysis of lithium chloride by Robert Bunsen and Augustus Matthiessen.[58][72] The discovery of this procedure led to commercial production of lithium in 1923 by the German company Metallgesellschaft AG, which performed an electrolysis of a liquid mixture of lithium chloride and potassium chloride.[58][73][74] to History
- Copy from Chemistry Lithium reacts with water easily, but with noticeably less vigor than other alkali metals. The reaction forms hydrogen gas and lithium hydroxide in aqueous solution.[4] Because of its reactivity with water, lithium is usually stored in a hydrocarbon sealant, often petroleum jelly. Though the heavier alkali metals can be stored in denser substances such as mineral oil, lithium is not dense enough to fully submerge itself in these liquids.[17] In moist air, lithium rapidly tarnishes to form a black coating of lithium hydroxide (LiOH and LiOH·H2O), lithium nitride (Li3N) and lithium carbonate (Li2CO3, the result of a secondary reaction between LiOH and CO2).[40]
When the metal burns strongly, the flame becomes a brilliant silver. Lithium will ignite and burn in oxygen when exposed to water or water vapors.[83] Lithium is flammable, and it is potentially explosive when exposed to air and especially to water, though less so than the other alkali metals. The lithium-water reaction at normal temperatures is brisk but nonviolent because the hydrogen produced does not ignite on its own. As with all alkali metals, lithium fires are difficult to extinguish, requiring dry powder fire extinguishers (Class D type). Lithium is one of the few metals that react with nitrogen under normal conditions.[84][85]
Copy from Military applications Metallic lithium and its complex hydrides, such as Li[AlH4], are used as high-energy additives to rocket propellants.[17]
Move section 'Precautions'
Example New article ("Elemental Lithium")
New article
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ElementalLithium is a metal with the formula Li. It is a soft, silvery-white alkali metal. Under standard conditions, it is the lightest metal and the lightest solid element. Like all alkali metals, lithium is highly reactive and flammable, and must be stored in mineral oil. When cut, it exhibits a metallic luster, but moist air corrodes it quickly to a dull silvery gray, then black tarnish. ProductionLithium metal is produced by electrolytic reduction of lithium chloride ApplicationsElemental lithium has no known industrial uses but it is used a precursor in academic synthetic chemistry. It can appear as an unwanted layer in lithium batteries, and there is much research to develop solid state batteries which could use lithium as cathode. References
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- (end of new article)
--Oldboltonian (talk) 23:49, 16 November 2020 (UTC)
- @Oldboltonian: Although I have some sympathy to the idea, I am eventually against it. First of all, most general inorganic texts cover the elemental form's properties within the context of a general discussion of the compounds and chemistry (Greenwood & Earnshaw, Holleman & Wiberg), so this would go against a conflation that is perfectly standard in the literature. Second of all, following on from that point, the distinction between an element and a simple substance seems rather better-known in other languages than it really is in English. Third of all, articles on compounds usually discuss their chemical reactions and the results thereof (e.g. sulfuric acid which of course mentions inevitably the sulfate anions), so we can hardly get a clean cut between the simple substance and the element anyway. Last of all the fact that we have been doing things this way since 2002 when the project was founded, combined with the difficulties that I have just described, tells me we should probably leave what has worked well enough for almost two decades alone. But it would be interesting to hear the views of others. Double sharp (talk) 00:22, 17 November 2020 (UTC)
- P.S. The project is also having a few tough times with conflicts. That doesn't mean you can't suggest something now, but I do recommend we all tread a little bit carefully to not ruin a peace that has just been starting to form a few days ago. My sincerest apologies that you had to encounter us at such a terrible time, and my welcome to the project in case you want to stick around. ^_^ Double sharp (talk) 00:26, 17 November 2020 (UTC)
Article distinction
- What, you think, is the essential separation ground (say, the test question: why does subtopic X belong in article Li/1 or Li/2?). Following, could the titles be like, disambiguated: [Lithium (elemental)], [Lithium (chemistry)], [Lithium in real life], [Lithium (element concept)], [Lithium]. -DePiep (talk) 00:58, 17 November 2020 (UTC)
- pending any other responses as requested by Double sharp, @DePiep: How about: information specific to the elemental form(s) of the element, in particular history, properties, uses (primarily industrial, secondarily academic), and above all hazard data. Otherwise, into the main article as it exists today. Not sure I follow your second question. There would be a lithium article, therein a section 'Compounds and Chemistry', therein a succinct description of the chemistry of its compounds including theelemental form, and a link to main article 'Elemental Lithium'? --Oldboltonian (talk) 14:06, 17 November 2020 (UTC)
- With the reader in mind, I ask the question: what is the separation ground? If you have property X of Li, which check do you perform to decide: should go in article Li-such or in Li-so? Then my 2nd question is: This same separation ground should be understandable from the title (to me, "elemental" is not). In short: If you have two lithium articles, what's their difference? -DePiep (talk) 17:24, 17 November 2020 (UTC)
- Good question. For elements that are metals or gases one could add the word 'metal' (I note that you already gave your opinion on the use of the word 'metal' to indicate 'elemental' or 'gas'. For the common allotropes of C and O, these articles aleady exist. But I take your points, DePiep and double sharp, let's let nature take its course here, and where there is enough meat (like the C&O allotropes) there will be a separate article). Still I'd like to see the content around the chemistry and properties of the elemental state grouped together within the articles--Oldboltonian (talk) 11:59, 21 November 2020 (UTC)
- With the reader in mind, I ask the question: what is the separation ground? If you have property X of Li, which check do you perform to decide: should go in article Li-such or in Li-so? Then my 2nd question is: This same separation ground should be understandable from the title (to me, "elemental" is not). In short: If you have two lithium articles, what's their difference? -DePiep (talk) 17:24, 17 November 2020 (UTC)
- pending any other responses as requested by Double sharp, @DePiep: How about: information specific to the elemental form(s) of the element, in particular history, properties, uses (primarily industrial, secondarily academic), and above all hazard data. Otherwise, into the main article as it exists today. Not sure I follow your second question. There would be a lithium article, therein a section 'Compounds and Chemistry', therein a succinct description of the chemistry of its compounds including theelemental form, and a link to main article 'Elemental Lithium'? --Oldboltonian (talk) 14:06, 17 November 2020 (UTC)
Compromise idea 3: ACS/LANL/2010
Idea planned for DS RFC
- NB: Actual RFC draft is at User:Double sharp/Category RFC. The below was just sounding the idea out with R8R first and will not be the actual RFC text! Double sharp (talk) 22:12, 18 November 2020 (UTC)
(I add this to preserve the previous anchor and to make it clear where this is planned to go.) Double sharp (talk) 22:11, 18 November 2020 (UTC)
Extended content
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Here's a third compromise idea (and probably the one I will end up proposing at an RFC): follow the tables of the ACS and LANL in their category boundaries are exactly the same there. In the cases of disagreement of category names (next to the metalloids), simply be neutral and use "other metals" and "other nonmetals" to create a complete return to the version of 2010, before any of us three still discussing this (me, R8R, Sandbh) had ever touched the template. (Well not quite, because at that point the discovery of Ts had not yet been announced. But I guess that is a side issue.)
