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Helium over beryllium (2021)

I've been doing some reading about He over Be, as shown in the left step periodic table, and the supposed helium compound, disodium helide.

Some folks have argued that since He (1s2) has only two electrons in its outer shell that it should or could go over Be (1s22s2) which also has two outer electrons, rather than over neon, which has eight electrons in its outer shell (1s22s22p6).

Now, as I understand it, He has a full shell, period, with a large energy gap between the 1s2 and empty 2s sub shell. Whereas Be is more like (1s22sp2). And Be2+ is (1s2)++. In each case, He is nothing like Be. Further, in sodium dihelide, helium does not participate in any chemical bonding.

Experimentally, there is no Be-He attraction. Computationally there is strong Be-He repulsion.

The big similarity He has is with Ne, as noble gases. Equally, H has significantly more similarities to Li than it does to F.

I don't know yet if any of this has relevance to the article space. We mention He over Be in periodic table, and in helium. --- Sandbh (talk) 06:11, 1 January 2021 (UTC)

In my opinion, putting helium over beryllium is just silly. Helium is an inert gas, and counting electrons accurately doesn't change the fact that helium is an inert gas. Robert McClenon (talk) 02:09, 5 January 2021 (UTC)
"silly" is not a convincing argument. Anyway, OP Sandbh already notes the arguments and their weight. Obviously there are the valid theories & claims, but they are not important enough to mention these in main articles like (the general) Periodic table. As with most or all minor theories & proofs, these should be dealt with in dedicated places like article sections. If I understand the He link right, that is dealt with; in PT article I did not find the linked-to text, and anyway it should be removed from there (being too much a detail). Of course, in Janet's Left Step it is a main feature. -DePiep (talk) 15:54, 5 January 2021 (UTC)
@Robert McClenon: Firstly, thanks for stopping by WT:ELEM. We can certainly use new contributors!
Secondly, (and speaking only for myself), one of the problems that came with some of Sandbh's comments / ideas was OR and SYNTH, and another was DUE weight. His comment about being unsure about article-space relevance in this case was a positive development as it does show the due weight issue that is important in this case. Sandbh's actions and contributions were problematic at times, but I would not dismiss his comments out of hand. Yes, the ANI thread brought the issues to a head and the outcome became inevitable, but I still hope that he will be able to return to this project as a better editor. So, while arguing that the modern PT should place He over Be on WP would be unsupported by RS, and while my personal view is that He belongs over Ne for the chemical reasons to which you refer, I am uncomfortable with the term "silly" being used to describe Sandbh's post. I am particularly uncomfortable with it given Sandbh is unable to respond.
Thirdly, I am not certain how I would evaluate the weight issue. I agree with DePiep that it is a feature of the Left Step PT and deserves discussion there. I would need to consider sources carefully to express an informed opinion on its inclusion in articles on helium or beryllium. My impression is that it is likely too niche for the main PT article, but I would certainly be open to evidence from RS etc that is otherwise, and that would likely involve looking at how much this arrangement appeared in historical tables during the evolution of the modern PT. The material on disodium helide was new to me (or I don't recall having read about it previously, at least), and does add some interesting bonding questions.
TL;DR: Please do not reflect on Sandbh (even indirectly) when he is unable to respond. I do not think that Sandbh was suggesting that the WP presentation of the PT be changed to put He over Be (which would be unjustifiable in light of RS). Whether the historic use of this arrangement is adequately covered in article space in appropriate places is a reasonable question, however, IMO. EdChem (talk) 01:48, 6 January 2021 (UTC)

Apparently I missed a lot.

  1. I am still on Wikibreak. Both because I lack time, and because I have been a bit frustrated by the recent goings-on. I had a bit of time today and wanted to see what had happened, so I post this. That said, I still think more time will be needed till I am both refreshed enough to really come back and have time to do so.
  2. As the resident He-Be aficionado, I can assure you that it is not silly, and has modern bluelinked partisans (Henry Bent, Eric Scerri). That said, He-Ne has mostly dominated historically, with He-Be coming just from people who wanted to emphasis electronic configurations. He-Be also has some surprising-at-first-glance support from noble gas chemists such as Wojciech Grochala and Felice Grandinetti. The reasoning behind it comes from a number of sources:
    • If you are a noble gas chemist (like Grochala and Grandinetti), then what will interest you about the chemistry of He, Ne, and Ar is not the most salient feature to everybody else (the fact that they don't want to have any chemistry), but how they act when they are forced into having chemistry. But helium forced into chemistry seems to be more like beryllium than neon; those "forced" He compounds tend to have Be analogues while lacking Ne analogues! So, it is actually not all that surprising that some noble gas chemists would support He-Be.
    • There is also some feeling that electron configurations are a more consistent basis than chemical and physical properties. (Not put in exactly this form by the sources, but: otherwise, why exactly is hydrogen the diatomic gas over lithium the reactive alkali metal? And why nitrogen the very inert diatomic gas over bismuth the brittle metal? And are we considering diamond or graphite for carbon, which have different physical properties?) Obviously electron configurations point to He-Be.
    • Finally there is the "global consistency of trends" argument. As is pretty well-known, the first member of each group is often anomalous. The 2p elements are not like the heavier p elements; they are so much smaller, more electronegative, prefer forming multiple bonds, etc. Something similar happens for the 3d and 4f elements (although in a slightly different way), as explained in this paper: basically, this is the trend Shchukarev called "kainosymmetry". All this, combined with hydrogen over lithium, suggests a first-row anomaly trend that carries on throughout all the blocks, with the size of the anomaly proceeding as s >> p > d > f. Helium over beryllium definitely fits this trend, because the two are so different at normal conditions. Helium over neon does not, because helium looks normal. So while He-Be is definitely worse than He-Ne for the local trend, it actually better fits the global trend.
  3. The above arguments (and a few others) are from a bunch of primary sources: Grochala (in the references are also links to his earlier articles which discuss this too), Bent Weberg (her father was Henry Bent, who discusses and supports He-Be in his self-published book New Ideas in Chemistry from Fresh Energy for the Periodic Law), Bent (admittedly a blog post by him only), Grandinetti, Kurushkin. And also in a secondary source: Eric Scerri's The Periodic Table: Its Story and Its Significance (2020 edition, pp. 389–390). (Which is a secondary source for Grochala's argument which appears there, albeit not for his own.) Some on the other hand have written in support of the standard He-Ne: Novaro, Petruševski and Cvetković. As always, the references in the articles are worth following up too.
  4. However, it is also completely obvious to everybody (I hope) that He above Ne utterly dominates in standard texts. So either most chemists are not convinced by the He-Be arguments or they just don't know of them. I rather suspect the latter given how recently this seems to have started to appear in the primary literature (and only just broken into the secondary); if so, then since awareness of this seems to be slowly increasing thanks to its very recent secondary-source appearance, it would be interesting to see what chemists think when they do know (but that is for the future). Therefore, although I personally am convinced (mostly by Grochala TBH) that helium really does belong above beryllium, I also think that it obviously should not be placed that way in the PT as we generally display it on WP. A very few textbooks do separate He from Ne even if they do not go so far as placing it over Be. I only know two: Greenwood and Earnshaw's Chemistry of the Elements (it would have been interesting to know why, but they didn't say), as well as by Keeler and Wothers' Chemical Structure and Reactivity: An Integrated Approach (link is to their PT and where the problem is discussed). These both "float" helium like you sometimes see done to hydrogen. Even if G&E is very well-known I am not quite convinced that this is really major enough to mention in periodic table. Discussion about placing He is nevertheless in a footnote at helium, as well as in the main text of period 1 element.
  5. Whether He over Be should be discussed on WP, and where, is a valid question. I think this will have to be left for more active editors to sort out since I am busy IRL. Hopefully, the sources I have given help EdChem express an opinion. ;)
  6. As for Sandbh's post. Well, I understand he has been topic-banned for 6 months, so I agree with EdChem not to comment while he cannot reply. Double sharp (talk) 04:35, 6 January 2021 (UTC)
Good to hear from you :-) Isn't everything with "emphasis on electronic configurations" screaming to use This One? Might even simplify "group 3" question (at least by reducing importsance of (more chemical) 'groups'), and simplify PT extension clarification. -DePiep (talk) 17:02, 6 January 2021 (UTC)
@DePiep: Not group 3 again! (x_x) It seems no one is taking my proposal to stop discussing it till the IUPAC project publishes something seriously. So, very well, executive summary about how "emphasis on electron configurations" relates to those issues according to RS.
  1. You are correct, by electronic configurations group 3 should be Sc-Y-Lu-Lr. IUPAC in a 1988 report wrote:
  2. The Jensen paper referred to makes it clear that Sc-Y-La-Ac was a historical misunderstanding based on wrongly measured electron configurations. However, because of the commonness of Sc-Y-La-Ac that IUPAC referred to, in this report they speak of a "compromise" which turned out to be Sc-Y-*-**. In the next 1990 Red Book, the 18 column table is given as Sc-Y-*-**, but the 32 column one as Sc-Y-Lu-Lr (so inconsistent). In the 2005 Red Book the 32 column table was dropped. (Yes, that means we show the one variant that, while common in textbooks, has not been used by IUPAC for decades.) It seems nobody was satisfied by the compromise, so the arguing continued. Hence the new IUPAC project that started in 2015, this time without Sc-Y-* as an option. ;)
  3. According to Sandbh here, we should hear something from the IUPAC project in January-February this year when Scerri (project chair) publishes an article in Chemistry International. Since Scerri (project leader) outright said in his recent Zoom workshop "My money's on number two [Sc-Y-Lu-Lr] and I certainly will be arguing to IUPAC that they should adopt number two", I think it is not a great stretch to suspect that Sc-Y-Lu-Lr will be the conclusion. However, I think it is more WP-legitimate to wait until February to have a source to cite. I also suspect that R8R, while not currently convinced we should do the change for WP, would be more convinced by such a statement from the IUPAC project. He may correct this if I am mistaken.
  4. Scerri and the late Henry Bent both think Janet is the ideal table, helium over beryllium included. But it is not common to actually use, so for WP we cannot follow. As I wrote: He over Be is gaining some converts, though not in textbooks yet, so I think that in a few decades we may be able to revisit this. Double sharp (talk) 05:18, 7 January 2021 (UTC)
No, is not what I talk about. It's: Why not use Janet's Left Step instead of trying to square the circle in the Mendeleevian PT? -DePiep (talk) 07:33, 7 January 2021 (UTC)
@DePiep: For WP: because everyone uses Mendeleevian format, as I said. Don't have sources to mind on the scientific reasons, I suspect because Janet is too much of a fringe thing for most sources to explain why they don't use it. Off the top of my head I would think He-Be has a lot to do with it though. Double sharp (talk) 07:43, 7 January 2021 (UTC)
I remain somewhat skeptical about what weight a decision by IUPAC carries. Think about their definition of transition elements: first of all, nobody says, "transition elements," it's "transition metals," and second, their definition includes thorium as a transition metal, and nobody does that, either. Everybody knows what a transition metal is and they don't need to be told that by IUPAC, so nobody cares. It could be, even though it's far from given, that the definition of group 3 will suffer the same fate. That being said, I see room for a different opinion.--R8R (talk) 11:49, 7 January 2021 (UTC)
@R8R: Thanks for your view. Well, I think it makes more sense to talk about it in February when we actually have something from IUPAC, so let's leave it for then if you're agreeable. ^_^ Double sharp (talk) 14:16, 7 January 2021 (UTC)
Of course. We'll discuss it later.--R8R (talk) 14:51, 7 January 2021 (UTC)

Splitting the p-block (2021)

This section is a sequence to /Archive 55#Splitting the p-block (2020), "B-Al above Sc-Y". now a closed thread. -DePiep (talk) 00:00, 13 January 2021 (UTC)

Outdated article

Table of nuclides (segmented, narrow) hasn't been updated since 2019, until I added a number of neutron-rich nuclei from Sr to Ru. It has even fallen behind the lists in Category:Lists of isotopes by element. The data in the table is contained within Template:Isotones. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 07:23, 8 January 2021 (UTC)

I cannot reply to this specific Q. But we could use a taskforce Isotopes.
About handling ~3500 items: Wikidata looks like a good friend. Someone added all recent AME and NUBASE data into there! -DePiep (talk) 00:05, 10 January 2021 (UTC)
LaundryPizza03, it certainly does need to be kept up to date. Have you checked if its main editors are still active? As for working with Wikidata, that sounds sensible in theory but the amount I know in practice is virtually nil, so I am not the editor to do it. EdChem (talk) 03:18, 14 January 2021 (UTC)
The top editor was ProDuct0339 (talk · contribs), who last edited in April 2017. We also have Quilbert (talk · contribs), who edits sporadically in English and German. Try contacting Kwamikagami (talk · contribs), Reyk (talk · contribs), or Greg L (talk · contribs). –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 08:07, 14 January 2021 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:Infobox unhexquadium

Template:Infobox unhexquadium has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the entry on the Templates for discussion page. Double sharp (talk) 03:31, 7 March 2021 (UTC)

The chemical categorisation (2021)

This section is to channel new (2021) discussions about "Chemical categorisation" (=categorisation of the elements, scientifically). The topic of coloring these categories (the graphical editing) is treated elsewhere. -DePiep (talk) 21:07, 12 January 2021 (UTC)
Recent discussions (2020):
-DePiep (talk) 21:09, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

About the 3-category classification

That is, Metal – Metalloid – Nonmetal

See the current category representations:

2020

We consider the 3-category set as a aggregation of the 10-category set. However, since the 2020 introduction of the halogens category, At is altering between metalloid (M-M-NonM set) and halogen (10-category set). How to handle this? Is the altering to be kept?

