User talk:TheBFG

Nuclide

I have not changed back anything after you rejected my corrections, but please consider the following comments.

• I changed T_½ to T_½ not because I like better the way it looks, but because it is the symbol of a physical quantity (halflife) and therefore it is supposed to be written in italic style.

• I don't mind that you eliminated “radioelement”, although it is used in the literature. It is also OK that you tried to solve the elimination by changing “francium” to “isotopes of francium”. But the whole sentence should be “Some of these nuclides are very short lived, such as isotopes of francium” rather than “Some of these isotopes are very short lived, such as isotopes of francium” because the word “these” refers to (the isotopes of) different elements. It is very good that the introduction tells the reader that the term isotope is often used in a loose sense. But it is not a good practice and it should not be followed in the rest of the article. (Please, check the rest of the article for the correct use of isotope/nuclide, because I will stop working on this article leaving the responsibility to you and to others who want to edit it.)

• I changed the sentence “the isotope ²³⁸U (T_½ = 4.5×10⁹ a) of uranium occurs in nature, but the shorter-lived isotope, ²³⁵U (T_½ = 0.7 ×10⁹ a), is 138 times rarer”, because having read the first part of the sentence, the reader would anticipate that the shorter-lived isotope does not occur in nature. You may say that anybody who is able to interpret a multiple sentence must come to the conclusion (after some consideration) that ²³⁵U must also occur in nature. It is true. But the reader is either puzzled by the sentence and starts thinking about it (as I did), or skips the consideration part and fails to draw the correct conclusion. With my version (which may not be perfect) I tried to produce a sentence which does not need much considering. So I ask you to rephrase the sentence more carefully.--TheBFG (talk) 07:43, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

I think you've got me confused with another editor, as I don't recognize most of those changes. Are you sure it's me? If it is and my memory is failing, I'll have another look. SBHarris 19:58, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

Yes, I made a mistake, but I left you a message at my discussion site as soon as I realized. I was told not to remove messages, so I haven't. But you can eliminate this section if you want. However, I want to use the opportunity to tell you that I am about to add a sentence after your last editing. It takes about an hour together with some other changes that I intend to do. So if you are online, look at the time stamp of this message before editing anything in Nuclide. Thanks. --TheBFG (talk) 16:05, 9 January 2010 (UTC)

I need your help (isotope vs nuclide)

We had some debates and I find you a bit stubborn but also reasonable and knowledgeable. I think all three properties will be needed now.

First of all, have a look at the article Nuclide. Without deleting anything you wrote last time, I have added a 4th paragraph starting with “No matter how the IUPAC...”. Now I find the content of the article both correct and informative.

If you agree with me, then look at the article Isotope. It is a real mess! I was thinking about changing it, but nobody knows me in Wikiland and I think that the radical changes that should be made would upset people because they would think, someone had vandalized the page. The introductory part is just awful.

There are structural problems too. Most of the odd-even question should be best discussed in the Nuclide article (carefully rephrased). Also the chart of nuclides belongs there.

Maybe you can do something about that article. If you want to contact me, you'll find my e-mail address on my homepage at http://nagys.eu --TheBFG (talk) 20:00, 14 January 2010 (UTC)

I see the problem. With the new change in usage, nuclide should be the long article, and isotope the short one (just long enough to say that isotopes are the set of nuclides which all have the same Z, and are thus the same chemical element, or something of that sort). The problem is that isotope has been used as a near synonym for what we now call "nuclide" for SO long that it has 16 times the number of entries in google that the other word does. In fact, there are many people who can tell you what a nuclide is but not an isotope.

There are two ways to fix this. One is to move most of the material from isotope to nuclide, differentiate them in the nuclide article, and have the short isotope article as described. However, that's not the best solution, as most of the people looking up "isotope" on Wikipedia are really looking for information on nuclides, and there's no guarantee they'll be redirected to the article where most of the information is.

A better solution, I propose, is to have only one article, called nuclide, and redirect isotope to it. So everybody ends up at the same place. In that article we differentiate the two in the header/LEDE, and after that, we have an isotope/history section which contains the history (before the word nuclide was invented), and next, a nuclide history section which has the IUPAC debates about ions and talk about nuclear vs atomic species, bringin us up to date with the concept usage, and then we go on with the rest of the physics of what's in isotope now, including the chart of nuclides, etc. The article on stable isotopes has already been renamed stable nuclides, so I don't think we'll get too much flack, particularly if isotope redirects to nuclide. I think we'd get more people upset at the name change if retained two articles. What say you? SBHarris 01:53, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

Isotope and nuclide merge proposal

Proposed to direct both to a single article Isotope and nuclide. Differences in present definitions will be discused in the lede there. Discussion on the merge is at talk:isotope. SBHarris 23:34, 12 March 2010 (UTC)