This is also almost exactly the ACS table (except we have "other nonmetal" instead of "nonmetal"; I feel this is justified since noble gases are generally regarded as nonmetals). It is also almost exactly the LANL table (except it has also "post-transition metals" – but there are multiple names for those metals as detailed at Post-transition_metal#Related_groupings, and "post-transition metals" raises unproductive questions about aluminium, so I feel we'd better leave well enough alone). Anyway, the category boundaries are exactly the same there. I recognise that this is not quite the current table. Scientifically speaking, if we look at the specialised sources, it is true that some elements could be treated better. One can make arguments about polonium and astatine, and also argue about the colouring of the superheavy elements. But:
Given his reaction to colouring At as a halogen above as Compromise 2, I think Sandbh is likely to be against this, but it would be nice to have a confirmation. That being said, this is most likely what I will put forward as an RFC anyway. Obviously, my RFC statement will not be this long, and will simply neutrally suggest this form. So I am mostly looking for R8R's opinion here before I go ahead with an RFC. I would like to ask him to take his time and consider. Oh, and just to clarify: I still scientifically don't like this scheme very much in how it treats those problematic radioactives near the bottom, and I still think it's not perfect. But I also think that if we don't give way on some things, we will never get any compromise out. If everyone goes for "my way or the highway", this will never end. But hopefully, the gravitas of appealing to ACS and LANL (since IUPAC doesn't, unfortunately for us, have a coloured PT) will mean that the result will be accepted as a permanent status quo. And we may apply this principle to future elements too: follow the sources, and if they want to apply categories by group, we'll do that. 119 will be an alkali metal, 120 will be an alkaline earth metal, 121+ will be superactinides for a while, and hopefully by the time that immensely long series is finally left there will be some consensus on how the periodic table looks like beyond there. I think ACS/LANL can have a chance at stopping the debate, and to support it I have put thoughts of "but this is scientifically wrong, I have specialised sources!" and trying to win aside. It all depends though on the opinions of others here and that of the community when I put this up for RFC. Double sharp (talk) 13:10, 18 November 2020 (UTC)
@Double sharp:--R8R (talk) 17:08, 18 November 2020 (UTC)
The nonmetal rfc proposal prompted mention of another five RFCs. That's OK but I do not think proposing an RFC in response to an RFC and asking for the second RFC to then go before the first RFC is a "proper(?)" way to air of treat the merits of the first RFC, unless the proposer of the first RFC agrees, which I don't. So, I politely oppose starting this option before the nonmetal rfc. Sandbh (talk) 22:13, 18 November 2020 (UTC)
@Double sharp: I'll reconsider as per your request. I have a few RL obligations today and cannot predict when I'll be able to get back to you (hopefully later today). Sandbh (talk) 23:05, 18 November 2020 (UTC)
Update: no, I can't currently bring myself to support At outside halogens if halogens is a category. That's just because almost all authors who use halogens as a category include it. If my proposal fails, then yes, I will think about it. Double sharp (talk) 21:22, 19 November 2020 (UTC) An attempt to clarifyThe following is addressed to Sandbh in a spirit of trying to resolve this issue agreeably. Double sharp (talk) 23:35, 19 November 2020 (UTC) I don't feel that this compromise is dragging multiple issues into one. On the contrary, I see it as a single issue on how policy is interpreted to apply to this case. To that end I will therefore first explain slightly more briefly why I am supporting the ACS/LANL/2010 option. Basically: there are lots of categories – but when it comes to colouring the PT, quite a few things seem to be generally agreed, such as AM/AEM/Ln/An/TM/halogens/noble gases with what happens in the middle iffy. In particular, it seems nearly universal for beginning texts to take group 12 as part of TM and to have halogens as a category with astatine (and probably now even tennessine) as a part of them. When there is disagreement like in the region between TMs and halogens + H: it may be due to textbook errors, or it may be due to different contexts. But then I feel like while following one source is OK (since the others are usually very close), weighing up the sources ourselves for iffy elements and producing something that none of a whole bunch of common sources do (including an "unknown" category or either removing halogens or removing At and Ts from them) just trips my OR/SYNTH meter. So it's not about dragging three issues (group 12, Po/At/superheavies, category names) into one. Rather it is about one issue: does the community agree with my interpretation of how policy applies to this issue, or not. It's very possible that my interpretation is not the community-supported one, in which case I will of course change it to conform to the community's. However, that will remain to be seen by the community. Considering the nature of this rationale, I feel that if your RFC starts first, I don't have a good option on how to !vote. If I honestly state my preference, I drag the scope beyond nonmetals alone and into the whole table, precisely because the nature of my argumentation for supporting this makes it an "all or nothing". If you are OK with such a !vote appearing on your RFC, despite it dragging the topic open that way, then there is no problem. (When I say OK with it, I mean obviously whether you think it conforms to the process to !vote that way; obviously, as is your right, you would probably not support it, but that's not the point.) But if you are not OK with such a thing, but you still go first, then I feel we end up at an impasse where I cannot honestly !vote for my preference. Forcing group 12, polonium, and the superheavies outside the scope of an RFC means that I cannot !vote honestly for my preference, because my argument simply doesn't work for changing just the nonmetals only. It's about following categorisation boundaries wholesale and so it only works if you change everything at once. Which is why I feel we need an RFC to see if there is consensus on those issues one way or the other first. If there is in favour of the logic that leads to ACS/LANL/2010; then we're done. If there isn't; then I see consensus is not for that logic, so I change my policy interpretation in accordance with it and seek something else, in which case I can quite likely !vote for one of the options on your RFC. But not yet, which is the problem. If a way can be found in which I can make an honest !vote given my current justification, then all my objections evaporate, of course. But I can't think of a way of doing it without either not being honest about what my argument leads to or going off-topic. Whereas you could easily respond to my RFC proposing anything you want, because mine is about colouring the whole table and therefore none of what you're suggesting would ever go off-topic. You could write in any option you want, really. You could for example !vote for one of your preferred trifurcation options, maybe with your preferred option replacing "other nonmetals", or maybe with "other nonmetals" first with an eye to another RFC to see if it should be changed. All that seems to work and I would not consider it off-topic at all. I hope we can resolve this amicably between ourselves. I note that you said at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Elements#Discussion_4 the following text: (And to make it clear by repetition: if you don't agree, I have no intention to start mine unilaterally. I would want to consult EdChem for advice, but I do not wish to do anything to jeopardise the current peace.) P.S. I agree that the way the ACS/LANL/2010 scheme colours the heaviest elements sucks scientifically, that it is stuck in a weird limbo between being a metallicity and a groupic table, and that polonium is better regarded as a metal without any qualification, so I would like to ask in good spirit that people do not try to convince me of what I am convinced by already. ^_^ I am supporting it for other reasons, which is that the tables of PubChem/ACS/LANL all seem to care about none of those issues and therefore that I am not convinced we should either. Please understand that my support of something for WP does not imply my personal support of it. For another example, I know R8R and I support Lu personally if you asked us what we thought was the better form, but I know he thinks and he has convinced me that for now WP should show La pending the outcome of the IUPAC project. But, again, that doesn't mean either of us personally support it and would show it if we were writing about periodicity outside WP: we wouldn't. Double sharp (talk) 21:22, 19 November 2020 (UTC) |
- @Double sharp: I'll reply at my talk page, with a ping of course, Sandbh (talk) 02:00, 20 November 2020 (UTC)
Book chapter: Why don’t we really teach about the periodic table?
- Rayner-Canham G 2020, Advances in teaching inorganic chemistry, vol. 2: Laboratory enrichment and faculty community, Chapter 6, pp 69–77, ACS Symposium Series, vol. 1371 doi:10.1021/bk-2020-1371.ch006
From the intro:
- "We lie to students. Such lies are often justified by saying that we are “simplifying” the topic. But in the process of simplifying, are we hiding the fascinating “messiness” of the periodic table? In this chapter, I focus on two facets of the periodic table. First, that richness, complexities, and controversies, should be highlighted in our teaching. Second, that terminology, sometimes used inconsistently or ambiguously, needs unambiguous definitions to give to our students. In the first half of this discourse, four of the many issues will be addressed; others are addressed elsewhere [41], particularly the very divisive issue of the lower members of Group 3 [42]."