As a sidenote, a similar question can be asked about the "unknown M-M-NonM elements"; does the removal of 'unknown' classification apply here too? -DePiep (talk) 21:06, 13 January 2021 (UTC)

DePiep, just so I am clear, are you asking about for the PT article or a more general use across WP? I'm thinking that we (ELEM / previous discussions, etc, rather than you and me) have a problem of black-or-white in a world of grey. EdChem (talk) 02:41, 14 January 2021 (UTC)
re EdChem: This question pertains to the classifications and so would be handled consistently throughout the topic, that is all relevant articles. As always, dedicated articles can have more details and background. -DePiep (talk) 10:56, 16 January 2021 (UTC)
The usual definition of a halogen (which seems to be taken by everybody except superheavy specialists) does not actually care about metallicity, only about being in group 17. So there is no contradiction. It does mean that anything that puts "halogen" as a subset of "nonmetal" is strictly speaking wrong. R8R recently raised this at #Other metal and other nonmetal; maybe that thread should be split and put down at the bottom for visibility.
I am sceptical about whether At should be coloured at all by metallicity instead of being left unknown, but if it has to be, metalloid is probably best. Double sharp (talk) 03:27, 14 January 2021 (UTC)
@Double sharp: The inconsistency (or break in consistency) is that by introducing halogens this way, ELEM articles have left the notion of subcategorising the three metallicity categories, and introduces systematically overlapping categories. That is leaving the YBG setup of good classification criteria. Also, saying "halogen does not actually care about metallicity" is illustrating the same problem, plus that it adds one more puzzle to the "Other nommetals" descriptive name. NB Declaring At 'unknown' does not nullify this [1]. -DePiep (talk) 10:56, 16 January 2021 (UTC)
@DePiep: Well such a notion was not exactly consistent in RS anyway. I have probably explained this, but categories were always meant by RS to just unify elements that act similarly. There was never any idea that they would be mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive. And different categories are more relevant in different circumstances: the circumstances in which "pnictogen", "chalcogen", "halogen" are cared about are rather different from those in which metallicity matters. I don't think anyone is that confused by Russia being culturally European, but geographically cutting deep into Asia...
This said, I think this does constitute a good argument for what R8R seems to be in favour of below: just stick to the blocks for a simple categorisation, and leave all other categories to text (not colours). Those are at least clear. Double sharp (talk) 04:28, 17 January 2021 (UTC)

Other metal and other nonmetal

I don't know whom I could ask about this now, but it seems I finally remembered why I didn't like categories named "other metal" and "other nonmetal."

In the infobox for aluminium, the category field now says, "other metal, yada yada". We never learned by that point other than what. "Post-transition metal" had some meaning in it, "other metal" has nothing. This is not so much a problem when other categories are present, but without them, this name is meaningless, and it seems nobody (including me) has thought this through and meaning cannot be easily obtained from the context in some cases. Would it make sense to return to any previous coloring scheme that doesn't have these meaningless names?--R8R (talk) 19:51, 6 January 2021 (UTC)

@Double sharp: I'm glad to be able to ping somebody who has participated in the discussion that resulted in that name; I'd very much like to hear your thoughts on this if you could.--R8R (talk) 19:55, 6 January 2021 (UTC)
@R8R: Guess what, I don't like it either. Problem is that there isn't a standard name for the category and I feel that giving one is just UNDUE. Should it be "post-transition metal", "poor metal", "B subgroup metal", etc.? The best solution I can think of is for the infobox to just say "metal" instead of "other metal". Double sharp (talk) 04:05, 7 January 2021 (UTC)
@Double sharp: That proposal is not without its disadvantages, too, but let's say we do that. How do we know which element is what? Should metalloids be a thing, for example?
Not to mention that the lead picture in periodic table claims that astatine and tennessine are nonmetals; should we replicate that in the infobox? Should we not, given that they are neither predicted nor observed to behave as such? If not, should we not remove that claim from periodic table? If we should, do we simply scrap the metal-nonmetal division in that picture or rethink the whole categorization?--R8R (talk) 11:40, 7 January 2021 (UTC)
@R8R: I also think we should not say At and Ts are nonmetals. And indeed, what you say is why I originally would have preferred a scheme in which only blocks are coloured, and everything else is given only in text: because nothing else is actually agreed between sources, and we don't know which element is what, because the categories were never meant by anyone to be mutually exclusive or jointly exhaustive. So you'd colour Ts as "p-block" and its infobox would say under "categories": "halogen, predicted to be post-transition metal, sometimes counted as metalloid". And Al could say "sometimes considered post-transition metal [see other names for similar categories], sometimes considered metalloid". And Se could say "chalcogen, either metalloid or nonmetal". Finally Cn could say "experimental results inconclusive, usually considered a transition metal; post-transition metal under other definitions; depending on calculations, may not be a metal but rather a semiconductor or a noble liquid". I still think that that is the best way to avoid this kind of problem. It also nicely solves the WP:A11Y problem on the grounds of leaving only four colours rather than ten.
But you may recall that me trying to push that led to a big fight with Sandbh, which is why I decided: okay, a compromise is better. If everyone left is for "blocks only" in this way, then OK, we can change it. Otherwise I prefer not to stir up the hornet's nest. Double sharp (talk) 14:09, 7 January 2021 (UTC)
Well, I like your logic, and I am for it. In principle, I am open to different ways to resolve this problem; I simply don't want to keep claiming that At and Ts are nonmetals when they are neither predicted nor observed to act as such. This solution would work. I suggest we do that unless opposition emerges within a week.
For the record, I did want to raise this problem as mislabeling At and Ts sooner or later anyway.--R8R (talk) 14:41, 7 January 2021 (UTC)
Section move? On (re) organising this page. It appears to me, by date order (18 Nov–20 Nov 2020) and by participants (Sandbh, Double sharp), that this thread Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Elements/Archive 56 § Organising the nonmetals precedes the more concluding § Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Elements#Launch of revamped 2010 category scheme (30 Nov 2020, also considered closed).
I therefor propose:
1. Move this newer section (by User:R8R) into new ==-thread, say, "Discussion the new chemical Categorisation" (keep name & sublevel); BTW, I use 'Chemical', as opposite to 'Coloring').
2. Archive the thread that stopped 20 Nov. -DePiep (talk) 21:00, 12 January 2021 (UTC)
 Done Section moved in § The chemical categorisation (2021) [2] [3].

A week has passed, and no comments, let alone objections, have been raised on this issue. I will therefore change the coloring scheme to blocks only.

We'll need six colors: red for the s-block, yellow for the p-block, blue for the d-block, green for the f-block, purple for the g-block, and light gray for the unknown category. We already use the first four of these, and we'll need the other two just in case rather than because I can envision a use for them at the moment.

I'll change the infobox. Hopefully images will follow later.--R8R (talk) 10:07, 17 January 2021 (UTC)

I have recolored many periodic tables. I hope I didn't miss anything.
Most infoboxes currently don't mention any element categories, like transition metals or halogens. They can be added manually on a per-case basis. For this purpose, I have added a new parameter |categories= to {{Infobox element}}. It is also meant to supersede the existing parameter |category comment=.--R8R (talk) 11:40, 17 January 2021 (UTC)
Since this has been done (I do not object), I have done some image replacements. Double sharp (talk) 09:04, 18 January 2021 (UTC)

Conclusion

Based on what appears to be a total lack of opposition, and some strong arguments from myself, R8R, and DePiep that the 2020 compromise scheme had problems, R8R seems to have resolved the discussion into a change to a blocks-only scheme. This is shown to the right: red = s-block, yellow = p-block, blue = d-block, green = f-block. As already expressed, this avoids any sign of overlapping subcategories: every element is unambiguously assigned to exactly one block.

One note.

Group 3. The block assignment of four elements is contingent on the group 3 dispute in sources: La, Ac, Lu, and Lr. Currently we show a La-Ac group 3, so the first two are d-block but the last two are f-block. When the IUPAC thing comes out in a month, this may change. (In a Lu-Lr group 3 it would be of course the other way round.) So I have been a bit lazy about getting things completely consistent now because there is a significant possibility we will need to change things again shortly. And also because I have a lot of RL stuff to do, to be fair.

R8R and I have done some changes of pictures and templates; anyone should be welcome to do any we have missed. If you think that we should not have changed some particular one, then by all means, revert and inform us, and we can discuss. I am saddened to see below that R8R appears to have left, but I am contactable here still and should respond within a week.

Unless anyone has anything else to say, I think this discussion can be archived as finished. Remaining WP:A11Y issues should probably be discussed in another thread; I guess they will be fewer now that there are only four colours. Double sharp (talk) 09:16, 18 January 2021 (UTC)

For starters, you are not top speedily "archive" and bury this discussion. As you know, I already protested the process of enfoprcing an outcome applied, and one might assume that that should be looked at. Also, in an unpleasant strike of reasoning, you Ds here introduce my notes on problems with the 2020 categorisation scheme, as advocacy for this change. In short, please do speak for yourself. As a complicating twist, I can note that R8R knew I was working on solutions (because I informed him [4]), and so this action by R8R was willingly bypassing & shortcuttng these efforts in cooration & improvement while enforcing an outcome not fleshed out. No less important I want to note that this very same process of enforing "bold", undiscussed edits (undiscussed as in: mentioned maybe somewhere, concluded no let alone consensus sought & found), such undiscussed editing in mainspace was the pattern that brought the PT article down, had two editors left in frustration and had to one editor with difficulty explained that this was not the good WP contributing way. After all, EdChem's critique on the article was used as an argument to make huge and many "bold" edits (again: undiscussed)—without regarding that very critique, i.o.w. as a false argument. In the end the backchamber dealing bit you in the tail too didn't it?
The point is, Double sharp, that one cannot support such a tactic when it suits you, and next time complain when there are problems equally easily fllowing from it. The same problematic situations that arose in November wrt ArbCom, and at Christmas will reappear if editors do not commit to basic editing processes. -DePiep (talk) 16:10, 18 January 2021 (UTC)
For clarity, I add this about the prime source disappointment: the thread is named § Other metal and other nonmetal, OP about ... categories named "other metal" and "other nonmetal.". That is: (chemical) categorisation. The then thread deviating to a totally different topic, in a 700k page, is part of the lack of talkpage discipline/discussion management in this Wikiproject I have mentioned before. -DePiep (talk) 20:59, 18 January 2021 (UTC)
@DePiep: Well, I'm ready to ask you then what you think we should have done. R8R wrote here over a week ago "I suggest we do that unless opposition emerges within a week", and there wasn't such opposition. Since he did it and nobody objected, I just edited an image and did a few replacements. I wrote a summary conclusion here, since there appeared to be no objections, and because R8R is not here to do it himself anymore. Should I have done that differently? Double sharp (talk) 03:43, 19 January 2021 (UTC)
@Double sharp: We, including you, could have strived for a more thorough discussion, well-performed in any sense. One could ask oneself: did I, recently?
In short(yes): the "proposal" (or idea) was buried in the aftermath of some huge discussions about WP:ELEM (including this Talkpage & its Members; then 740k). Its section title is § Other metal and other nonmetal, i.e. straight Periodic Table Categories talk (about the 6-week old overhauled version Nov 30, 2020 made by you after an obscure discussion).
Later, the topic of that Jan 6 topic in a few posts completely moved away from its title and from the WP:ELEM:Category setup. It included dropping the Category concept completely (btw it ended up corrupting & breaking our template setup [5]). This is "conclusion" and "consensus"? Astonishing that you do not see the problem in this.
Now this is just a recent example (with consequences). Last six months there have been more examples. I am surprised that you wonder just now what went wrong just yesterday? As I wrote above, Ds, if there is no self-criticism to discussion & editing process, the pattern is to repeat itself. IOW, if you use a hidden diff to prove your point, then don't complain if other editors do complain with/without reversal. I also noted that it might fly in your own face (which is not important for WP, but does illustrate the problematic nature of hidden 'consensus'). For myself, I can note that I worked last weeks to the winding down of this tumultuous page. -DePiep (talk) 17:29, 20 January 2021 (UTC)

The Periodic Table Graphics (PTG) task force

I want to introduce the task force "Periodic Table Graphics", WP:PTG (talk), a workshop where we can develop graphical enhancements for the Element articles.

The workshop can provide tools & experiment-space to try & check improvements. Changes that are mainspace-ready then can be proposed (or discussed) here at WT:ELEM or at a appropriate talkpage. A current active job is /PTG/Group 3 (talk).

The setup and workings of the task force is to be developed too. You are invited to develop the PTG into a productive, cooperative lab. Step 1: sign in at the Members list. -DePiep (talk) 18:45, 23 January 2021 (UTC)

Emergency edit: remove fontcoloring State-of-Matter

The fontcolors of State-of-Matter (SoM) for liquid, gas and unknown, are resulting in extremely bad Accessability issues. See the PTG/Contrast check table: 5 out of 18 color contrasts score a negative (not conforming w3c contrast requirements). -DePiep (talk) 18:56, 23 January 2021 (UTC)

See talk:PTG/state-of-matter#Emergency_edit. I have set the SoM fontcolors to "black" (#000000) in {{Element color}}, and blanked the legend {{Periodic table legend/State of matter}}. All (7) mainspace articles are checked for being broken (none is).
The problem: some fontcolor/backgroundcolor combinations do not have enough contrast to be accesssible (think: legible); see MOS:CONTRAST, PTG/Contrast check table. Extreme example: for H and He, a red font is on top of a red background. Since the SoM colors are not essential to the presentation of the PT (except where SoM is the topic), the coloring could be switched off without breaking the PT presentation.
The wikilink-color: The contrast check table also says this: a wikilink blue text on red background (s-block, H and He) is not contrast safe either. For this, we should find an other solution. Wikilink-blue was not switched off btw.
Other issues: there are also other considerations wrt the font coloring. In the PT, font coloring seems to interact with bg coloring. The reader easily gets the impression that the two colors in one cell are related, as if interacting re their meaning. This is caused by using two independent colorschemes in one graph. For example: see the blind PT that shows non-letters only (so one is not distracted by reading or recognising texts). In this blind PT, it is difficult to grasp the pattern, if any, of the SoM colors. (Hg and Br seem randomly, so there is not much help in coloring anyway). LaundryPizza03 already proposed to use black pictograms to indicate SoM.
Todo:
  1. Find better bg red color to eliminate wikilink-issue (see /PTG/state-of-matter PTG/blocks),
  2. Agree that (SoM) fontcoloring should not return this way,
  3. Consider using pictograms or other solutions.
-DePiep (talk) 19:42, 23 January 2021 (UTC)

Future SoM handling

Parallel talks are happening. For example, see also PTG/state-of-matter

I like the idea of pictograms. I would suggest something like this:

- a cloud for gasses
- a drop for liquids
- a cube for solids

YBG (talk) 22:53, 25 January 2021 (UTC)

+1 I like this idea as well. I've seen a few PTs like this on walls and in books; it's visually appealing and unambiguous. ComplexRational (talk) 02:53, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
+1 Double sharp (talk) 04:58, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
Thoughts: (1) when being tiny (~font-size), 3d-effect not effective (cube). Square or rechtangle maybe? (2) a cloud is not a gas is it? I'll create a six-circle image. (3) Questions: what with the unknown ones? Blank, or some question mark? And: in which PT do we use them? -DePiep (talk) 08:46, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
Icons, my 1st concept: Icon to indicate gaseous phase, b/w Icon to indicate liquid phase, b/w Icon to indicate solid phase, b/w -DePiep (talk) 22:17, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
I like the idea of symbols. Do we need a symbol for solid, or just say that symbols are added where the state at RTP is not solid? Could also add ? for unknown but expected solid, l/g symbol + ? for suspected l or g? Perhaps? EdChem (talk) 11:20, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
@EdChem: I worry that if you put solid as blank, then "?" looks more like "unknown" than "unknown but expected solid". Maybe it is an unfounded worry.
Predictions: the only ones in period 7 for which there has been any question are Fr, Cn, Fl, and Og (almost all the rest are kinda obviously solid by extrapolation and predictions back to the 1970s have been saying so). Fr has had various not-that-close values banded around, but CRC handbook says 27°C and we might as well follow that. (I do have many questions about exactly how any of those values were actually obtained and how accurate they really are thanks to all the decay heat coming out of whatever Fr sample may have been used, which is why I despairingly choose delegating responsibility to the Rubber Bible instead.) For Cn, Fl, and Og, Mewes, Schwerdtfeger et al. have been doing some theoretical work. Copernicium (eka-mercury) seems likely liquid, oganesson (eka-radon) seems likely solid. Unfortunately currently the calculations by their group on flerovium seem not published – unless you count what seems to be a 2013 sneak preview Schwerdtfeger wrote in Nature ("This suggests that flerovium would be a metallic liquid at room temperature, much like mercury.") So, if one is going to put up predictions, I guess the best would be to call the whole 7th period expected solid except Cn and Fl (expected liquids).
I do wonder if these tentative, not experimentally confirmed, things are best to put up for a general template though. They are cool but also not known to be the truth yet. On the other hand it would probably go some way to countering the lame division "Solid/Liquid/Gas/Synthetic" you find on some PT posters that gives the weird idea that synthetic elements fall outside the standard states, and it ties in well with when we have to mention relativistic effects as something that will likely mess with the PT at high Z (who would've thought eka-lead was probably a liquid metal?). And on the third slightly mutated hand I have suspicions that everyone is actually quoting predictions for elements like astatine and francium and is simply not admitting it (the one experimental result I know of for At actually contradicts the standard value, LOL), so perhaps showing predictions anyway avoids a double standard. Anyway, I'm prepared to be convinced either way. Double sharp (talk) 13:48, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
The initiating textbooks would be helped with simple notions (like three symbols only). And just as we did recently with categories and with the split d-block: we can throw complications out of the window for the general audience. (Highschool students expect to see Hg as liquid, and should be invited to discover that corner area with gases—to have them start wondering about "Why is it this way? Let me click". *That* moment we can call Success!). This would also mean that, in our general PTs, we can forego the predicted states, like synthetic and radioactive elements: no big deal, no clarifying/complicating footnote texts, just a blank icon.
And of course, in the dedicated articles (like m.p. and b.p.) this basic information can be expanded with State of the Art descriptions like "seems to" as Double sharp did here.
Interesting 3D graphs are at webelements, m.p., b.p.. Though the colors better be gradual not blocks; our 2D {{Periodic table (electronegativity by Pauling scale)}} does this better. If we can think of a r.t. level to change colort per vertical bar, that wqould be great. Result then 3 colors ranges, Hg's top showing the middle one.
TL;DR: In general PTs, for general audience: 3 statuses=icons only, blank for non-stable elements. In dedicated articles, add & show & tell the complicated situations. -DePiep (talk) 16:16, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
@DePiep: OK I'm convinced.
To avoid questions about whether the Fr and At values are actually real, I suggest we simply stick to the Rubber Bible line as in our data pages and as in WebElements. That will mean Fm through Lr have to get the solid icon even though I strongly suspect those values are not real, but let's also be honest: no one expects anything different, and for now it is just a suspicion. So H–Lr will get the icons, Rf–Og will be left blank. Any specialised periodic table with Rf–Og as predicted solids except Cn and Fl as predicted liquids can be used somewhere else, if I can think of exactly what dedicated article that would be useful for. Double sharp (talk) 03:42, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
Labeling H–Lr and leaving blank Rf–Og would accurately reflect everything we know from RS, though Fr still seems like a tricky case because we only have estimates or extrapolations. And despite the habits of many publishers, there is no need for synthetic elements to be treated any differently (except, of course, when no experimental data is available); natural occurrence is independent of state of matter. ComplexRational (talk) 02:12, 31 January 2021 (UTC)
@ComplexRational: According to melting points of the elements (data page), it seems the Rubber Bible gives Fr as an unqualified 27 °C. So, if it's good enough for them, I'd argue it's good enough for us. Double sharp (talk) 06:05, 31 January 2021 (UTC)
@Double sharp: Do we plan to consistently use the Rubber Bible as a reference? If so, we might also want to change the value in the Fr infobox (it gives an estimated 8 °C) so as to avoid having another noticeable discrepancy. ComplexRational (talk) 11:45, 31 January 2021 (UTC)
@ComplexRational: Makes sense.  Done Double sharp (talk) 12:16, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

Plasm? SoM=phase?

I just learned, Phase and State Of Matter are different things:

How does this effect WP:ELEMENTS? How do we accomodate "plasm"? (@Double sharp:) -DePiep (talk) 23:03, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

That's plasma (Q10251) en:Plasma (physics) -DePiep (talk) 23:41, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
@DePiep: Not that important for us. It is the fourth state, but no element is in it at standard conditions. Double sharp (talk) 03:23, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
 Resolved — distinction 'phase (matter)' and 'state of matter' not relevant for WP:ELEMENTS. And we can use these two wordings alike. -DePiep (talk) 21:20, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

Group 3 news from IUPAC

The provisional report has appeared in the latest issue of Chemistry International here (read pages 31-34).

I quote the interesting bits.


The report also refers to "how the periodic table is presented to the general chemical and scientific community".

The last time we ran this was in Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Elements/Archive 52, after which we had an agreement to not raise the issue again until the IUPAC project responds. Now they have, albeit as a provisional report (presumably, a real one is forthcoming). Group 3 as Sc-Y-Lu-Lr appears to be supported by their wording, albeit not that firmly (perhaps this will be made clearer in the real report).

What views do we have on whether we should change to Sc-Y-Lu-Lr now? Double sharp (talk) 13:07, 21 January 2021 (UTC)

  • My notes on this report:
Nicely describes that a resolution by convention is needed (as oppose to a schientific result), and that too specialised options are possible (such as a 15-column f-block, with group 3 being solely Sc, Y) but not to be used in general application.
So, for the "widest possible audience", the WG advises to use the Sc,Y,Lu,Lr as it more conveniently handles the graphic effects (single d-block).
However, the graphics in the article need some comment.
1. Mendeleev did not present a PT with "eight columns". There were eight Gruppen (numbered I-VIII), in ten columns. The triple-column single Group VIII has existed as such until IUPAC introduced the one-column-one-group numbering; not coincidentally renaming Group VIII into group 8-9-10.
2. Figures 1–3, the 18-column PTs, do not use placeholders (like asterisks) to position the detached f-block. This is unforgivable, because it will lead inevitably to unnecessary mistakes and learning hurdles. This way, it is impossible to insert the f-block in the main table without outside knowledge. This is also true when atomic numbers were present.
3. (Possibly related to #2): Figure 3 purports to show "group 3 consists of Sc,Y only". However, it leaves wide open the invitation to insert the f-block .... right below Sc,Y. Which is: in group 3. Extra confusing is, that this misguided form (f-block under=in group 3) is the one published most often, even by IUPAC. Could it be that, by trying to illustrate the "Sc,Y only" statement, the WG had to remove inconvenient pesky asterisks that would expose an inconsistency?
Incidentally, this consitution (Sc,Y only) was not included in the original 2015 question; good though that the WG added it to illustrate a niche science (15-column f-block).
4. The WG proposes "figure 2", as it "achieves three desiderata": increasing Z, no split d-block, and 14-column f-block. (As noted, this can only be so when correct placeholders like asterisks are added; likely adding an empty column could be used—as this Wiki has done for years). The remaining question is: why does the WG not label Figure 4 equally useful? Or even: more useful, since without smoke and mirrors, and without requiring mental tricks, it naturally shows the three desiderata.
-DePiep (talk) 15:51, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
Thank you to Double sharp for the notification and to DePiep for his comments, plus those made in the !voting below. WP is still hampered, in my opinion, by a preliminary report with recommendations / suggestions inconsistent with RS, that does not yet have the imprimatur of IUPAC itself. RS like textbooks will act on this (or not) in future editions, so any new consensus on a convention will take time to evolve. I personally am also torn between what I will do as an educator and what policy supports as a Wikipedian. For example, I have never liked the 15 column f-block depiction that implies the entire block belongs in group 3, but I can't deny that its use is widespread and I'll teach it as the temporary compromise that was suggested for use while a new convention was being developed and that the process of adoption has now begun (while recognising that does not mean the new convention is inevitable). So, I think this article assists in us choosing a WP default but issues like the widespread use of alternatives in RS need appropriate article-space recognition.
DePiep's point that the 32-column Figure 4 achieves the stated goals even more clearly than do the 18-column Figures is well-made. The article does not address this (unless I missed it in an admittedly quick read), which is unfortunate. Without placeholders in the 18-column version, the case for a 32-column PT is strengthened. My problem with this, from a WP perspective, is the relative abundance of 18- and 32- column PTs in RS. I am unconvinced that RS support a 32-column default, though I will not be surprised if this also changes over time. Further, I don't see this article providing a basis for choosing between these options like it does for choosing a group 3 composition. EdChem (talk) 23:48, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
There shall be no content diff between 18- vs. 32-column presentation. Just editorial, like: write "Hg" or "Hg" in fonts. That is: both must and can and shall represent the same PT. I find it an astonishing lack of professionality, think science communication, that an IUPAC/WC introduces this, ehm, confusion. enwiki maintains this non-difference for some years. -DePiep (talk) 00:02, 22 January 2021 (UTC)
both must and can and shall represent the same PT – I agree. The problem is that WP follows RS and RS strongly favour one over the other. It is not unprofessionalism that keeps en.WP using the form that is most prevalent in RS, it is respect for policy and the purpose of an encyclopaedia as a reflection of human knowledge rather than as an advocate for the beliefs of Wikipedians about what choices RS should make. EdChem (talk) 00:16, 22 January 2021 (UTC)
Off-topic. Start a new thread please. -DePiep (talk) 00:32, 22 January 2021 (UTC)
Not that far off, so I stroke my post. I'm sorry for blocking your post this way, EdChem. I might have been a bit restless for the can of worms this group 3 thing is. May post a response later on. -DePiep (talk) 16:44, 24 January 2021 (UTC)

A clarification on the project agenda, regarding 18 vs 32

I add a subsection for this clarification.

18 vs 32 was explicitly not on the project's agenda. They write so on their page: "The task group does not intend to recommend the use of a 32-column periodic table or an 18-column. This choice which is a matter of convention, rather than a scientific one, should be left to individual authors and educators. The task group will only concern itselve [sic] with the constitution of group 3. Once this is established, one is free to represent the periodic table in an 18 or 32 column format."

I would agree this supports DePiep's statement both must and can and shall represent the same PT: one should not have an 18 column table showing one thing together with a 32 column table showing another. So, I thought it was pretty clear that whatever change we make ought to be applied equally to both forms, but thank you DePiep for explicitly saying it. But I do not think it serves as a rationale to use 32 column PTs as the default for now when the 18 column format is widespread. After all: the task force did not intend to recommend on that question, and they did not. I would, FWIW, consider that question off-topic for this thread. Double sharp (talk) 02:24, 22 January 2021 (UTC)

Comment. Please note that the traditional 18-column table makes it look like cerium is really element 57A, praseodymium element 57B, neodymium element 57C, then 57D, all the way to 57P (skipping I and O because they can can be mis-read) and then hafnium is element 58, tantalum 59, tungsten 60, and so on. I would support the 32-column table because it resolves this mis-interpretation. Georgia guy (talk) 13:43, 22 January 2021 (UTC)
Like I said, the 18 vs 32 column thing was explicitly not the concern of the IUPAC project. Therefore, if people want to discuss it, I would prefer that it be done in another section. Double sharp (talk) 14:45, 22 January 2021 (UTC)
Double sharp, please note the title of this sub-section. Georgia guy (talk) 14:47, 22 January 2021 (UTC)
Yes, I started it and called it that precisely to make it clear that 18 vs 32 was not the project's agenda. Maybe in hindsight it was a bad choice. Double sharp (talk) 14:49, 22 January 2021 (UTC)

Polling

Pinging active/semi-active project participants + those who participated last time around: @YBG, DePiep, Droog Andrey, ComplexRational, LaundryPizza03, Unbinilium-322 Dibromide, EdChem, and Narky Blert: This is in view of the recent publication of the IUPAC provisional report on group 3 (linked above).

Should we change our default depiction of the periodic table to show group 3 as Sc-Y-Lu-Lr now, or not?