Rayner-Canham covers the placement of H; do we overdo group trends; do we underdo other trends; and where do the early actinoids belong? --- Sandbh (talk) 12:09, 19 November 2020 (UTC)
- Sandbh I read some of it, it was fascinating. I have to admit however that I do not think his proposed solution to group 3 (sometimes Lu, sometimes a gap before Lu, sometimes a gap) will actually stop the issue from being divisive, on the grounds that the current compromise IUPAC table with a gap below Y has been around for decades and if anything the debate actually got more divisive since it came out. So I will continue to wait for IUPAC. ^_^ Double sharp (talk) 12:20, 19 November 2020 (UTC)
Double sharp: R-C does not discuss a proposed solution to group 3 in this chapter, aside from citing my FoC article. Are you referring to something else? Sandbh (talk) 09:01, 20 November 2020 (UTC)
- @Sandbh: Yes, your second link [43]. Sorry for not making it clear that I meant that one when I said I'd read it. I haven't been able to read this first one yet. ^_^ Double sharp (talk) 10:03, 20 November 2020 (UTC)
- Double sharp, in this context, is the German periodic table p-block worth revisiting? Their colour category treatment of Ge, Sb, Se, Po, and At is interesting. They are for sure not telling lies to children. Sandbh (talk) 11:31, 20 November 2020 (UTC)
- @Sandbh:, my concern is not about telling lies to children, but rather about following the sources. I don't see any significant sources in English doing this sort of striping, so I do not feel we should do it. The source situation may be different between English and German: I have not checked because I'm not an active editor on German Wikipedia and therefore I'm not involved in checking if their content is supported by their literature situation.
Again, please understand that when I support ACS/LANL/2010 for WP, I mean that I think it best reflects the coloured-tables literature to do so, not that I think the colouring is all that great personally. There are a number of things like that on WP, where I currently support the WP table showing He in group 18 and La in group 3 on the grounds of most of the literature saying that, even though if you asked me personally my viewpoint is that both are serious mistakes. And that's why my current opinion for WP is that group 3 should not be revisited until we hear from IUPAC, not because I feel that would impact the scientific situation (it might if new arguments are presented, but that's not my main point) but because I feel that would impact the source situation that matters for WP. About the same thing goes for calling Ts a halogen and Og a noble gas from my perspective: I don't like it, if I was writing outside WP I'd probably call it a serious mistake as well, but I feel it's not WP's place to say it if most sources are doing it anyway. Similarly I think of the whole metalloid-line problem as an issue of an "original sin" of not clearly stating definitions, and would favour giving the children the physical-based definition "a metallic element has to have a Fermi surface in all stable or metastable allotropes at standard conditions" which mostly matches the chemistry (and then the metal-nonmetal dividing line runs between Be and B, between Al and Si, between Ga and Ge, between Sb and Te, probably between At and Rn, and in the 7th period everything is a metal but Cn and Og probably). I feel it makes sense because "metal" seems to have started as a physical term according to Origin and use of the term metalloid which you wrote, most people are more familiar with the physical idea of a metal than the chemical one (K is by far a stronger metal chemically than Au, yet the latter is for everyone the king of metals, and the former was found so weird it was sometimes called a "metalloid"!) and the chemistry just mostly correlates because the same thing of easily mobile electrons is behind both (though the correlation is not perfect). And I'd do that if I were writing some sort of text on periodicity. But again, to a first approximation people don't do that, there's no clear consensus definition in the literature, and so I feel my personal preference here means nothing for WP no matter how persuasive I find my own argument. So, I've listed three issues, containing a mixture of agreement and disagreement with your view, where I have a personal view and don't advocate it for WP because I don't feel the current source situation supports it. The fact that you probably have a different preference for some of this is for me further proof that trying to analyse the sources ourselves for some sort of scientific correctness is not the way to go; because of differing philosophies, some arguments of mine won't be found convincing by you, the same goes the other way, and nothing can get done that way for an encyclopaedia. There we have to present the views in the literature given their weight there; each following our own philosophy is something that only works if we write a separate monograph each, which isn't what we're doing here. That's why I feel that this sort of thing should be left to monographs and papers, leaving encyclopaedias to just describe the majority situation first even if we both agree that it sucks and there's some minority situation around that is better; I feel that's consistent with WP:DUE anyway. In other words: if most of the sources are lying to children, then I feel it is our duty to be following that even if mentally I cannot help but protest. You don't have to agree, but I'd ask that you understand where I'm coming from. And please don't try to convince me that the lying to children is bad; you'd first of all be trying to convince me of something I'm already convinced by, and second of all not be addressing my actual argument and therefore probably not manage to change my mind. ^_^ Double sharp (talk) 11:40, 20 November 2020 (UTC)
- P.S. A table drawn according to how I would prefer if I was writing outside WP can be found at User:Double sharp/Template Periodic table. I hope its drastic difference from everything I am proposing for WP makes my view above clear. I wish to also make clear that while I personally, speaking with the scientist/educator's hat on, think this is the best way to go; putting my encyclopaedist's hat on, I have precisely zero intention of proposing that as a general WP table; and if it appears somewhere, it will only be in something off-WP which I, or perhaps I and somebody else, write in the future. And even then I would not propose it for the WP general table, despite my personal belief in its superiority, unless most people adopt it – which, even if it does happen, will probably take a long while. I hope that clarifies what I've said above. Though maybe it would be a good and fun exercise for everyone here to draw the PT to personal inclinations once, just to see how great the differences are and why I feel that the best way forward is to unquestioningly adopt something common in the literature rather than seeking to create something better by analysing it ourselves. ^_^ Double sharp (talk) 12:15, 20 November 2020 (UTC)
- Double sharp, A picture is just a form of words. No doubt you'd've heard the expression, "A picture is worth a thousand words?" The p-block in the German PT picture is probably the most representative of the entire English RS literature. How do you see this now?
- On lies to children I suggest this is a question of the quality of RS. Very crudely, there are: 3. less RS; 2. RS; and 1. "top-tier" RS, with reputation. Lies to children (ltc) RS fall between tiers 3 and 2. There's no need to necessarily rely on ltc-RS, since plenty of RS and top-tier RS are available. Indeed. a theme of distinguishing RS based on e.g. publisher reputation, author reputation, age of publication, etc pervades WP:RS.
- Sandbh (talk) 22:01, 20 November 2020 (UTC)
- Well, Sandbh, I understand that there may be a difficulty when it comes to the difference between what exactly is the best that can be shown from sources (e.g. for the superheavies), and what individual sources say, and I confess I am not sure what I believe in here anymore. I am also unsure if I really feel strongly for any of the schemes in particular in the first place as opposed to others at the moment. For the time being, I'd say you can go ahead with your RFC, because I feel like I have to think about this and what I feel should be there in WP. To edit effectively, I think I do need to to some extent believe that what I'm doing is the best path for creating an encyclopaedia, and frankly I'm not sure exactly what is at the moment. So I'm also not sure if I should set something before the community to pass judgement on if I only half-heartedly believe in it myself. I will have to think about it. Maybe go on semi-wikibreak mode to do so, hopefully with no hard feelings attached since we resolved all mutual issues.
- (That being said: if your RFC is planned to be as at User:Sandbh/Nonmetal rfc, then I suggest you consider removing the "Aim" section. Reason being that it makes the thing look not quite neutral by arguing against "reactive nonmetals". Feel free to take or ignore this advice as you see fit, of course. ^_^) Double sharp (talk) 22:14, 20 November 2020 (UTC)
- Double sharp, righto. No hard feelings whatsoever. The discussion has been engrossing. I'll have a look at the aim section. Maybe rewrite it into a context section. Not sure yet. Sandbh (talk) 00:34, 21 November 2020 (UTC)
Thanks for emailing me the article, Sandbh. Since a significant part of this seems to be about what is over- or under-emphasised in the literature, I guess I will not comment about it much for WP coverage of the periodic table in that overview article, but it is interesting and could maybe be used to cite a couple of warning examples that the typical trends are not as straight as the ones typically chosen (maybe good for a footnote there). I also like his classification of Sb as a metal rather than a metalloid, but only personally, since most people still include it. ^_^ Double sharp (talk) 23:31, 22 November 2020 (UTC)
Periodic table has an RFC
Periodic table has an RFC for possible consensus. A discussion is taking place. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments on the discussion page. Thank you.
Sandbh (talk) 01:47, 21 November 2020 (UTC)
Uniform structure of articles
In spite of there being a recommended structure for articles on the project page, adherence to the proposed structure is quite patchy (see table below, analysis just the first 3 rows of the PT. Any energy for editing towards some uniformity?
' | ' | ' | 1 | ' | 2 | ' | 3 | ' | 4 | ' | 5 | ' | 6 | ' | 7 | ' | 8 | ' | 9 | ' | 10 | ' | ' | ' | ' | ' | ' | ' | ' | ' | ' | ' | ' | ' | ' | ' | ' |
H | He | Li | Be | B | C | N | O | F | Ne | Na | Mg | Al | Si | P | S | Cl | Ar | ||||||||||||||||||||
pageviews 30 days to 16nov20 (k) | 100 | 57 | 64 | 33 | 41 | 80 | 67 | 92 | 37 | 34 | 68 | 76 | 98 | 61 | 57 | 68 | 57 | 57 | |||||||||||||||||||
cpd article | cat | Helium compounds | no | no | cat | Compounds of carbon | no | Compounds of oxygen | Compounds of fluorine | Neon compounds | cat | no | no | no | cat (and cat for minerals) | cat | no | Argon compounds | |||||||||||||||||||
recommended section number | actual section number | This article is about structural chemistry of the compounds of fluorine. For applications and other aspects, see Fluorine. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
1 | Characteristics | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
1.1 | Physical | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
1.2 | Chemical | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
1.3 | Isotopes | 1.6 | 2.4 | 1.2 | 1.4 | 3.3 | 1.3 | 2.2 | 2.4 | 1.4 | 2 | 1.2 | 2.3 | 1.1 | 2.2 | 1.3 | 1.3 | 2.1 | 4 | ||||||||||||||||||
1.4 | Occurrence | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
2 | Production | 4 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
3 | Compounds | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
4 | History | 2 | 1 | 3 | 4 | 1 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 1 | 3 | 4 | 4 | 1 | 4 | 3 | 1 | 2 | ||||||||||||||||||
5 | Applications | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
6 | Biological role | 6 (reactions) | 7 | no | 6 | no (!) | no (?) | 3 | 8 | no | 7 | 7 | 8 | 7 | 7 | 6 | 6 | no | |||||||||||||||||||
7 | Precautions | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
8 | Notes | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
9 | References | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
10 | Bibliography | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
11 | Reference data pages | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
11.1 | Previous data sources | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
12 | Color standards | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
13 | Category | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
13.1 | Usage | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
13.2 | Earlier category scheme | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
13.3 | Categories, reduced set | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
14 | Blocks | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
15 | State of matter, Occurrence | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
16 | Locator map image | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
17 | Notes | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Actual TOCs | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
1 | Properties | 1 | History | 1 | Properties | 1 | Characteristics | 1 | History | 1 | Characteristics | 1 | History | 1 | History | 1 | Characteristics | 1 | History | 1 | Characteristics | 1 | Characteristics | 1 | Physical characteristics | 1 | History | 1 | Characteristics | 1 | Characteristics | 1 | History | 1 | Characteristics | ||
1.1 | Combustion | 1.1 | Scientific discoveries | 1.1 | Atomic and physical | 1.1 | Physical properties | 2 | Preparation of elemental boron in the laboratory | 1.1 | Allotropes | 2 | Properties | 1.1 | Early experiments | 1.1 | Electron configuration | 2 | Isotopes | 1.1 | Physical | 1.1 | Physical properties | 1.1 | Isotopes | 1.1 | Discovery | 1.1 | Allotropes | 1.1 | Physical properties | 2 | Properties | 2 | History | ||
01.01.01 | Flame | 1.2 | Extraction and use | 1.2 | Isotopes | 1.2 | Nuclear properties | 3 | Characteristics | 1.2 | Occurrence | 2.1 | Atomic | 1.2 | Phlogiston theory | 1.2 | Reactivity | 3 | Characteristics | 1.2 | Isotopes | 1.2 | Chemical properties | 1.2 | Electron shell | 1.2 | Silicon semiconductors | 1.2 | Chemiluminescence | 1.2 | Chemical properties | 2.1 | Isotopes | 3 | Occurrence | ||
01.01.02 | Reactants | 2 | Characteristics | 2 | Occurrence | 1.3 | Optical Properties | 3.1 | Allotropes | 1.3 | Isotopes | 2.2 | Isotopes | 1.3 | Discovery | 1.3 | Phases | 4 | Occurrence | 2 | Chemistry | 1.3 | Occurrence | 1.3 | Bulk | 1.3 | Silicon Age | 1.3 | Isotopes | 1.3 | Isotopes | 3 | Chemistry and compounds | 4 | Isotopes | ||
1.2 | Electron energy levels | 2.1 | The helium atom | 2.1 | Astronomical | 1.4 | Isotopes and nucleosynthesis | 3.2 | Chemistry of the element | 1.4 | Formation in stars | 3 | Chemistry and compounds | 1.4 | Lavoisier's contribution | 1.4 | Isotopes | 5 | Chemistry | 2.1 | Salts and oxides | 2 | Forms | 2 | Chemistry | 2 | Characteristics | 2 | Occurrence | 1.4 | Natural occurrence | 3.1 | Hydrogen chloride | 5 | Compounds | ||
1.3 | Elemental molecular forms | 02.01.01 | Helium in quantum mechanics | 2.2 | Terrestrial | 1.5 | Occurrence | 03.02.01 | Atomic structure | 1.5 | Carbon cycle | 3.1 | Allotropes | 1.5 | Later history | 2 | Occurrence | 6 | Applications | 2.2 | Aqueous solutions | 2.1 | Alloys | 2.1 | Inorganic compounds | 2.1 | Physical and atomic | 2.1 | Universe | 2 | Compounds | 3.2 | Other binary chlorides | 6 | Production | ||
1.4 | Phases | 02.01.02 | The related stability of the helium-4 nucleus and electron shell | 2.3 | Biological | 2 | Production | 03.02.02 | Chemical compounds | 2 | Compounds | 3.2 | Dinitrogen complexes | 2 | Characteristics | 2.1 | Universe | 7 | See also | 2.3 | Electrides and sodides | 2.2 | Compounds | 2.2 | Organoaluminium compounds and related hydrides | 02.01.01 | Electrical | 2.2 | Crust and organic sources | 2.1 | Allotropes | 3.3 | Polychlorine compounds | 6.1 | Industrial | ||
1.5 | Compounds | 2.2 | Gas and plasma phases | 3 | History | 3 | Chemical properties | 3.2.2.1 | Organoboron chemistry | 2.1 | Organic compounds | 3.3 | Nitrides, azides, and nitrido complexes | 2.1 | Properties and molecular structure | 2.2 | Earth | 8 | References | 2.4 | Organosodium compounds | 2.3 | Isotopes | 3 | Natural occurrence | 02.01.02 | Crystal structure | 3 | Compounds | 2.2 | Polycations and polyanions | 3.4 | Chlorine fluorides | 6.2 | In radioactive decays | ||
01.05.01 | Covalent and organic compounds | 2.3 | Liquid helium | 4 | Chemistry and compounds | 3.1 | Organic chemistry | 3.2.2.2 | Compounds of B(I) and B(II) | 2.2 | Inorganic compounds | 3.4 | Hydrides | 2.2 | Allotropes | 3 | History | 9 | External links | 2.5 | Intermetallic compounds | 3 | Production | 3.1 | In space | 2.2 | Isotopes | 3.1 | Phosphorus(V) | 2.3 | Sulfides | 3.5 | Chlorine oxides | 7 | Applications | ||