User:LaundryPizza03, could you write this change proposal in a separate thread? -DePiep (talk) 16:33, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
  • Support Adding that this can equally be achieved & done in 18- and in 32-column format. -DePiep (talk) 15:53, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
  • Support I agree with User:DePiep. Droog Andrey (talk) 20:32, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
  • Support I agree with User:ComplexRational. -322UbnBr2 (Talk | Contributions | Actions) 18:00, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
  • Support the use of an 18-column table with Sc to Lr as group 3. As an educator, I agree strongly with DePiep that the use placeholders of some sort to indicate the location the f-block is necessary and their omission (whether a deliberate choice or an accidental oversight) from in the CI article is very unfortunate. I even more strongly agree that Figure 3, with a 15 column f-block, is a pedagogical disaster. However, DePiep is also correct that this representation is widely used at present, which means that Wikipedian EdChem is cautious about leading the way to a preferred outcome ahead of the (inevitably delayed) response of RS to this preliminary report. It is also for this reason that I think the default should be 18- columns rather than 32. We clearly can add a gap between columns 2 and 3 for placemarkers for the f-block, but that doesn't mean that we should. I suggest a separate consideration before a lot of graphics get changed. The existence of RS with 15 column f-blocks needs recognition in article space for the sake of readers and noting that the choice of representation is ultimately one of convention and that WP is following IUPAC's preliminary advice while consensus for it (or a different convention) develops in RS. EdChem (talk) 23:25, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
This is explicitly not describing what Double sharp proposes, and so your "support" is conflicting with your own writing.
Ds proposes: "our default depiction of the periodic table to show group 3 as Sc-Y-Lu-L", which is what this poll is about full stop. If you want to add extra requirements, please start a new, dedicated thread. (I think your post is confusing the simple poll, and therefor not helpful this way). -DePiep (talk) 23:40, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
I don't see how my comments are inconsistent with supporting Double sharp's proposal. However, in the hope of avoiding both confusion and conflict, allow me to clarify:
Should we change our default depiction of the periodic table to show group 3 as Sc-Y-Lu-Lr now, or not? – Yes, we should
But also
Should the default be 18- or 32-columns? – 18-columns, in my opinion.
If 18-columns, should a placeholder of some sort be included to locate the f-block? – Yes, again in my opinion.
I see these as relevant issues to consider before graphics are updated, but if ELEM (or other) editors want to make the change to group 3 without addressing these, I have no ability to prevent it. I am a single editor, with a single !vote, expressing an opinion that will be taken as relevant (or not) by others. I also do not see suggesting article-space including appropriate recognition of the existence of other representations, such as the 15-column f-block PTs found in many RS, as either hampering of implementing Double sharp's proposal or being a controversial inclusion in article space. EdChem (talk) 00:08, 22 January 2021 (UTC)
EdChem: if you want to promote secondary regulations to this proposal, I'd strongly suggest you start a separate thread. Main thread here better stay a black/white vote on the exact proposal. Editors responded to the proposal, not to your side-notes. -DePiep (talk) 00:08, 22 January 2021 (UTC)

Planned closure

Well, that seems to be a surprisingly quick and near-universal acclamation, as Georgia guy noted. Two of those pinged have not responded: Narky Blert has been quite active since the ping, and YBG (semi-active now) supported the Sc-Y-Lu-Lr already the last time.

Therefore, I plan to start formally making the changes tomorrow, if no one objects to that before then.

A few notes based on what has been discussed:

  • Since our current Sc-Y-La-Ac graphics already have a placeholder between groups 3 and 4 to locate the f block (e.g. File:Simple Periodic Table Chart-en.svg), I plan to reproduce such a placeholder for the new Sc-Y-Lu-Lr ones between groups 2 and 3. We did not discuss that particular aspect of graphic presentation, and therefore it seems to me that it should stay the same in the absence of such a discussion.
  • 18 vs 32 column was neither the main subject of discussion here nor recommended by the IUPAC project. Therefore, I plan to retain the status quo in that respect, i.e.: tables that are currently 18 column will remain 18 column, and tables that are currently 32 column will remain 32 column. Same idea as the above: if it wasn't discussed to change it, let's not.
  • The extended periodic table, brought up by LaundryPizza03. It is true, the IUPAC project does not mention anything about it, because the elements concerned have not been discovered. That being said, if you want to follow the spirit of the IUPAC project's desiderata (no split blocks and increasing atomic number order), and keep the old conclusions about what exactly to show for the post-138 elements when chemists do not agree, there is only one way to do it, which is what LaundryPizza03 suggested. In fact, this would revive exactly what was decided in Talk:Extended periodic table/Archive 3 based on some literature review (the form of Kulsha because it is closest to what everybody else says about the expected chemistry, basically): note that at the time of that discussion we had Sc-Y-Lu-Lr.

Since it is a preliminary report, I plan to only change the graphics: text discussing the group 3 problem should probably be edited and discussed on a more case-by-case basis.

@YBG, DePiep, Droog Andrey, ComplexRational, LaundryPizza03, Unbinilium-322 Dibromide, EdChem, and Narky Blert: Double sharp (talk) 05:40, 23 January 2021 (UTC)

I stayed out because even though I can dredge up from memory a mnemonic for the lanthanides (a variant of the second one at List of chemistry mnemonics#Lanthanides and actinides: "Lascivious centaurs, prancing nude, pimp [for] some European goddesses, [while] tubby dinosaurs hover erratically thrumming yellow lutes"), I don't consider this my field. Narky Blert (talk) 08:27, 23 January 2021 (UTC)
A nice walk, Ds. I understand this makes Lu, Lr in the d-block? I think there could be a textual description in article Group 3 element. Ping me if I can help. -DePiep (talk) 08:55, 23 January 2021 (UTC)
@DePiep: Correct, this makes Lu, Lr in the d-block, and La, Ac in the f-block. For extended periodic table: 119–120 s-block, 121–142 g-block, 143–156 f-block, 157–166 d-block, 167–172 p-block. 119–120 are in groups 1 and 2 (should be homologues of Rb and Sr), 143–156 align under Ac–No, and 157–172 are in groups 3–18 as homologues as Y–Xe.
Group 3 element: yes, this article does need an update. Firstly I guess the 2021 IUPAC provisional report ought to be mentioned (it currently is not at all). But also something else may need to change. Because for now the Sc-Y-La-Ac and Sc-Y-Lu-Lr options are treated with equal weightage: the infobox gives both La and Lu, both Ac and Lr, so do all the tables. That made sense before the 2021 IUPAC provisional report. But now that that report exists, perhaps instead Sc-Y-Lu-Lr should be the pictured version while acknowledging the older common alternatives (Sc-Y-La-Ac and Sc-Y-*-**) in their own section discussing the dispute. Well, what do you think? Probably some rewriting is required anyhow. (I note the article has GA status, so presumably it should be updated in such a way to keep it.) Double sharp (talk) 09:23, 23 January 2021 (UTC)
I'd say: we can fully go by the Report's line of reasoning & conclusion. We do not need to build in the "2-option group 3" anywhere (which is a horror to graph & decribe anyway). So the top PT & infobox has the new, single-form structure, and in ~section 3 we can open with: "There are three sound possiblities to define group 3: ... None is definitive. For reasons xyz, IUPAC has proposed to present option x as most useful for the audience. options Y and Z are niche science." (or maybe, better use your wording). Section titles can easily be changed into text-supporintg ones. All in all, I'm saying, the Report gives us a nice structure for this section, no need or gain in finding our own text structure (though the philosophical part can be left out, I guess). Existing texts about group 3 can be discarded, or reused to describe the three options (give them their scientific base). Check rest of article for references to this issue. Once the new text is stable, we can check for GA again. Being GAN is no reason to defer this change.
As for the images: I prefer not using the graphs presented in the WG Report, as I explained above. I think our enwiki presentation forms can do the job well (as you noted). -DePiep (talk) 12:02, 23 January 2021 (UTC)

@DePiep: Thanks to some IRL procrastination (LOL) I have written up a proposed redraft of the group 3 element article at User:Double sharp/Group 3 element. All sections describing individual elements and trends take the group as Sc-Y-Lu-Lr for granted, as described (I didn't edit them much, just cut out the parts describing La and Ac). The main section on the dispute is redrafted as a section in "History" and significantly shortened (I mean, I think we don't need to spam all the arguments). Now it simply states the history of the dispute, just enough to explain where each form came from, and finally the IUPAC attempts to resolve it. I guess it would be significantly better with your magic: there should probably be some illustrations showing each in 18 column and 32 column form, something like the IUPAC report. Of course, open to your (or anyone else's) critiques and suggestions. Double sharp (talk) 07:44, 24 January 2021 (UTC)

Yes I have (and do) suppord the So/Y/Lu/La form, largely for aesthetic reasons akin to the working group's disiderati. I had thought we were going to belay changes until seeing the response of the scientific community. But given the strength of the consensus, I believe you are doing the right thing. YBG (talk) 19:10, 25 January 2021 (UTC)

Implementations

Micro PT

I am working to make the micro PT supporting the three WG options, to be used in the Group 3 article. ({{/testcases}}, {{/PTG/group-3}}). Will notify you on its progress. -DePiep (talk) 12:02, 23 January 2021 (UTC)

Hydrogen Helium
Lithium Beryllium Boron Carbon Nitrogen Oxygen Fluorine Neon
Sodium Magnesium Aluminium Silicon Phosphorus Sulfur Chlorine Argon
Potassium Calcium Scandium Titanium Vanadium Chromium Manganese Iron Cobalt Nickel Copper Zinc Gallium Germanium Arsenic Selenium Bromine Krypton
Rubidium Strontium Yttrium Zirconium Niobium Molybdenum Technetium Ruthenium Rhodium Palladium Silver Cadmium Indium Tin Antimony Tellurium Iodine Xenon
Caesium Barium Lanthanum Cerium Praseodymium Neodymium Promethium Samarium Europium Gadolinium Terbium Dysprosium Holmium Erbium Thulium Ytterbium Lutetium Hafnium Tantalum Tungsten Rhenium Osmium Iridium Platinum Gold Mercury (element) Thallium Lead Bismuth Polonium Astatine Radon
Francium Radium Actinium Thorium Protactinium Uranium Neptunium Plutonium Americium Curium Berkelium Californium Einsteinium Fermium Mendelevium Nobelium Lawrencium Rutherfordium Dubnium Seaborgium Bohrium Hassium Meitnerium Darmstadtium Roentgenium Copernicium Nihonium Flerovium Moscovium Livermorium Tennessine Oganesson
It is now possible to use {{Periodic table (micro)}} in various group 3 forms. E.g., setting |form=Sc, Y, La, Ac shows the previous presentation form. See /documentation. Can be used, for example, to describe the IUPAC considerations (non-chosen forms) in Group 3 element. @Double sharp:. -DePiep (talk) 14:34, 24 January 2021 (UTC)
Extended PT

About block allocations. From section above, by Double sharp:

Correct, this makes Lu, Lr in the d-block, and La, Ac in the f-block. For extended periodic table: 119–120 s-block, 121–142 g-block, 143–156 f-block, 157–166 d-block, 167–172 p-block. 119–120 are in groups 1 and 2 (should be homologues of Rb and Sr), 143–156 align under Ac–No, and 157–172 are in groups 3–18 as homologues as Y–Xe.

However, I find other block allocations:

{{Extended periodic table (by Aufbau, 50 columns, compact)}} homologues La/Ac/E139
Extended periodic table § Aufbau model homologues La/Ac/E139
Extended periodic table § Pyykkö model homologues La/Ac/E141
Extended periodic table § Fricke model homologues La/Ac/E141

@Double sharp: continue with your list? Would have a block change in column La/Ac/... I think. Or apply one of the three theories throughout (as our default extended PT)? -DePiep (talk) 13:23, 23 January 2021 (UTC)

@DePiep: La/Ac/E143 is Kulsha, following more or less Nefedov. The point is to align E157–166 with their chemical best homologues Y–Cd, which Fricke admits in his article despite placing them somewhere else. See {{Extended periodic table (by Nefedov, 54 columns, detailed cells)}}. Double sharp (talk) 13:37, 23 January 2021 (UTC)
"Predicted" coloring?

P.S. The block-only category legend should probably "expand" in the extended version to have a "g-block" between s and f, not an extra "undiscovered". Double sharp (talk) 14:39, 23 January 2021 (UTC)

Some template/image replacement

I find myself with more time than usual today, and, thanks to some last-minute RL stuff, less time than usual tomorrow. So, despite what I wrote above, I will do some replacement of templates and images today instead. I hope that is all right, since {[u|DePiep}} has started doing some work here.

Bigger changes like an appropriate rewrite for group 3 element will have to wait, I'm afraid... Double sharp (talk) 13:39, 23 January 2021 (UTC)

Fine with me. I won't touch {{Nefedov's}}, in case we get editconflicts.
Question: do you like the third, Sc-Y form like {{here}}?
Pls look at the E121 cell marker in {{Infobox unbiunium}}. Repositioning of cell E121 mistake [6]?
Yes, mistake. Corrected (I hope). Double sharp (talk) 14:35, 23 January 2021 (UTC)
Will look at teh extended micor PT's later on. -DePiep (talk) 14:24, 23 January 2021 (UTC)
Add a ping since you seem to be on a roll...@Double sharp:. -DePiep (talk) 14:32, 23 January 2021 (UTC)
@DePiep: Yes, that Sc-Y form is correct, see Scerri's 2019 article.
Sc-Y-*-** will be harder to show: per Thyssen & Binnemans it should have "stretchy Sc and Y" over all 15 cells of their f block. Double sharp (talk) 14:34, 23 January 2021 (UTC)

Okay, I've done what I can stand doing in one day. ;) I should've gotten most of the obvious and high-visibility ones. The rest (low-visibility + those that require some thought as to rewording) hopefully may wait. ;) Double sharp (talk) 14:56, 23 January 2021 (UTC)

Todo list

Please keep it a bulleted list; strike (by <s>...</s>) when done.
Wow, this image looks too outdated and unfit for our PT standards. -DePiep (talk) 20:17, 23 January 2021 (UTC)
Somehow I think this may be better done as a template (especially since the heaviest elements may conceivably change as more stable isotopes are discovered). Double sharp (talk) 04:20, 25 January 2021 (UTC)

Regarding the asterisks

Of interest might be the earlier 1988 report on this matter. Although this is where the compromise apparently came from, it then spends a funnily large amount of time detailing how Sc-Y-Lu-Lr works, and the subsequent 1990 IUPAC Red Book appeared inconsistently with a Sc-Y-*-** 18-column table and a Sc-Y-Lu-Lr 32-column table.


Therefore I would say that having asterisks to show where exactly La–Yb and Ac–No belong (between groups 2 and 3), although not explicitly recommended, is surely within the spirit of what is stated given the pains that were taken to explain where exactly they should be inserted. Double sharp (talk) 05:11, 24 January 2021 (UTC)

P.S. Actually it was pointed out in 1948 (link is to 1st Russian edition of the Landau source, go to p. 286). 1959 must be the translation date. Double sharp (talk) 15:28, 24 January 2021 (UTC)

An interesting contrast between 1988 and 2021 IUPAC reports

In the 1988 IUPAC report, objective scientific reasoning is used to justify Sc-Y-Lu-Lr: for we see there written "According to the electron configurations of the elements, the scandium group consists of the elements Sc, Y, Lu, Lr." That's a pretty objective scientific criterion. Yet in the 2021 IUPAC report it is instead stated that this does not "provide a clear-cut resolution of the question", and that the group 3 conundrum "is one of convention rather than one that can be decided on objective scientific grounds".

The 2021 statement is interesting because electron configurations have indeed been given as a way to clearly resolve the problem by authorities on the matter – including by Jensen who is one of the project members.