01.05.02 | Hydrides | 02.03.01 | Helium I | 4.1 | Organic chemistry | 4 | History | 3.3 | Isotopes | 2.3 | Organometallic compounds | 3.5 | Halides and oxohalides | 2.3 | Physical properties | 3.1 | Early discoveries | 3 | History | 4 | History | 3.2 | On Earth | 3 | Chemistry and compounds | 3.2 | Phosphorus(III) | 2.4 | Oxides, oxoacids, and oxoanions | 3.6 | Chlorine oxoacids and oxyanions | 7.1 | Industrial processes | ||||
01.05.03 | Protons and acids | 02.03.02 | Helium II | 5 | Production | 4.1 | Etymology | 03.03.01 | Commercial isotope enrichment | 3 | History and etymology | 3.6 | Oxides | 2.4 | Isotopes and stellar origin | 3.2 | Isolation | 4 | Occurrence | 5 | Uses as a metal | 4 | History | 3.1 | Silicides | 3.3 | Phosphorus(I) and phosphorus(II) | 2.5 | Halides and oxyhalides | 3.7 | Organochlorine compounds | 7.2 | Scientific research | ||||
01.05.04 | Atomic hydrogen | 2.4 | Isotopes | 5.1 | Reserves | 5 | Applications | 03.03.02 | Enriched boron (boron-10) | 4 | Production | 3.7 | Oxoacids, oxoanions, and oxoacid salts | 2.5 | Occurrence | 3.3 | Later uses | 4.1 | Astronomical observations | 5.1 | Aircraft | 5 | Etymology | 3.2 | Silanes | 3.4 | Phosphides and phosphines | 2.6 | Pnictides | 4 | Occurrence and production | 7.3 | Preservative | ||||
1.6 | Isotopes | 3 | Compounds | 5.2 | Pricing | 5.1 | Radiation windows | 03.03.03 | Depleted boron (boron-11) | 4.1 | Graphite | 3.8 | Organic nitrogen compounds | 2.6 | Analysis | 4 | Compounds | 5 | Commercial production | 5.2 | Automotive | 5.1 | Coinage | 3.3 | Halides | 3.5 | Oxoacids | 2.7 | Metal sulfides | 5 | Applications | 7.4 | Laboratory equipment | ||||
2 | History | 4 | Occurrence and production | 5.3 | Extraction | 5.2 | Mechanical applications | 3.3.3.1 | Radiation-hardened semiconductors | 4.2 | Diamond | 4 | Occurrence | 3 | Biological role of O2 | 4.1 | Metals | 6 | Uses | 5.3 | Electronics | 5.2 | Spelling | 3.4 | Silica | 3.6 | Nitrides | 2.8 | Organic compounds | 5.1 | Sanitation, disinfection, and antisepsis | 7.5 | Medical use | ||||
2.1 | Discovery and use | 4.1 | Natural abundance | 5.4 | Investment | 5.3 | Mirrors | 3.3.3.2 | Proton-boron fusion | 5 | Applications | 5 | Production | 3.1 | Photosynthesis and respiration | 4.2 | Hydrogen | 6.1 | Heat transfer | 5.4 | Other | 6 | Production and refinement | 3.5 | Silicic acids | 3.7 | Sulfides | 3 | History | 05.01.01 | Combating putrefaction | 7.6 | Lighting | ||||
2.2 | Role in quantum theory | 4.2 | Modern extraction and distribution | 6 | Applications | 5.4 | Magnetic applications | 03.03.04 | NMR spectroscopy | 5.1 | Diamonds | 6 | Applications | 3.2 | Living organisms | 4.3 | Other reactive nonmetals | 7 | Biological role | 5.5 | Safety precautions | 6.1 | Bayer process | 3.6 | Silicate minerals | 3.8 | Organophosphorus compounds | 3.1 | Antiquity | 05.01.02 | Disinfection | 7.7 | Miscellaneous uses | ||||
3 | Cosmic prevalence and distribution | 4.3 | Conservation advocates | 6.1 | Ceramics and glass | 5.5 | Nuclear applications | 3.4 | Occurrence | 6 | Precautions | 6.1 | Gas | 3.3 | Build-up in the atmosphere | 4.4 | Noble gases | 7.1 | Biological role in humans | 6 | Useful compounds | 6.2 | Hall–Héroult process | 3.7 | Other inorganic compounds | 4 | History | 3.2 | Modern times | 05.01.03 | Semmelweis and experiments with antisepsis | 8 | Safety | ||||
3.1 | States | 5 | Applications | 6.2 | Electrical and electronics | 5.6 | Acoustics | 4 | Production | 7 | See also | 6.2 | Liquid | 4 | Industrial production | 4.5 | Organic compounds | 07.01.01 | Nutrition | 7 | Biological roles | 6.3 | Recycling | 3.8 | Organosilicon compounds | 4.1 | Etymology | 3.3 | Spelling and etymology | 05.01.04 | Public sanitation | 9 | See also | ||||
4 | Production | 5.1 | Controlled atmospheres | 6.3 | Lubricating greases | 5.7 | Electronic | 4.1 | Market trend | 8 | References | 7 | Safety | 5 | Storage | 5 | Production | 7.1.1.1 | Diet | 7.1 | Mechanism of action | 7 | Applications | 3.9 | Silicone polymers | 4.2 | Discovery | 4 | Production | 5.2 | Use as a weapon | 10 | References | ||||
4.1 | Electrolysis of water | 5.2 | Gas tungsten arc welding | 6.4 | Metallurgy | 5.8 | Healthcare | 5 | Applications | 9 | Bibliography | 7.1 | Gas | 6 | Applications | 5.1 | Industrial routes to F2 | 7.1.1.2 | Dietary recommendations | 7.2 | Nutrition | 7.1 | Metal | 4 | Occurrence | 4.3 | Bone ash and guano | 5 | Applications | 05.02.01 | World War I | 11 | Further reading | ||||
4.2 | Steam reforming (industrial method) | 5.3 | Minor uses | 6.5 | Silicon nano-welding | 6 | Occupational safety and health | 5.1 | Elemental boron fiber | 10 | External links | 7.2 | Liquid | 6.1 | Medical | 5.2 | Laboratory routes | 07.01.02 | Health | 7.3 | Metabolism | 7.2 | Compounds | 5 | Production | 4.4 | Phosphate rock | 5.1 | Sulfuric acid | 05.02.02 | Iraq | 12 | External links | ||||
4.3 | Methane pyrolysis (industrial method) | 05.03.01 | Industrial leak detection | 6.6 | Other chemical and industrial uses | 7 | Precautions | 5.2 | Boronated fiberglass | 7.3 | Oxygen Deficiency Monitors | 6.2 | Life support and recreational use | 6 | Industrial applications | 7.2 | Biological role in plants | 7.4 | Detection in serum and plasma | 8 | Biology | 6 | Applications | 4.5 | Incendiaries | 5.2 | Other important sulfur chemistry | 05.02.03 | Syria | ||||||||
4.4 | Metal-acid | 05.03.02 | Flight | 6.7 | Nuclear | 8 | References | 5.3 | Borosilicate glass | 8 | See also | 6.3 | Industrial | 6.1 | Inorganic fluorides | 8 | Safety and precautions | 7.5 | Deficiency | 8.1 | Toxicity | 6.1 | Compounds | 5 | Production | 5.3 | Fertilizer | 6 | Biological role | ||||||||
4.5 | Thermochemical | 05.03.03 | Minor commercial and recreational uses | 6.8 | Medicine | 9 | Cited sources | 5.4 | Boron carbide ceramic | 9 | References | 7 | Compounds | 6.2 | Organic fluorides | 9 | See also | 7.6 | Therapy | 8.2 | Effects | 6.2 | Alloys | 5.1 | Peak phosphorus | 5.4 | Fine chemicals | 7 | Hazards | ||||||||
4.6 | Serpentinization reaction | 05.03.04 | Scientific uses | 7 | Biological role | 10 | Further reading | 5.5 | High-hardness and abrasive compounds | 10 | Bibliography | 7.1 | Oxides and other inorganic compounds | 7 | Medicinal applications | 10 | References | 7.7 | Overdose | 8.3 | Exposure routes | 6.3 | Electronics | 5.2 | Elemental phosphorus | 5.5 | Fungicide and pesticide | 7.1 | Chlorine-induced cracking in structural materials | ||||||||
5 | Applications | 05.03.05 | Medical uses | 8 | Precautions | 11 | External links | 5.6 | Metallurgy | 11 | External links | 7.2 | Organic compounds | 7.1 | Dental care | 11 | Bibliography | 7.8 | Function in plants | 8.4 | Treatment | 6.4 | Quantum dots | 6 | Applications | 5.6 | Bactericide in winemaking and food preservation | 7.2 | Chlorine-iron fire | ||||||||
5.1 | Petrochemical industry | 6 | As a contaminant | 9 | See also | 5.7 | Detergent formulations and bleaching agents | 8 | Safety and precautions | 7.2 | Pharmaceuticals | 12 | External links | 8 | See also | 9 | Environmental effects | 7 | Biological role | 6.1 | Fertiliser | 5.7 | Pharmaceuticals | 8 | See also | ||||||||||||