Perhaps something more will be heard about this when we have a less preliminary report (such reports usually appear in PAC rather than CI). Double sharp (talk) 08:54, 25 January 2021 (UTC)

P.S. Red Book 1990 contains a 32-column periodic table with Sc-Y-Lu-Lr. Which is inconsistently facing an 18-column periodic table with Sc-Y-*-**. Go figure. Double sharp (talk) 15:17, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

Block class & coloring "(predicted)"

It has been mentioned recently. I'd like to aks it straight here:

Do we keep using Block class:predicted (as in: "E121 is in g-bock (predicted)")?

Recently, Double sharp has this and did edited them out in places. I think the fact that g-block only exists theoretically so far is a different topic, and needs no change re this.

If we want the option out, we will formally deprecate it & remove it from mainspace graciously. Or, define situations when to keep it (and check legend colors used). -DePiep (talk) 09:20, 26 January 2021 (UTC)

I stand by what I said: it makes no sense to colour Og without "predicted" and 119 with "predicted". It might make sense to go for predicted past Hs, as electron configurations are unknown beyond there, but I cannot think of any textbook that actually does that. Double sharp (talk) 09:25, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
(I was not questioning your opinion, I just want to make this a formal and clear conclusion. -DePiep (talk) 11:38, 26 January 2021 (UTC))

Mainspacing

Article Group 3

I have moved my draft into the mainspace, since it seems presentable already. Thanks in particular to DePiep for his very valuable graphic improvements. :) Naturally it can be improved yet further. So, we now have a section covering the dispute's history and where it came from (mostly, arguing over electron configurations); having done that and mentioned the IUPAC ruling, the rest of the article discusses Sc, Y, Lu, and Lr as its scope. The lede gives a summary: "Although some controversy exists regarding the composition and placement of this group, it is generally agreed among those who study the matter that this group contains the four elements scandium (Sc), yttrium (Y), lutetium (Lu), and lawrencium (Lr). ... Historically, sometimes lanthanum (La) and actinium (Ac) were included in the group instead of lutetium and lawrencium, and this option is still commonly found in textbooks. Some compromises between the two major options have been proposed and used, involving either the shrinking of the group to scandium and yttrium only, or the inclusion of all 30 lanthanides and actinides in the group as well."

DePiep has written above, in response to one of my queries: I'd say: we can fully go by the Report's line of reasoning & conclusion. We do not need to build in the "2-option group 3" anywhere (which is a horror to graph & decribe anyway). So the top PT & infobox has the new, single-form structuree, and in ~section 3 we can open with: "There are three sound possiblities to define group 3: ... None is definitive. For reasons xyz, IUPAC has proposed to present option x as most useful for the audience. options Y and Z are niche science." (or maybe, better use your wording). So, I would like to propose that as our general line: when we are just giving data, we can say things like "Lr: group 3", and when we say it in text, we briefly describe it. Say, along the lines of "Lawrencium is the final member of the actinide series. Some controversy exists regarding its group placement, but according to most who study the matter and a recent IUPAC provisional report, it may be regarded as the heaviest element of group 3 and the first of the 6d transition metals. This makes it a heavier homologue of scandium, yttrium, and lutetium." Or for the other one: "Actinium is the first member and eponym of the actinide series. It is the heavier homologue of lanthanum. Some controversy exists regarding its group placement, but according to most who study the matter and a recent IUPAC provisional report, it may be regarded as the first of the 5f elements." And then carry on. It seems consistent with the idea to use one form as a default, at least.

Comments on such wordings? And feel free to comment on the new group 3 element revision too. As always, feel free to revert/discuss/etc.

@YBG, DePiep, Droog Andrey, ComplexRational, LaundryPizza03, Unbinilium-322 Dibromide, and EdChem:

Double sharp (talk) 09:13, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

Generally agree. Droog Andrey (talk) 12:48, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
@Droog Andrey: Thanks for your support. ^_^ May I ask if you have anything specific in mind that could be improved? Double sharp (talk) 13:03, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
I'll think of it :) Droog Andrey (talk) 18:40, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

I've made a few changes of this kind. I think the source list at User:Double sharp/Group 3 sources (not really that organised right now, sorry) clearly justifies the formulaic statement I have used that Sc-Y-Lu-Lr is the format favoured by most who study the matter: if even this is OR (I can see arguments for that), note that Jensen (one of the IUPAC project members) says something very similar in his 2015 paper, published some months before the IUPAC project started. (That the evidence since his 1982 paper has tended to support Lu in group 3.) That said, we can discuss, and I in particular eagerly await what Droog Andrey thinks of. ;)

Of course, we will carry on describing the dispute when it matters, along with all forms. We can revisit this if/when the Lu form makes it to the IUPAC periodic table, as there are some processes that remain till that can happen. Double sharp (talk) 05:30, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

I have redirected my draft User:Double sharp/Group 3 element to Group 3 element, since it has served its purpose (now in mainspace). Since not very much extra work was needed to do it, I also gave group 4 element a similar lift-off for chemistry + physics + history (the stuff I have good sources on).

I suppose it would not take too much effort to give the remaining transition metal groups the same sort of love. I may do it if I have time. A little bonus is that it would immediately make a bunch of easy good topics since the d-block is already almost totally a sea of green on our PTQ. ^_^ Double sharp (talk) 14:53, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Sandbox organiser

Sandbox Organiser

A place to help you organise your work

Hi all

I've been working on a tool for the past few months that you may find useful, especially if you create new articles. Wikipedia:Sandbox organiser is a set of tools to help you better organise your draft articles and other pages in your userspace. It also includes areas to keep your to do lists, bookmarks, list of tools. You can customise your sandbox organiser to add new features and sections. Once created you can access it simply by clicking the sandbox link at the top of the page. You can create and then customise your own sandbox organiser just by clicking the button on the page. All ideas for improvements and other versions would be really appreciated.

Huge thanks to PrimeHunter and NavinoEvans for their work on the technical parts, without them it wouldn't have happened.

Hope its helpful

John Cummings (talk) 11:24, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

What to do with categories: the infoboxes

As we know, recently (Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Elements#Conclusion) it was finally decided to use blocks instead of categories as the means for a colouring scheme, on the grounds that categories were never meant to be mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive and making them so is basically OR. (The closure was not done in the best possible way, but it seems to be at least settled by now.)

Now, we do still have a "category" field in the infobox, but it looks to be only populated for {{infobox lutetium}} (Lu) and {{infobox hafnium}} (Hf). We also do still have the group names in infoboxes like {{infobox antimony}} (Sb) which says "group 15: pnictogens", but of course that is something separate. (Alas, by IUPAC 2016 it seems "halogen" and "noble gas" mean the whole group officially.)

However, to accurately give a category field would require quite some difficulty. I have previously suggested it, but actually it seems worse than I thought. Lu is a lanthanide, people are pretty sure about that – for now. (It seems quite possible that if/when IUPAC updates its showcase periodic table to Sc-Y-Lu it will stop being one. For instance on WebElements, which has as far as I can remember always been Sc-Y-Lu, Lu is apparently not a lanthanide.) On the other hand, people are not sure whether to spell it "lanthanide" (common usage) or "lanthanoid" (IUPAC Red Book, less ambiguous with La anions). But now that we have a group 3 containing Sc-Y-Lu, Lu is also d-block, and by IUPAC's definition it is also a transition element. Which many people call "transition metal" because they're all probably metals (I reserve judgement for copernicium). And it is also pretty unambiguously one of the rare earth elements / rare earth metals.

Or take arsenic. Yes, it's a pnictogen, everyone agrees on that. But is it a metal, nonmetal, or metalloid? You can find people saying all three. Well, what weight should we give each? In different contexts things may differ, e.g. organic compounds with As are usually called organometallics even if As is quite lame as a metal. If it is a metal, then what name are we using for p-block metals anyway? "P-block metals"? "Other metals"? "Post-transition metals" (then what about aluminium)?

So I ask the question: should we have category fields in the infobox at all, or leave this stuff to article text? Double sharp (talk) 09:13, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

@YBG, DePiep, Droog Andrey, ComplexRational, LaundryPizza03, Unbinilium-322 Dibromide, EdChem, and Narky Blert:

Allow me to fix the ping: @YBG, DePiep, Droog Andrey, ComplexRational, LaundryPizza03, Unbinilium-322 Dibromide, EdChem, and Narky Blert: Thank you ComplexRational! Double sharp (talk) 04:31, 31 January 2021 (UTC)
@LaundryPizza03: (since everyone else responded). Double sharp (talk) 08:11, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

Polling again

Organic chemists don't distinguish between metals and metalloids. AFAIC/IMAO, organoarsenicals and organostibenes (and I'll thank you to keep downwind of me) are organometallics. Which reminds me that around 1970, there was a communication in Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. entitled "Some Unusual Insertion Reactions of Arsoles". Check Chem. Abs. if you don't believe me. Narky Blert (talk) 20:06, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
Off-topic? but anyhoo. I'm watching an old Periodic Videos in which Martyn Poliakoff says, "Noble is an old-fashioned word meaning it doesn't react. Posh way of saying chemically boring." YT link. Narky Blert (talk) 23:28, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
I've remembered a parallel example - WP:WikiProject Composers#Biographical infoboxes. You can drive round in futile circles arguing whether Beethoven was a Classical or an Early Romantic composer, or whether Schoenberg was Late Romantic or Early Modern. They were both; the labels are meaningless.
Popular music genre classification illustrates the kind of rabbit hole to avoid falling down. Heavy metal music sometimes seems to be one band = one genre. On the other hand, I've seen The Beatles mislabelled as a rock band - no they effing weren't, they were a beat group. Sigh.
Conclusion - don't try to force things into pigeonholes for tidiness, even (or especially) in science. (I'm planning to lobby IUPAC for placing Ar and K the wrong way round, an obvious mistake which has gone uncorrected for over a century - just look at their AWs!) Narky Blert (talk) 20:25, 31 January 2021 (UTC)
  • In infobox when telling. While the examples are confusing and leading to "too subtle for the infobox", there is also this: e.g. the Metalloids are an existing, respectable & relevant eh category. Just because we do not illustrate by category any more, does not say metalloid is irrelevant. It is a main, pivotal trend (periodicity!) in the PT, between metal-nonmetal. However difficult to delimit (only when zooming in btw), metalloids do exist and take their place in the PT. The "category" metalloid should be mentioned in the infobox. (Up to us, not RS, on how to handle At-like vagueness, still this does not allow us to remove the property "metalloid" from the infobox list completely). Same for alkali metal etc. (low fruit). BTW we still need a good wording & article for 'Category'. They exist, you know. -DePiep (talk) 20:22, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
(happy with my editsummary [7], so let me self-quote it here: so misty things are clear then. but what about the clear things? ;-) . -DePiep (talk) 00:32, 31 January 2021 (UTC)
  • Leave it to text. The simple cases can be explained in the lead section; more complicated ones can be briefly summarized there and expanded upon in the body. There are plenty of examples for which chemists (or physicists) do not agree on categorization. To name some of the many debated categorizations brought up at WP:ELEM at some point:
    • Metalloids: selenium (metalloid or nonmetal?), polonium (metal or metalloid?), astatine (metal, metalloid, or halogen?)
    • Groups: group 3 (transition metals or lanthanides/actinides?), group 12 (transition metals or post-transition metals?)
    • Phases: does metallic hydrogen affect its categorization?
    • Nonmetals: core nonmetals, moderately/highly active nonmetals, should halogens be labeled separately?
    • Superheavy elements: follow periodic trends or label as unknown?
ComplexRational (talk) 22:09, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
@Double sharp: BTW, the ping didn't work because you added your signature later, so I was only notified of this thread by watchlist. You might want to resend the pings. ComplexRational (talk) 22:11, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
CR, my question is: why should the word "Metalloid" not be present in infobox silicon? -DePiep (talk) 23:34, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
If there were a way to label every element unambiguously, and categorization remained stable and consistent, I would not be opposed to that. However, I imagine that labeling silicon as a metalloid would lead readers to expect other metalloids to be similarly identified, while there is disagreement on several (such as selenium, polonium, and astatine). Therefore, we either need a simple, reliable, indisputable solution for labels, or we have dozens of complicated or borderline cases that an infobox label alone will not adequately address. ComplexRational (talk) 02:07, 31 January 2021 (UTC)
My example of As applies to all the metalloids, actually. ^_^ Double sharp (talk) 04:31, 31 January 2021 (UTC)
... and counting in scientists who do not recognise metalloids at all (including fringe denounciations). Do you actually want to erase the word "metaliod" from PT discourse? -DePiep (talk) 04:39, 31 January 2021 (UTC)
@DePiep: It's not a "fringe denunciation" because it isn't "fringe". Droog Andrey already mentioned a couple of years ago (Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Elements/Archive 34#Dividing line between metals and nonmetals) that most Russian textbooks do not have a "metalloid" category; they only use metals and nonmetals. In Russian-language schoolbooks the term "metalloids" is rarely used; usually the whole set of elements is just divided into "metals" and "non-metals". So that's why my table has a single line. Astatine may go to metals in the next edition. Droog Andrey (talk) 18:59, 10 March 2018 (UTC)
If you look at Lists of metalloids, you will see the massive spread. While it's true that {B, Si, Ge, As, Sb, Te} are definite majority inclusions among those who have a metalloid category, the majority of sources actually include others too. IUPAC doesn't seem to use the term either. It seems not very well-defined to me. I also somehow think that it would be better to illustrate the metal-to-nonmetal trend simply with the more standard diagonal stairstep and just say that elements near the stairstep line are sometimes considered metalloids or semimetals, except that the term isn't used very consistently. Double sharp (talk) 05:59, 31 January 2021 (UTC)
Note: Above !vote posted and signed as "YBG (talk) 16:48, 31 January 2021 (UTC)," who then moved the accompanying comment into the new sub-section, "Other categories" in infobox, started below. I (EdChem) have added this note so that it YBG's !vote is clear and separated from subsequent !votes, for whe it comes time to evaluate any consensus. EdChem (talk) 01:38, 3 February 2021 (UTC)
  • Leave it to text: I am persuaded that most obvious / uncontroversial categories are included in the infobox via group and block statements. I think that DePiep has a good point about metalloids, one I would be much more concerned about if some infoboxes said elements were metals or nonmetals... but they don't, based on a quick check (so I'm open to correction, other thoughts). I accept that the Russian-languages / sources divide elements cleanly between metals and nonmetals, but that is not the case for the majority of English-language RS nor for most readers (assuming they recall any chemistry). All the cases where we could debate which of the metal / metalloid / nonmetal categories applies would mean any infobox entry would be potentially misleading / confusion without referring to the main text, so let's just put that information with the necessary nuance where it can be explored properly. EdChem (talk) 02:16, 3 February 2021 (UTC)
  • Leave it to text: There is no universally accepted categorization scheme for the widely varying properties in the p-block, which is further complicated by the overwhelmingly post-transition metal character for group 12. Some elements, particularly the heavier ones, mix characteristics of multiple categories; for example, At shows formal similarites to both Ag and I and is variously classified as a metalloid, a nonmetal, or a metal, even when there is a halogen category. The nuances are already covered in certain articles about these categories, and in this case also the At article itself. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 16:28, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