5.2 | Hydrogenation | 7 | Inhalation and safety | 10 | Notes | 5.8 | Insecticides | 8.1 | Toxicity | 7.3 | PET scanning | 9 | References | 10 | See also | 7.1 | Human nutrition | 6.2 | Organophosphorus | 5.8 | Furniture | 9 | References | ||||||||||||||
5.3 | Coolant | 7.1 | Effects | 11 | References | 5.9 | Semiconductors | 8.2 | Combustion and other hazards | 7.4 | Oxygen carriers | 10 | Cited sources | 11 | Notes | 8 | Safety | 6.3 | Metallurgical aspects | 6 | Biological role | 10 | Notes | ||||||||||||||
5.4 | Energy carrier | 7.2 | Hazards | 12 | External links | 5.1 | Magnets | 9 | See also | 8 | Biological role | 11 | External links | 12 | References | 9 | See also | 6.4 | Matches | 6.1 | Protein and organic cofactors | 11 | Bibliography | ||||||||||||||
5.5 | Semiconductor industry | 8 | See also | 5.11 | Shielding and neutron absorber in nuclear reactors | 10 | Notes | 9 | Toxicity | 13 | Bibliography | 10 | References | 6.5 | Water softening | 6.2 | Metalloproteins and inorganic cofactors | 12 | External links | ||||||||||||||||||
5.6 | Niche and evolving uses | 9 | Notes | 5.12 | Other nonmedical uses | 11 | References | 9.1 | Hydrofluoric acid | 14 | Further reading | 11 | Bibliography | 6.6 | Miscellaneous | 6.3 | Sulfur metabolism and the sulfur cycle | ||||||||||||||||||||
6 | Biological reactions | 10 | References | 5.13 | Pharmaceutical and biological applications | 11.1 | General references | 9.2 | Fluoride ion | 15 | External links | 12 | External links | 7 | Biological role | 7 | Precautions | ||||||||||||||||||||
7 | Safety and precautions | 11 | Bibliography | 5.14 | Research areas | 12 | External links | 10 | Environmental concerns | 7.1 | Bone and teeth enamel | 8 | See also | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
8 | Notes | 6 | Biological role | 10.1 | Atmosphere | 7.2 | Phosphorus deficiency | 9 | References | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
9 | See also | 6.1 | Analytical quantification | 10.2 | Biopersistence | 7.3 | Nutrition | 10 | Further reading | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
10 | References | 6.2 | Health issues and toxicity | 11 | See also | 07.03.01 | Dietary recommendations | 11 | External links | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
11 | Further reading | 7 | See also | 12 | Notes | 07.03.02 | Food sources | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
12 | External links | 8 | References | 13 | Sources | 8 | Precautions | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
9 | External links | 13.1 | Citations | 8.1 | US DEA List I status | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
13.2 | Indexed references | 9 | In popular culture | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
14 | External links | 10 | Notes | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
11 | References | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
12 | Bibliography |
--Oldboltonian (talk) 12:18, 21 November 2020 (UTC)
- @Oldboltonian: The guidelines are mostly historical and nobody really seems to be taking them very seriously. They were probably good for a phase-I standardisation, but at some point we moved into a more of a phase-II article improvement of getting as many to GA and FA as we could, and then the structures naturally diverge per element. So I'd say there's not so much reason to change. Double sharp (talk) 10:58, 23 November 2020 (UTC)
- If they are merely historical artifacts, perhaps we should note that? YBG (talk) 03:22, 24 November 2020 (UTC)
- Sounds cool to me, YBG. I've marked it as historical and taken it off the tabs list. That being said, I do think an updated version of these guidelines just for a "standard WP layout decision + colouring style" might be a good idea if/when one is decided on via RFC. (Former is frozen till we hear from IUPAC, latter is to come.) Or maybe that is better for the MOS like WP:ALUM. Anyway, we have time before we'll have such a thing. Double sharp (talk) 21:26, 24 November 2020 (UTC)
- If they are merely historical artifacts, perhaps we should note that? YBG (talk) 03:22, 24 November 2020 (UTC)
Isotope page improvements
I propose 3 changes to isotope pages: First, the Isotopes of dysprosium page says 164
Dy
is the heaviest theoretically stable nuclide. It is actually 92
Zr
because the stable nuclides in between are either theorized to decay or spontaneous fission. Second, mark the remaining observationally stable nuclides to observationally stable (191
Ir
to 205
Tl
). Third, adding navigation links to nearby element isotopes pages, sort of like on the element pages. -322UbnBr2 (Talk | Contributions | Actions) 04:57, 23 November 2020 (UTC)
- About the navigation you mention: what do you have in mind? With elements, it is simply four (N-E-S-W in the periodic table). Would it involve decay chains?
- FYI, a complete navigation table, isotope pages by periodic table, is at the bottom, like at Isotopes of dysprosium#References. This navigation aid does not show in mobile view (being a navigation aid). OTOH, if you see a strong content-based relationship in 'nearby', that could be in body text and/or the isotopes infobox.
- I note that I am not happy with the N-E-S-W neighbors addition to the element infobox. For the same reason: it is more practical navigation, not a strong content relationship (many more such flaw relationships exist in the PT that do not deserve to be in an WP:infobox). -DePiep (talk) 10:07, 26 November 2020 (UTC)
- Yes, I mean N-E-S-W. The links will lead to the different elements' isotope pages. -322UbnBr2 (Talk | Contributions | Actions) 20:24, 27 November 2020 (UTC)
- In the element infoboxes, the NESW links make sense because of the adjacent periodic table to provide context. Far more important to providing those links would be to display a periodic table with each cell linking to the Isotopes of X page. But the idea of showing the complete decay products for each isotope seems interesting to me. YBG (talk) 23:28, 27 November 2020 (UTC)
- In general, I reject adding navigation aids to the infobox. Strongly related isotopes info (-pages, -series, -relations) may be added if there is good reason, when numbers are low. How many data points, say links, would that be? Keep in mind that the infobox should contain main article info only, not all info. -DePiep (talk) 13:29, 28 November 2020 (UTC)
- For the element infoboxes, the N-S-E-W relationships make sense. E and W are next door in atomic number, and getting to the next or previous element makes some sense for navigation. N and S also make sense: they are in the same group and are hence homologous, so obviously also related. For the isotope infoboxes, E and W still make sense as they are the products of a single beta decay. However, N and S don't make any sense anymore because that second dimension of the PT is based on the electronic structure, not the nuclear one.
- That being said, I think a really better solution would be to make the PT bigger so that you actually had enough room to place the symbols and click on them. Yes, that would imply 18-column rather than 32-, but it really is the same thing anyway. Then we would not need any NESW links anymore because they would already be there in the PT.
- Showing complete decay products may be problematic due to branched decays. Double sharp (talk) 13:43, 28 November 2020 (UTC)
- Another idea on my mind was linking the decay products to their respective isotope pages, but that would be too many links. -322UbnBr2 (Talk | Contributions | Actions) 06:00, 29 November 2020 (UTC)
- In general, I reject adding navigation aids to the infobox. Strongly related isotopes info (-pages, -series, -relations) may be added if there is good reason, when numbers are low. How many data points, say links, would that be? Keep in mind that the infobox should contain main article info only, not all info. -DePiep (talk) 13:29, 28 November 2020 (UTC)
- In the element infoboxes, the NESW links make sense because of the adjacent periodic table to provide context. Far more important to providing those links would be to display a periodic table with each cell linking to the Isotopes of X page. But the idea of showing the complete decay products for each isotope seems interesting to me. YBG (talk) 23:28, 27 November 2020 (UTC)
- Yes, I mean N-E-S-W. The links will lead to the different elements' isotope pages. -322UbnBr2 (Talk | Contributions | Actions) 20:24, 27 November 2020 (UTC)
Water into peroxide, by itself
Stanford scientists find water can transform into hydrogen peroxide when condensing on cold surfaces. Sandbh (talk) 10:21, 24 November 2020 (UTC)
Use of sources at WP:ELEM
I just finished reading WP:PSTS, which discusses WP:PRIMARY, WP:SECONDARY, and WP:TERTIARY sources. IMHO, I think understanding these policies and how they apply to our domain of knowledge would be of great benefit to our project. It would help us (a) create good content, (b) following WP policy, and (c) avoiding conflict. What our project needs is to interpret these rules and specify what are (1) primary WP:ELEM sources, secondary WP:ELEM sources, and tertiary WP:ELEM sources. I am not saying I have the answers here, just saying that we need to collaboratively reach a consensus on these three question. Thoughts? YBG (talk) 04:11, 25 November 2020 (UTC)
- YBG,
- 1. Primary sources are those in the peer-reviewed academic literature reporting OR.
- 2. Secondary source are those primarily relying on secondary sources. Very crudely there are three tiers:
- C. less RS;
- CB. lies to children (ltc) RS
- B. RS; and
- A. "top-tier" RS, with reputation e.g. Wiberg; G&E; C&W; Oxford University Press, Pergamon Press
- Wikipedia articles usually rely on material from reliable secondary sources.
- 3. Tertiary sources are dictionaries, encyclopaedias and compendium. Many introductory undergraduate-level textbooks are regarded as tertiary sources because they sum up multiple secondary sources. Reliable tertiary sources can be helpful in providing broad summaries of topics that involve many primary and secondary sources, and may be helpful in evaluating due weight, especially when primary or secondary sources contradict each other. Some tertiary sources are more reliable than others, and within any given tertiary source, some entries may be more reliable than others.
- Principles
- Deciding whether primary, secondary, or tertiary sources are appropriate in any given instance is a matter of good editorial judgment and common sense, and should be discussed on article talk pages.
- There's no need to necessarily rely on ltc RS, since plenty of RS and top-tier RS are available. Indeed, a theme of distinguishing RS based on e.g. publisher reputation, author reputation, age of publication, etc pervades WP:RS.
- Higher-level texts, for elements that are hard to study, will be more reliable.
- The age of a source does not necessarily reduce its reliability.
- Introductory undergraduate-level textbooks have a reputation for textbook errors, [44], [45], [46]
- —- Sandbh (talk) 04:08, 29 November 2020 (UTC)
FYI: Hydrous oxides, hydrated oxides, hydrous hydrated oxides, hydroxides, and hydrous hydroxide
Here’s an extract from Bray & Latimer 1949, A course in general chemistry, 3rd ed., Macmillan, New York, pp. 89–90. It’s the first time I’ve seen a concise explanation of these five terms, in one place.
- ”The oxides of Group I and of the heavier elements of Group II react readily with water to form hydroxides which are soluble strong bases; i.e., their solutlons contain hydroxide ion and the ions of the metals. The oxides of the nonmetallic elements are soluble in water, with but few exceptions, to form acid solutions. This difference in behaviour depends mainly upon the size and charge of the positive kernel or ion.
- The oxides of the remaining metals, in general, do not react with water; but compounds (hydrous oxides, hydrated oxides, or hydroxides) are usually formed when solutions of the positive ions are made alkaline. In a few cases the precipitate is the anhydrous oxide. When the precipitates consist of particles of the oxides with an indefinite amount of absorbed water they are called hydrous oxides, e.g., SnO2 • xH2O. If there is a definite number of water molecules combined with the oxide, the name hydrated oxide is applied, e. g., Al2O3 • H2O. However, the hydrated oxides may absorb an indefinite amount of water to form gelatinous precipitates or hydrous hydrated oxides. In some cases the precipitate has a definite hydroxide structure, especially with ions having a +2 charge, e. g., Fe(OH)2 and Mg(OH)2 and these may be correctly called hydroxides.
- If, as is often the case, additional absorbed water is present they may be referred to as hydrous hydroxides. The character of a hydrous precipitate varies with the method of preparation and changes upon ageing and drying. For the sake of simplicity, we shall often write the hydroxide formula without implying that this is correct.”
—- Sandbh (talk) 08:33, 30 November 2020 (UTC)
- @Sandbh: Yup, I like having the terms all defined together too.
- Of course, size and charge of the positive ion as Bray & Latimer state is exactly Fajans' rules. It's nice indeed to see an RS offering this up as the rationalisation. ^_^ Double sharp (talk) 12:17, 30 November 2020 (UTC)
Launch of revamped 2010 category scheme
Some discussion between Sandbh, YBG, and myself has been going on at my talk page. It seems that the three of us are all OK with the 2010 scheme if Po is changed to being showed as a metal. Furthermore, Sandbh does not seem to think an RFC is necessary, and R8R has said above that he wouldn't be too disappointed if this scheme is chosen.
Therefore, in the spirit of WP:BOLD, I have decided to launch the new colour scheme.
I understand that Sandbh would prefer for some articles to be updated first to match, such as our articles on post-transition metal and the nonmetals. However, I feel that if we ask for too many prerequisites, we are likely to never get anything done. The current articles seem more or less serviceable in a pinch (the PTM one will need a small update to not call them PTMs anymore, but that's all); new ones can come later. After all, when element 119 is discovered, we will not be completely correct either, and there's nothing saying we cannot update things slower rather than faster.
I also understand that Sandbh and I currently disagree on whether or not the status of At, Cn, Ts, and Og should be flagged out in the navboxes. But since this disagreement does not extend to the actual colouring, I do not think we should let it stand in the way of the recolouring either, since it can easily be discussed afterwards.
Everything I do can, as always, be reverted and discussed afterwards.
Double sharp (talk) 16:32, 30 November 2020 (UTC)
- Mostly done at this point (may have overlooked some), for templates. Images will have to wait. Double sharp (talk) 17:16, 30 November 2020 (UTC)
- Most obvious pictures on Periodic table done. That should be enough for now, also to make things easier if it turns out that people object to this and it needs to be reverted. Double sharp (talk) 19:37, 30 November 2020 (UTC)
- May we expect an overview of the reasoning here? As in, arguments, lines of thinking, source handling? -DePiep (talk) 20:26, 30 November 2020 (UTC)
- @DePiep: Yes, since you asked. Give me a moment to put it together, most of it is from where something almost like it was proposed above as Compromise 3. Double sharp (talk) 20:49, 30 November 2020 (UTC)
- May we expect an overview of the reasoning here? As in, arguments, lines of thinking, source handling? -DePiep (talk) 20:26, 30 November 2020 (UTC)
- Most obvious pictures on Periodic table done. That should be enough for now, also to make things easier if it turns out that people object to this and it needs to be reverted. Double sharp (talk) 19:37, 30 November 2020 (UTC)
Rationale
I will ignore the parts of the periodic table that were not changed.
Mostly, sources that present periodic table colourings are working more or less at an overview level, not delving deep into the chemistry of a single element. They also are usually meant as a didactic introduction to signal out groups of like elements, especially the easy-to-cover ones that will be introduced early in chemistry. Therefore, priority was given to such sources as ACS, LANL, RSC, and Britannica. Priority was also given to IUPAC (as the relevant authority) when it had something to say, which is unfortunately not always. Further down the list were textbooks and monographs (e.g. Greenwood & Earnshaw, Holleman & Wiberg as very common reputable textbooks), and finally individual research papers for the "difficult" superheavy elements that are not well-known.