"Other categories" in infobox

Discussion separated out from YBG's response to poll above

There is no reason why the infobox needs to have one and only one category. The colorization pretty much required us to assign each element to one and only one category, but in the infobox we could list a number of the significant named sets of chemical elements to which it belongs. I think we'd need to figure out a way to keep the lists relatively short; for starters, there would be no need to repeat the already listed group name. I proposed this idea some time back and DePiep started working on a template to support this idea, but I can't find it now. YBG (talk) 16:48, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

This might work as well; I had not previously thought of this. However, if we impose a label "other categories", we'd still need to accurately determine what the primary category should be for some case, unless we just present a list of all common categorizations for each element without identifying a main one (aside from blocks). ComplexRational (talk) 18:21, 31 January 2021 (UTC)
@YBG: I have considered this, but my worry is it may lead to a whole load of difficulties: for something like arsenic, which can be classified as metal, metalloid, or nonmetal, and for which its status as a p-block element then lets the metal and nonmetal categories fracture into a whole lot of possibilities, I almost think it might end up as the longest field in the infobox. "Variously classified as a metal, metalloid, or nonmetal, but usually as a metalloid; if a metal, then a post-transition / poor / other / B subgroup metal; if a nonmetal, then a reactive polyatomic weakly electronegative nonmetal"? Plus the questions of weight. Should we really give non-standardised categories?
I guess that if one were to only put the IUPAC-named categories, then it might not be so bad. But that still has quite strong overlaps (La is simultaneously a lanthanoid and an inner transition element and a rare earth element), does not cover all elements and makes no claims as to which elements are metals. Which is probably another thing we should relook at, to be honest. Anyway, I still want to ask: if this is something that can only be adequately handled in a big string of text, and we are going to have such a text in the article anyway when describing the element's characteristics, then why burden the box? Double sharp (talk) 05:39, 1 February 2021 (UTC)
For Arsenic, I would probably just say "metalloid (usually)" and leave it at that. For the rest, yes, we'd need to limit the list somehow, and IUPAC approved names seems as good a way as any. What is the largest number of non-group IUPAC categories an element would belong to? If the max was 5 or 6 and that only affected not much more than a dozen or so elements, I think I'd be OK with that. YBG (talk) 06:55, 1 February 2021 (UTC)
@YBG: If you don't include group categories, then IUPAC approval leaves us with only transition and inner transition elements (which are really synonyms of d-block and f-block respectively), main group elements (which is basically s-block plus p-block minus hydrogen), lanthanoids, actinoids, and rare earth elements for sure. Biggest overlap seems to be the triple one for lanthanum and friends.
As for metallicity: IUPAC wrote in the Red Book: In Ref. 11, the formulae for intermetallic compounds were also subject to an exceptional rule although no guidance was given for naming such compounds, and the term ‘intermetallic compound’ was not defined. The problem is to define the term ‘metal’. Therefore, no attempt is now made to make a separate prescription for either the formulae or the names of intermetallic compounds. So it seems that chemistry has abdicated from defining "metal" and that there are multiple ideas going around there. In the end I think you'll find that "metalloid" is one of those ill-defined terms that people use despite having no really agreed meaning. Similar to "noble metal" or "heavy metal". I guess "metalloid (usually)" for arsenic is not inaccurate; I just kind of dislike putting up ill-defined terms in the infobox because I worry it might make people think they are more standardised than they really are. Maybe I worry too much. ;) Double sharp (talk) 08:31, 1 February 2021 (UTC)

Please correct me if I am wrong, but aren't the categorisations (whether single or several) both straight-forward and uncontroversial in the significant majority of elements? If so, those could be added to infoboxes as a useful summary for readers. For the complicated / unclear cases, some possibilities include:

  • leave the category blank, perhaps with a hidden note in the edit field that the category parameter is being left blank as any categorisation provided would be problematic with some RS and so the concept is left to the text where there is space to explore it; or,
  • put something like "reliable sources support different categorisations", perhaps with a convenience link or a footnote pointing to where the issues are presented in the article; or,
  • put something like the above but with a footnote that explores the options, and is appropriately supported by references; or,
  • simply exclude categories from the infoboxes; or,
  • put whatever consensus that article talk page discussion supports as the most appropriate for that element, with a footnote noting the alternatives supported by references. This option comes with a bonus gigantic time sink every time someone suggests a different categorisation, the potential for a nice long and pointless fight, and that feeling of satisfaction that comes with moving your desk two inches in some direction after the massive casualties that inevitably come with trench warfare.

You will hopefully be unsurprised that I don't favour the last possibility. EdChem (talk) 07:00, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

@EdChem: Well it seems most of us are currently favouring your fourth bullet, FWIW. And indeed, save for Lu and Hf, they were all already not there when I started this polling; I just wanted it to be clear if this was what was generally wanted among project members.
My impression is that nearly all the old categories are either (1) group names that are clear and already in the infobox under "group", (2) close enough to blocks (transition metal = d-block; lanthanoid and actinoid are close enough to "f-block"), or (3) stuff that is not agreed in sources and gives what you aptly call a "bonus gigantic timesink" (the metal/metalloid/nonmetal area). Having been through the timesink on entirely too many occasions (e.g. Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Elements/Archive 15, I cringe somewhat thinking of it now) makes me likewise unenthusiastic about making it ever possible to go through again, whence my "leave it to text" !vote and those of others. ;) Double sharp (talk) 08:25, 2 February 2021 (UTC)
Double sharp, the categories that I was thinking about as uncontroversial are mostly group or block references (as you pointed out), so I am persuaded that leaving out categories from the infobox seems wisest. EdChem (talk) 01:23, 3 February 2021 (UTC)
I shouldn't continue flogging a dead horse, but I'm gonna try anyway. It seems elements fall neatly satisfy one of these five supercategories
  1. metal
  2. nonmetal
  3. metal or metalloid (depending on author)
  4. nonmetal or metalloid (depending on author)
  5. metal, metalloid or even nonmetal (no consensus among authors)
It seems to me, that as far as the general reader is concerned, the last one is the most remarkable, surprising, newsworthy, and (dare I say it) infobox-worthy. YBG (talk) 02:44, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
@YBG: I have doubts that 3 and 4 are non-empty. 5 is kind of the case for pretty much all metalloids: in purer inorganic chemistry they are more nonmetallic and sometimes considered as such, in organometallic chemistry the similarities are with metals and they are grouped as such. And for physicists, I guess they are all nonmetals for lacking a Fermi surface, except graphite, grey arsenic, and grey antimony (which is the only stable form anyway). I also think that it is not surprising that if an element is often called a "metalloid", meaning it has some properties of both metals and nonmetals, that different authorities would try to classify it with both sides for their own reasons.
Besides, the classifications are often pulled mercilessly when the context demands it, e.g. often to try to avoid splitting up a group's story. But while it makes sense when you specialise that way, I somehow think it does not do our readers a service to report that lead is sometimes called a metalloid or even a nonmetal (latter found in Wulfsberg's Inorganic Chemistry). Or that selenium is sometimes called a metal (ref). Yes, within their contexts they make sense, but in an infobox you don't have time to set up context. And while saying Pb is universally considered a metal is inaccurate, I almost think it would be more harm to be pedantically accurate and inform readers that it can be considered otherwise, as if those classifications were as general as the one that every layman would use to declare Pb a metal!
OTOH I think there is a point when it comes to describing the trend between metals and nonmetals for the periodic table rewrite. Somehow, we've got to illustrate something. I think we have little better than the diagonal line and a statement that elements near it are sometimes called metalloids with much fuzziness. That's what I was told in school, so there must be something to it. Double sharp (talk) 02:57, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
Well, even though the ASPCA and RSPCA may object, I will continue down this path a bit further. Out of curiosity, could this categorization work:
  1. metal
  2. metal, sometimes metalloid; rarely nonmetal
  3. metalloid, sometimes metal, rarely nonmetal
  4. metalloid, sometimes nonmetal, rarely metal
  5. nonmetal, sometimes metalloid; rarely metal
  6. nonmetal
YBG (talk) 04:47, 7 February 2021 (UTC)
@Double sharp: How do these six sets work out? Assuming we !vote the astrophysicists off the planet, how clearly are these sets distinguished? How many elements end up in each? YBG (talk) 07:52, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
@YBG: I still think they're not very clear. Firstly: to some extent "metalloid" is dependent on the other two categories. If you are stricter on what exactly counts as a metal, your "metalloids" will move towards the metallic side accordingly. If you are less strict, they'll move the other way. Secondly, I get the feeling that it depends a lot on the subfield of interest. Selenium is often a heavy metal, organoselenium is part of organometallic chemistry, but I don't think other chemical disciplines will be that happy to call it a metal. (And then you have the phenomenon of those who don't want to separate the Se-Te-Po series as a gradation. Sherwin et al.'s Chemistry of the Non-metallic Elements discusses polonium right after acknowledging that strictly speaking they probably shouldn't.) My (not backed up yet by statistics) memory also suggests that German-speaking chemists are far more likely to call selenium a metalloid than English-speaking ones. Double sharp (talk) 08:25, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
OK, the horse is dead! Thanks for your willingness to indulge. YBG (talk) 08:36, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
BTW, in astrophysics all elements beyond helium are considered metals (even the most non-metallic element neon), so I don't think that "depending on author" option is a good idea. Droog Andrey (talk) 13:40, 5 February 2021 (UTC)
LOL yes. Wish I'd remembered that example. ;) Double sharp (talk) 15:33, 5 February 2021 (UTC)
I don't think the astrophysics sense of 'metal' really counts - I think of it as a completely different term that happens to be spelled and pronounced and has some overlap. It is rather like salt and salt (chemistry). The man on the street, when he hears the chemist speak of 'salt' to mean not only what he calls 'salt' but also a whole lot of very different things, he would be inclined to think the chemist is using a different word that happens to sound exactly the same. Likewise, when the chemist hears the astrophysicist speak of 'metal' to mean not only what he calls a 'metal' but also a whole lot of very different things, he would be inclined to think the astrophysicist is using a different word that happens to sound exactly the same.
@YBG: In that case, is the physicist's definition of a metal also different from the organometallic chemist's and the inorganic chemist's? Germanium is a metal for organometallic chemistry, not so much for general inorganic chemistry (more metalloid-ish or nonmetallic), and certainly not for a physicist (no metallic bonding till you pressurise it). They are after all based on slightly different ideas that just happen to be correlated by sharing a root cause. And if so, whose definition wins? The one to assume usually depends on exactly whose book you're reading... Double sharp (talk) 07:27, 7 February 2021 (UTC)
The astrophysicist's definition of "metal" is an outlier like Don Bradman's batting average.
@Double sharp: Point well taken. It is just that most of these definitions (it seems to me) differ in a few edge cases. The astrophysicist's definition seems so wildly different from all other definitions that IMO it is nearly a different term altogether. But I suppose by this logic one would have to call Don Bradman something other than a cricketer. YBG (talk) 07:52, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
@YBG: Dirty secret: the botanists' definition of berry includes eggplants and bananas while failing to include strawberries. Source. I believe this is not what anybody other than botanists thinks of when hearing the word "berry". And yet, their field is pretty relevant to all these plants. I think it's analogous: just like "berry", the term "metal" can be claimed by multiple disciplines, which have sometimes slightly and sometimes wildly different ideas of what it means, some of which are themselves fuzzy. Double sharp (talk) 09:33, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

Closure

Well, this has been running for a while, and it's now gone a few days with no further comments. Since YBG appears convinced in the discussion above, and the !vote tally definitely shows a majority in favour of removing these, I have gone ahead and removed the category mentions from Lu and Hf (the only ones that had them). Double sharp (talk) 09:56, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

I forgot a few category comments that had been orphaned when blocks were first instituted (e.g. {{infobox carbon}}). Have removed them now, since they created weird sentence fragments. Double sharp (talk) 03:28, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

Periodic table article (2021)

Sequence of section Periodic table article (2021); split for reasons of managing the threads. -DePiep (talk) 12:22, 16 January 2021 (UTC)
(Separated from #Consenus requests (2020), allow archiving ) -DePiep (talk) 22:37, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

ELEM future plans (re PT article)