Group 12 as transition metals. This is something that has been strongly argued against. However, even Jensen who was [strongly against this in 2003 had to admit that nearly all introductory general chemistry textbooks were doing it, and that it was only the advanced monographs on specific topics that sometimes demurred (but even then it was 50-50). So do all four of ACS, LANL, RSC, and Britannica. IUPAC presents the definition including them first in the Red Book 2005 (their latest word on the matter):
“ | For example, the elements of groups 3–12 are the d-block elements. These elements are also commonly referred to as the transition elements, though the elements of group 12 are not always included | ” |
. That is also evidently their primary definition, as when they discuss the organometallic nomenclature in pages 228 through 232, group 12 is not discussed with the main group elements. Greenwood & Earnshaw as well as Holleman & Wiberg both consider group 12 as transition metals, though Cotton & Wilkinson demur. Therefore it seems more justifiable to follow the more general perspective. This also matches what we had in 2010.
Other metals rather than post-transition metals. Between ACS, LANL, and Britannica (RSC classes by group in this area, which is a rarer choice) there is not agreement on which to use: there are also a bunch of other names in the literature such as poor metals, chemically weak metals, p-block metals, B subgroup metals, and so on. As such it seems more prudent to not take a side and simply use other metals, which is indisputable as a catch-all qualifier. This also matches what we had in 2010.
Metalloids. There is not agreement between ACS, LANL, and Britannica about whether there should be a metalloid category. The first two have one as {B, Si, Ge, As, Sb, Te, Po}; Britannica lacks one, splitting {Ge, Sb, Po} to metals and {B, Si, As, Te} to nonmetals. Most English-language sources do have one, but are often a bit hazy about which elements are in there. The literature survey done by Sandbh whose results are at lists of metalloids was consulted: here {B, Si, Ge, As, Sb, Te} emerge as the most common six inclusions by far, with a huge drop to the next inclusions {Po, At} that have always had a certain amount of iffiness hanging around them due to their intense radioactivity. In general, it seems that most sources that focus on polonium do treat it as a metal: in this special case of a difficult-to-study but still fairly well-characterised element (unlike most radioactives, Po is not ignored or quarantined off into its own special section in Greenwood & Earnshaw), following them seems reasonable.
Other nonmetals. ACS, LANL, and Britannica are unanimous about splitting out the noble gases and the halogens from most of the nonmetals. Both are, after all, some of the first examples of group trends an average chemistry student encounters, and make sense to highlight at this overview level (that's not true for the pnictogens and chalcogens, say). There is not agreement as to whether these should just be called "nonmetals" or "other nonmetals" between them, but since "other nonmetals" is the only accurate one anyway (everybody agrees that chlorine and argon are nonmetals), we have used it. This also matches what we had in 2010.
Halogens, with reference to At and Ts. The problem is that there are two definitions of "halogen" running about, as there seems to be for a lot of these categories. In the literature focusing on the superheavy elements, there is some feeling I detect that you have no right to call an element a "halogen", a "transition metal", or a "noble gas" before you have actually characterised it chemically, and that if the properties are badly matching enough it's possible that Ts is not a halogen (e.g. here). So that's the specialised practice. However, outside the subset of chemists focused on these issues (which is very tiny given the short half-lives of the problematic elements At, Ts, and Og), nobody cares. ACS, LANL, Britannica, and RSC are unanimous about calling At and Ts halogens. Greenwood & Earnshaw and Holleman & Wiberg have no qualms about calling At a halogen (they were published before Ts was discovered). The 2005 IUPAC Red Book is absolutely clear that the halogens include At. It was published before Ts and Og were discovered, true, but IUPAC reports in 2016 made it clear that for them Ts and Og were in the halogen and noble gas groups. Indeed, that's the very reason why they are called tennessine and oganesson with the -ine and -on suffixes of their groups, and not -ium like for other elements. So clearly for them it means the whole group.
I feel that on the above grounds using the definition in which Ts is not automatically a halogen, and Og not automatically a noble gas, and using an "unknown chemical properties" category, is catering only to the superheavy-element community and not the rest of the chemical world that does not seem to care about such issues. I'm sad about that because I think the superheavy-element community has the right idea here, but they're not usually in the business of colouring periodic tables as an overview of the elements people actually care about.
Finally, I think it is simply premature to classify astatine as a metal, metalloid, or a nonmetal. As far as is experimentally known, it sometimes reacts characteristically like its lighter buddies in the halogen group which are all clearly nonmetals (fluorine, chlorine, bromine, and iodine). But sometimes it reacts more like a metal instead. Experimental results on copernicium appeared to suggest metallicity – but later theoretical calculations pointed out that the result was also consistent with nonmetallicity. Therefore I feel that any metallicity category here is an overreach, and that it is a good thing that we have a group category to save the day. We only have predictions telling us that At is probably a metal, that Cn is probably a nonmetal (like a noble gas), that Ts is probably a metal, and that Og is probably a semiconductor (so maybe a metalloid like silicon?). We can hardly use these predictions without some element of original research for Og, and the predictions have changed before for elements like Cn, Fl, and Og: who's to say they may not change again?
Noble gases, with reference to Og. All of the above on Ts applies here to Og.
Colouring Mt through Lv. I agree that somehow it looks problematic with colouring them with category names that include "metal" when it's not actually sure if these elements are metals. On the other hand, ACS, LANL, RSC (for Mt through Cn), and Britannica all do that anyway. Besides Cn, no one seriously expects anything different, and for Cn, predictions have changed back and forth and they may well do so again. I also feel that it is not a problem that the category names become "formal" and a bit divorced from the actual meaning when everybody is making them so anyway. No one asks how bismuth is "choking" when that's where "pnictogen" comes from (well, I suppose you could choke on a large piece); no one asks how polonium can be an "ore-former" when it's too unstable to form ores; no one wonders why Be and Mg are "alkaline earth metals" in English (I know they do in Russian and Japanese, but that's not exactly the practice the English Wikipedia should probably be prioritising); no one wonders why the rare earth elements are not rare. With all this behind us, what's wrong with Og as a "noble gas" that is neither noble nor a gas?
Therefore this colour scheme seems to be one of the best solutions within the bounds of what can be justified from sources to the whole problem. It was worked out as a compromise in the first place, seeking to follow the sources but at the same time try to be as "correct" in a way that both of us could agree on (and you know we sometimes differ very strongly about what exactly is "correct"). Because of the support I got for it on my talk page, I have decided to launch it.
Note that subtleties regarding how the status of Mt is not actually experimentally known, as well as the problematic metallicity of At, Ts, and Og and possible lack thereof for Cn, are all discussed where appropriate in the infoboxes. See {{infobox meitnerium}}
, {{infobox astatine}}
, {{infobox tennessine}}
, {{infobox oganesson}}
, {{infobox copernicium}}
. For the everyday reader, I submit that what we show is enough as an overview, and that there is no need to footnote elements that to a first approximation no one cares about and that no one will get to see for a long while if ever.
Finally, we note for clarification that:
- So as to avoid having to rush a discussion at the last minute when elements 119 and 120 get discovered, we will add that unless sources do something massively different, element 119 will be coloured as an alkali metal (like Fr) when discovered, and element 120 as an alkaline earth metal (like Ra) too. Future elements may require a big reshuffling of the PT because of the double footnote to fit in, and will likely take a while to come on the horizon; therefore what to do with them will be discussed at a future date.
- This scheme only decides the categories. In particular, it makes no decision about the precise colours used for the categories. Those may be discussed separately. It also makes no decision about the composition of group 3. That is a subject that will be returned to hopefully when Scerri's article appears in Chemistry International outlining what has gone on at IUPAC, as it is expected soon.
Double sharp (talk) 21:39, 30 November 2020 (UTC)