For talks about the actual article PT, please visit Talk:Periodic table -DePiep (talk) 23:22, 20 January 2021 (UTC)
  • I wonder what ELEM project members and interested parties, etc, see as important / desirable in the next little while? I would like to see progress made on the periodic table article, including the overview (or whatever we call it) for the first section after the lede. I think we also need to decide about some of the many threads here, though ideally without more reorganising that has been problematic – and I note YBG's comments in the ANI thread and DePiep's recent helpful post on that topic. I would also like to try to encourage more participation in the project, which will hopefully be helped by increased collegiality. EdChem (talk) 02:43, 5 January 2021 (UTC)
I was myself going to ask about what we should do with periodic table... we need to essentially rewrite the article. But before we start outlining any plans on it, I was wondering, who could improve the article now? If I recall correctly (which is, as it often goes, quite an if), you mentioned yourself that the article is either improved or demoted. My understanding is—and I’d like to stand corrected very much—there is nobody left to do the improving.
Speaking for myself, I was going to aid the collective effort to rewrite the article that included Double sharp and Sandbh, but that effort is no longer on the table, and when I figured that effort had failed, I was going to take over the article in order to at the very least diffuse the tension and, in the end of the day, help both them, both of whom I know and like, and the project as a whole... and I didn’t even want to do it all that much, it just seemed like the best thing for them and for the project. I don’t see a point in investing time in doing that now, especially given that we once had a featured article... why would we write it anew, especially if it may deteriorate again, as it has done twice by now?
If my understanding is correct that nobody will be doing it, too, then I really see two ways to proceed from here: one, we can pick a previous version of the article from long enough ago, and revert the article to it. It would certainly have to predate the group 3 dispute from early to mid-2020. We could, for example, pick the revision just before the TFA in 2018, as the article probably wouldn’t have been picked had it been in a bad shape. If that idea doesn’t work, we could do the obvious. We’re talking about a supposedly featured article which needs a lot of work... if it needs that much work, we could recognize that by stripping it off its bronze star. Either of these will at the very least be more fair to the reader who sees some value in that bronze star.
EdChem, I’m sorry if my post comes out as pessimistic despite all the effort you’ve made over the last few months (before I saw your post, I was going to leave everyone the same choice, revert or FAR, and title that section, “We failed”, as in “we failed to save the article”). I’d feel bad if nobody had offered nothing to your post, and to make sure there is at least some reply, I give a reply that fatalistic...I’m sorry. If there is something I’m missing, I’d like to stand corrected very much, it’s just that I genuinely don’t see how that could be.
After the GAN for aluminium is successful, I’ll start a peer review. I don’t think this offers a lot of room for collaboration—I think the article is in a good shape already—but that’s at least something.—R8R (talk) 12:35, 5 January 2021 (UTC)
  • WP:ELEM organisation I propose to move all this, from EdChem's "I wonder .." bullet, into new ==-section below: "ELEM future plans" (or equivalent title), to contain both (1) these talks about PT-article and (2) about handling & reorganising this WT:ELEM page. -DePiep (talk) 15:33, 5 January 2021 (UTC)
Better: two different ==-sections: about article PT and about page WT:ELEM. I will start the latter one right away. Can be done without disrupting this subthread, I understand, as that topic is not mentioned here. -DePiep (talk) 15:44, 5 January 2021 (UTC)
@EdChem:: thanks for section adding. I'd strongly prefer to refine:
Limit topic to "Article periodic table", and so retitle;
Move to ==level thread. Should stand on itself, & should not refer to ANI (ANI gives no help in this).
Of other ELEM future plans, I already had created § WT:ELEMENTS: winding down (to clean up this talkpage). -DePiep (talk) 16:48, 6 January 2021 (UTC)
  • About Periodic table: I see no path to bring current article version through FAC (or GAN for that matter) within 6 months, even with a theoretically repleted ELEM-company. Meanwhile it would loose FA anyway (as we are admitting it ourselves, IMO). Given the ani conclusions that the recent (re)writing process was flawed, and therefor so are the published results I can say, best to do is revert. At least to "Nov 14, 2020" (pre massive unevoluted edits), or early 2020 (before Group 3-discussions leaked into it), or 2018 (FAC version). Easiest: early 2020, check each 2018-2020 edit for degrading. Then: asap rewrite to use new chemical categorisation scheme (version: 30 Nov 2020, today's). Then: start overhaul discussion, (using EdChem's Oct 2020 comments first and foremost), keep talks structured and systematic. Likely meta-issues first: general TOC, consensus as a goal, agreement on critiques, aim to keep each version FA-level.
TL;DR: Revert to version early 2020; Keep current Category version; Meta-discuss handling critique; Discuss improvements systematically. -DePiep (talk) 17:41, 5 January 2021 (UTC)
  • I have added the "ELEM future plans" sub-heading that DePiep suggested.
  • R8R, thanks for responding. I am not as pessimistic, though I do feel that the ELEM group will take time to recover from recent events – both the conflict and the issuing of a tban. I am willing to help with article editing. My unofficial role in recent times has prevented much actual editing, and others can evaluate how effective things have been, but I do actually enjoy article work. I tried to move in the editing direction on the PT article, without much success, but I still hope that article work can help with ELEM team building. I do hope that you will choose to contribute as time and interests allow, R8R. I hope that Double sharp and YBG feel refreshed from time away and choose to re-engage with time. I also hope that Sandbh's time away will lead him to return to collaborate with a team that is more cohesive and productive. I'm even hoping it will have grown with new participants! (Wow, am I optimistic or what!?!)
  • I have been avoiding expressing opinions in trying to remain neutral or out of uncertainty. Several of the proposals have left me wondering about due weight. Taking He over Be, for example, it is historically true that this was used and it is appropriate to note this in a historical context. Whether it warrants mention in the main PT article is unclear to me, however.
  • My suggestion is thus to work on the PT article in the areas that are widely agreed to be weaker. For some (many?) of Sandbh's suggestions, I think working them into more specialised articles will help to make it clear whether they are also due mention in the main article.
  • As for reverting PT to an older version, I can see arguments in both ways – and ultimately, it is for a consensus decision rather than there being a policy-based reasoning for a single "right" answer. However, one factor that I do think we should consider if a reversion occurs is this: when changes that subsequently occurred are resurrected, whoever makes the change is being attributed as author of the addition, and I think it would be appropriate / desirable to include in edit summaries a note mentioning the original author, as a matter of polite consideration. EdChem (talk) 01:20, 6 January 2021 (UTC)
I'm glad you retain some positivity, and I'm particularly glad that you said you'd help improve the article (if I interpreted your words correctly, that is), because I'd otherwise be feeling that this is a nice but empty sentiment, at least for the time being. Last year already we only delivered one featured article, and so far it looks like we won't beat that this year, but I'm eager to be proven wrong. I hope your prediction will prove correct rather than mine.
My own time here is already sparse as it is, although I'm somewhat glad there's less discussion now, which seemingly never ended, which in turn means less distraction from article writing. I like writing: being able to write concisely is a useful skill, and this is a great way of practicing it, and it's also nice to actually produce something, and learn interesting things along the way. Not to mention that this is a nice way to practice English, which is a useful skill worldwide nowadays, but some people have a natural advantage of living in an English-speaking environment, something I don't have, and I have to compensate for that somehow.
If there really is going to be some actual work, I think reverting is not necessary... is there?--R8R (talk) 16:52, 6 January 2021 (UTC)

Revert to 14 Nov 2020 status

I have reverted article Periodic table to the version of 14 Nov 2020. That is, the one before numerous "bold" edits were made that probably would have cost the FA star. It is well poissible that more edits (before Nov 14) are to be reverted, maybe even an complete earlier version is required.

Anyway, given the edit history one must assume that each non-trivial edit is controversioal and so has to be discussed beforehand. -DePiep (talk) 14:55, 17 January 2021 (UTC)

  • We need to decide where Talks should happen: here or at Talk:Periodic table? I'd say with the article. -DePiep (talk) 15:04, 17 January 2021 (UTC)
    • I agree that they should happen on the article talk page. That is the most visible and appropriate venue for anyone interested in the article. And regarding other edits, do you think a PR or FAR would be appropriate (for assessment by uninvolved editors)? ComplexRational (talk) 15:20, 17 January 2021 (UTC)
      • Reading the introduction of WP:FAR, I understand it is about "raising & discussing concerns", not !voting (which happens in a next phase, FARC). So with or without formal FAR, we ourselves could raise those concerns, and work to improve them. A good starter is this initiative by EdChem, 17 Oct 2020.
Such a review discussion will be hard to do well, since it touches complicated and abstract issues. On top of this is that recent times our discussion performances have become less than optimal. (Even today R8R (talk · contribs) started mass-editing the main content of the PT without even a hint of an explanation or rationale). Still, cooperative and well-performed discussions are the only way forward. -DePiep (talk) 15:52, 17 January 2021 (UTC)
@DePiep: I am hurt by your words, I really am.
To be clear, the edits I have made today were a consequence of this thread. Moreover, I mentioned this thread in a personal discussion with you on my talk page a few days ago. I don't know why you weren't able to find "even a hint of an explanation or rationale" given that not only this issue had been discussed publicly prior to the edits in question, but also given that you had been personally notified of that discussion.
I am also hurt by how you chose the particular words you said, "without even a hint of an explanation or rationale," you even emphasized those words. Do you really consider that suitable for a "cooperative and well-performed discussion" that constitutes "the only way forward"? If the only way forward includes belittling my actions based on false assumptions, then I don't want to walk this path. You seem to enjoy EdChem's presence (so do I). I'd like to ask you, how do you think he would phrase this? Also, do you think the way EdChem picks his wordings has any effect on the way he is perceived by other editors, including you and me? Do you think you could learn anything from him in order to improve your phrasing?
(If I ever said something about you myself like this myself, which is certainly possible, this event will be something for me to learn from...but then again, if I ever did that, I'm left wondering why you didn't learn from my failures.)
As for the edit you undid, I made it because the existing colors didn't pass the color contrast test. My colors pass it. You can reinstate my colors or you can keep the ones in place right now that don't. I am under the impression that an edit that concerns colors in the periodic table is impossible without your approval, so I'll leave it to you, and I'm sorry for entering the forbidden area without asking first.
Finally, as for the periodic table revert. The November 14 version is in several ways worse than the one we had yesterday, and the problems with the article had emerged way before November 14; in fact, some edits starting with November 15 actually improved the article. I will quote you from above: "TL;DR: Revert to version early 2020", signed DePiep, January 5, 2021. I'll do that.--R8R (talk) 18:33, 17 January 2021 (UTC)
I have reverted R8R's edit of the PT article [8] (which installed a March 21, 2020 version). Not because the edit might be wrong per se, but because it did not have any support whereever by whomever. Again. Per my es: "Undid revision 1000989719 by R8R: R8R Please STOP making undiscussed edits & reverts. Just because you *mention* a projected edit, does not say it was 'discussed'; let alone it has consensus. I note you did not engage in the recent 'ELEM future plans (re PT article)' talks) reve[rts]". -DePiep (talk) 21:08, 17 January 2021 (UTC)
And please be sure, R8R, I have had a horrible day too, since waking up and looking at my Watchlist. Seeing not a single Talk: link. -DePiep (talk) 21:24, 17 January 2021 (UTC)
I'm sorry you had a bad day. I can't really say my yesterday was bad until I saw that mean and factually incorrect comment about my supposed failure to explain my actions. Maybe you could reconsider the need to comment when you're having a bad day. Maybe you could consider the need to mitigate the impact of your comments if you nonetheless chose to comment.
"Not because the edit might be wrong per se, but because it did not have any support whereever by whomever." This comment leaves me puzzled. I did mention the need to revert way beyond November 14 above, and I had the support of nobody other than yourself. I see no point in discussion any further, since you keep ignoring what arguments I bring up. This was the impression I got long before this event. I hoped that my escalation in November at the ArbCom case, as misguided as it was, could change the tone of discussion in this project. It worked, it looked like, but only for a brief while. Now we're back at square one, and I don't know how I should put an argument in order to be heard by you, again. At this point, I don't know why I should return to Wikipedia tomorrow, and I won't.
I did consider that my inability to get through might lead to this, and I was in peace with the idea that I could be banned in November when I initiated that escalation. That seemed better still than staying in a placed where my arguments were continuously neglected (rather than contested). But in December already, you used words like "I object" and "unacceptable" to a proposal that you were not a part of and that in no way affected you (so your opinion, one way or another, was not of any real consequence), and at the same time when you mentioned that proposal of mine to EdChem, you used the words "I understand, but my impression is that"; I suppose the difference in phrasing is explained by saying you wanted to be heard by EdChem. I knew at that moment that my departure was a matter of time rather than principle. This incident merely seals it.
I have applied for a GAN for aluminium, although the actual review will probably start in a few months only. Those who remain in this project, please think who could support the nomination without me. If nobody can do that, it might be wise to withdraw it.
Farewell, everybody. Thank you all for all nice times. I learned a lot from you over these years, and being a part of this project has been a great experience. I hope that I was able to keep you a good company and that the articles I wrote will be useful for many more readers. I probably owe some of you apologies, some of which I meant to say but never said and some of which I probably didn't even realize I needed to say; I'm sorry for it all, and I hope you can forgive me. It's been fun... well, it used to be.--R8R (talk) 05:35, 18 January 2021 (UTC)
This is very bad news... Double sharp (talk) 09:18, 18 January 2021 (UTC)
Bad news indeed... here goes another productive editor for nothing... I hope you return some day when things settle. ComplexRational (talk) 15:02, 18 January 2021 (UTC)
I also don't know what to say about aluminium because I have not written the bulk of the article and am not familiar with its sources. Should the GAN proceed, probably it's best that Double sharp addresses the review (some article work is better than none). For that matter, will the WikiProject even survive if most of its productive content creators have quit or gone on wikibreak, or are its days numbered as well? Will I have to see out my Wikipedia career elsewhere on the site? ComplexRational (talk) 15:10, 18 January 2021 (UTC)
@ComplexRational: I can probably handle Al when the GAN comes, so that's one worry less. Still. Double sharp (talk) 03:36, 19 January 2021 (UTC)

Prospects for more superheavy chemistry

doi:10.2533/chimia.2020.924 Probably should update articles for the 6d noble metals (may have prospects now). Double sharp (talk) 04:06, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

Group names

It still seems illogical to me that the naming convention we use for groups changes from group 12 to group 13. We have:

but then

This is a different convention, that which allows groups to be named by the first element, rather than by the number. It seems to me inconsistent. Surely either boron group and carbon group should become group 13 element and group 14 element, or the ten transition groups should become scandium group through zinc group.

What do others think about this? Double sharp (talk) 04:17, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

Lawrencium-264

And some new decay paths: http://flerovlab.jinr.ru/index.php/2020/12/25/she-factory-first-experiment/

Should we add this to Isotopes of lawrencium at least? Droog Andrey (talk) 21:36, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

This is definitely something, so I'd say go for it. I don't know, however, if there's a common practice for handling discoveries that are mentioned in reports such as these but not in peer-reviewed articles (I looked today, nothing about 264Lr). Maybe a note that its discovery has not been "announced"? ComplexRational (talk) 01:00, 9 February 2021 (UTC)
P.S. There's also the possibility that the SF is due to 264No, the EC daughter of 264Lr (current sensors are not sensitive to EC, as in the case of several other SHE isotopes), so I'd also be curious to hear what a full discovery paper would say about it. Of course, we wouldn't mention that unless there's a credible publication suggesting it. ComplexRational (talk) 02:35, 9 February 2021 (UTC)
@ComplexRational: EC of 264Lr and SF of the product 264No was already suggested in the first paper on Mc discovery. Double sharp (talk) 04:06, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

Have added. I think the values are life-times, so I multiplied by log 2 to give the half-life. Double sharp (talk) 05:07, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

Regarding stuff only in reports: the initial discovery of 118 was only published in an internal JINR report and had to wait some years before it got published formally. However at this point WP was quite young (2002 to 2006), so I haven't checked what we did then on the grounds that it's not clear if we should do the same thing again if it happens. And also on the grounds that this can probably be decided case-by-case. But FWIW, I would advise accepting it on the grounds that IUPAC and IUPAP considered such internal reports when evaluating 101 through 109. Double sharp (talk) 16:49, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

Question

Does anyone have a good idea for how to title a section about the current procedures for the PT? (As I'm redrafting the article in my sandbox.)

The IUPAC doesn't recommend any kind of PT, but that doesn't stop them from proudly displaying a IUPAC PT anyway on their website. And they do seem to be the de facto custodians of the PT, judging by its prominent appearance under "What We Do" on their site:


This all seems to belong in the article, but what to call it?

@Droog Andrey, DePiep, ComplexRational, and LaundryPizza03: Double sharp (talk) 14:45, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

@YBG: Double sharp (talk) 14:54, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

P.S. Not to mention this: "the Periodic Table is a brand of IUPAC". Double sharp (talk) 14:49, 18 March 2021 (UTC)
I can't offer any specific advice, except maybe something like IUPAC procedures or IUPAC conventions. I'd like to know how reliable sources describe them. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 20:10, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

Ubt, Ubp

Why do unbiquadium and unbihexium have articles, but unbitrium and unbipentium do not? It doesn't seem fair.🪐Kepler-1229b | talk | contribs🪐 19:37, 17 March 2021 (UTC)

@Kepler-1229b: It was discussed here back in 2018. Basically, there is not enough to say about 123 and 125 right now. A quick Google suggests that this hasn't changed. Maybe it will once the 8s elements come. Double sharp (talk) 03:21, 18 March 2021 (UTC)
Ok. 🪐Kepler-1229b | talk | contribs🪐 17:48, 19 March 2021 (UTC)

An attempt to redraft periodic table

I am giving it a try, in my sandbox: User:Double sharp/Periodic table. Not exactly fully presentable yet, also not finished. Long live RL procrastination. ;)

Inspired by what EdChem wrote at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Elements/Archive_54#On_the_periodic_table_article_more_generally. And also what textbooks generally do (I went to The Cartoon Guide to Chemistry even, to make sure I was sticking to the basics).

Tried to avoid primary sources when possible. Because this is so basic in chemistry and physics that if you cannot find secondary sources, you probably are out on your own fringe limb. One is there though, sorry (just for that useful ≪ notation). To that end, referred often to Feynman's lectures on physics just because it's a standard textbook that is freely accessible online. Not to mention that it helpfully makes the point that ground-state configurations must be treated with a grain of salt for d and f block elements and can be easily influenced by the chemical surroundings, which is why no serious chemist will ever care that Ni, Pd, and Pt all have a slightly different configuration when it comes to non-specialised topics. (Because, alas, most of the easy textbooks that this is the level at handwave once they get to the transition elements.)

Sorry I have not cited everything yet. This is mostly because this is so basic that I can more or less write it by channeling memories of school chemistry. I did however base the structure on the aforementioned cartoon guide to make sure things were presented in a logical order; first what chemical elements are, then how they are arranged.

Maybe the presentation is too textbooky given its parentage. I am open to rearrangements.

Presentation follows the Madelung rule, since it is common to refer to (and doesn't pretty much everybody teach it for writing electron configurations?). So, yes, Sc-Y-Lu-Lr is treated as the default table as was decided above, as it is the only Madelung-consistent version. That's what almost all the sources that think about this problem say, and now that IUPAC has spoken (though not yet finally), we have a valid reason to disregard the older textbooks anyway. (Which often are not exactly the most consistent in the world when it comes to this question.) Don't worry, the whole saga and the old alternates will be somehow mentioned in history when I get around to writing it, as it relates strongly to how the rare earths always gave a headache.

Categories and all that will be mentioned in accordance with how they are used in reality, when the metal-to-nonmetal trend bit gets rewritten. That is, there will be no attempt to pretend there is any consistency between sources, nor will there be any attempt to pretend that the categories are actually mutually exclusive or jointly exhaustive. Double sharp (talk) 06:58, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

Progress is slow due to RL commitments, but today I had time, so more is written. ;) Double sharp (talk) 14:21, 17 March 2021 (UTC)
P.S. I think DePiep will be pleased by what I've chosen for the lede image. ;) Double sharp (talk) 15:09, 17 March 2021 (UTC)
I'm especialy pleased to see that you have a brilliant mind for writing encyclopedic stuff. -DePiep (talk) 17:07, 17 March 2021 (UTC)
@DePiep: Thank you!
Just a heads up that the proposed icons for states of matter are mentioned in the text even though they're not actually there yet. Double sharp (talk) 03:31, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

I decided to use YBG's figures (suitably edited) for the history section: see User:Double sharp/Periodic table#Chronology of element discovery. A few changes:

I added the alchemical elements to the ancient ones, since it is not that different a tradition. Therefore As, Sb, Bi, and Zn are there from the start. Of course this is a little bit anachronistic because the ancients did not think these were quite like the seven planetary metals. (No, they had not discovered anything earth-shatteringly important from our perspective about the amphoteric character of these metals. For one thing, if that had been the case, they should've excluded Sn too.) But this whole business is in some way anachronistic, so I don't think it matters too much.

There is some iffiness with Lavoisier's elements. That radical boracique should be identified with later boron is probably hard to deny, but the fact remains that he didn't really have it. But if that was the standard, then fluorine was unknown when Mendeleev made his periodic table, which is silly. Still, since Lavoisier himself wrote inconnu beside it (also for later F and Cl), I have elected to throw it out. And the same thing for his "earths" (which were the oxides of Mg, Al, Si, Ca, and Ba, which he could not reduce to the metals). Strontium and uranium had been discovered before 1789, but they are not on Lavoisier's list.

After that things are not too bad, because the notion of element rapidly converges with ours. Terbium was discovered before 1869, but Mendeleev was uncertain of its elementary status, so it is not on his periodic table.

I chose Moseley and Siegbahn as a more important moment for the history of the PT than Deming's 18-column form, especially since acceptance of that came a bit slowly (the short 8-column PT is still not hard to find in Russia). Rhenium was known by then, but only as Masataka Ogawa's nipponium, a claim that wasn't universally accepted, but has only been rehabilitated in retrospect. (And also, he thought it was element 43, when he had actually element 75.) So it is not coloured yet.

The last milestone shown is 2010, with the synthesis of element 117 and the completion of the seventh row. Nothing in between, because although the Transfermium Wars were a big thing with warring names (so the periodic table depended on where you lived; was it rutherfordium and hahnium, or kurchatovium and nielsbohrium?), they also make it impossible to neutrally pick a date to say if the element had been discovered or not, especially because the best that even IUPAC and IUPAP could say about lawrencium was that confidence had been built up slowly over ten years from 1961 to 1971.

Presumably, the next milestone to be shown would be whenever IUPAC comes up with a formal report for the group 3 thing. This has, however, not happened yet; there is only at present a preliminary report. When it does happen, we should probably move the stuff about group 3 from "Open questions and controversies" to "History".

Perhaps the cells should be bigger, for symbols to be present. Actually, I think the coolest would be a way to step through six images. But I don't know how you'd do that. Double sharp (talk) 14:21, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

Metallicity

Also. Sorry Droog Andrey. I still think your table's definition of metallicity is the best one, but after looking through some sources, I think I'll have to stick with drawing a simple diagonal and waffling about some elements near it being often called metalloids. Just for this overview at least. Double sharp (talk) 06:48, 19 March 2021 (UTC)

@Double sharp: it's far better not to draw anything than to draw a straight diagonal. Droog Andrey (talk) 08:20, 19 March 2021 (UTC)

@Droog Andrey: I agree (because germanium), but how do you propose I should summarise it in something like User:Double sharp/Periodic table#Metallicity? Double sharp (talk) 08:21, 19 March 2021 (UTC)
@Double sharp: You wrote "the dividing line between metals and nonmetals is roughly diagonal", and that's OK. We can always use worded description where the things are not straight enough to draw them :) Droog Andrey (talk) 08:50, 19 March 2021 (UTC)
@Droog Andrey: what do you think of colouring by covalent vs. metallic structures? I can probably justify it by looking at how UK high-school syllabi deal with group 14. Double sharp (talk) 08:47, 19 March 2021 (UTC)
@Double sharp: Let's look at it :) Droog Andrey (talk) 09:09, 19 March 2021 (UTC)

@Droog Andrey: Well, maybe just your line will do? ;) Yellow for more metallic, blue for more covalent, grey for "nobody made enough".

Metals–metalloids–nonmetals in the periodic table
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
Group →
↓ Period
1 H He
2 Li Be B C N O F Ne
3 Na Mg Al Si P S Cl Ar
4 K Ca Sc Ti V Cr Mn Fe Co Ni Cu Zn Ga Ge As Se Br Kr
5 Rb Sr Y Zr Nb Mo Tc Ru Rh Pd Ag Cd In Sn Sb Te I Xe
6 Cs Ba La Ce Pr Nd Pm Sm Eu Gd Tb Dy Ho Er Tm Yb Lu Hf Ta W Re Os Ir Pt Au Hg Tl Pb Bi Po At Rn
7 Fr Ra Ac Th Pa U Np Pu Am Cm Bk Cf Es Fm Md No Lr Rf Db Sg Bh Hs Mt Ds Rg Cn Nh Fl Mc Lv Ts Og

Arsenic is blue because of a line in Comprehensive Inorganic Chemistry: "whereas in the various forms of arsenic each atom interacts strongly with three neighbours, in antimony and bismuth interactions are spread more evenly over a larger number of neighbours." But maybe I misunderstand this or the descriptions for group 16 too. I admit to not being too clear about what's going on for Se and Te... ;) Double sharp (talk) 09:21, 19 March 2021 (UTC)

@Double sharp: That looks good :) Droog Andrey (talk) 10:17, 19 March 2021 (UTC)

@Droog Andrey: Okay, included this one! :) Double sharp (talk) 14:22, 19 March 2021 (UTC)

Progress report

Large portions have been done; only the history section is mostly unwritten. I don't know for sure when I'll have time to write it; maybe soon, maybe not quite so soon. ;) Some more sourcing is required at some places. Feel free to help along by adding them if you can easily find them. ;)

I am not sure where the "Controversies" section (period 1 and group 3) should stand. Currently it is near the end of the article, after history. I suppose a case could be made that it should be earlier, since variation on these points in published periodic tables is not hard to find.

Perhaps the periodic table itself should come earlier, but logically the stuff in Basis does rather need to be there to explain where everything came from (otherwise, explaining what a block is becomes problematic). To some extent there is already a problem with the section about classifying the elements, but I presume people at least have an idea of what a metal should be.

Since this is shaping up pretty different from the existing article, perhaps an FAR should be done once it mainspaces... Double sharp (talk) 14:22, 19 March 2021 (UTC)

P.S. Colour scheme for File:First Ionization Energy.svg should be revised to blocks. Double sharp (talk) 14:30, 19 March 2021 (UTC)

Thanks to one exhilarating week of procrastination, most of the actual writing work is done. Still need to fix some citation neededs and give what I have here a closer read through. But because RL beckons, maybe later. ;) Double sharp (talk) 13:32, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

Somewhat newer density predictions for 6d metals

doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.83.172101 for Lr–Rg. They also did a study on Cn, which I quote here since it likewise predicts metallic copernicium. (Of course newer predictions give 14.0 as already detailed at copernicium, but those studies conclude insulating copernicium like radon.) I quote the 3d, 4d, 5d values for comparison.

Element Lr Rf Db Sg Bh Hs Mt Ds Rg Cn
Density (g/cm3) 14.4 17.9 21.6 24.2 26.0 26.9 27.3 25.7 22.4 19.14
Older value 16.6 23.2 29.3 35.0 37.1 40.7 37.4 34.8 28.7 23.7
Element Lu Hf Ta W Re Os Ir Pt Au Hg
Density (g/cm3) 9.841 13.31 16.69 19.25 21.02 22.59 22.56 21.45 19.3 13.534
Element Y Zr Nb Mo Tc Ru Rh Pd Ag Cd
Density (g/cm3) 4.472 6.52 8.57 10.28 11 12.45 12.41 12.023 10.49 8.65
Element Sc Ti V Cr Mn Fe Co Ni Cu Zn
Density (g/cm3) 2.985 4.506 6.11 7.15 7.21 7.86 8.90 8.908 8.96 7.14

In many cases the most stable isotope has changed since this 2011 study, but it does not have a really big effect, and besides for many of these elements there should be even more stable isotopes hovering out of reach. So I feel free to quote it as it stands.

So it seems that the 6d metals are not actually that much denser than the 5d ones. The old predictions (from Fricke era) seem to have assumed that atomic radii of 6d elements should shrink beyond 5d elements; most of the 5d metals are already close-packed, there is no room to get any higher density by any other means. (See Talk:Hassium/Archive 1#chemical and physical properties.) But, calculations on covalent radii seem to indicate that this is not the case, and that in fact radii of 6d elements are modestly higher than 5d elements (see covalent radius for the table). So, although indeed we surpass osmium density, we don't do it by much. I wouldn't shout from the rooftops that meitnerium is going to be the heaviest metal now, because this is very isotope-dependent again (too close to hassium and friends).

We'll have to make some changes, I think. Now I wish someone would finally address 7p and maybe 8s elements. ;) Double sharp (talk) 06:23, 2 March 2021 (UTC)

P.S. I still wonder if there are actual values for densities of Fm, Md, No beyond the ones calculated at Talk:Fermium/Archive 1. Okay, WP:CALC exists, but still it'd be nicer. Double sharp (talk) 06:43, 2 March 2021 (UTC)

Nuclear and Radiochemistry: Fundamentals and Applications (2013, 3rd ed., p. 631) by Kratz and Lieser has newer but pretty similar values:

Element Rf Db Sg Bh Hs Mt Ds Rg Cn Nh Fl Mc Lv Ts Og 119 120
Preferred oxidation state 4 5 6 7 8 6 4 3 0 1 0 1 2 3 0 1 2
Ionisation energy (eV) 5.1 6.2 7.1 6.5 7.4 8.2 9.4 10.3 11.1 7.5 8.5 5.9 6.8 8.2 9.0 4.1 5.3
Ionic radius, metallic state (Å) 1.66 1.53 1.47 1.45 1.43 1.44 1.46 1.52 1.60 1.69 1.76 1.78 1.77 — — 2.6 2.0
Density (g/cm3) 17.0 21.6 23.2 27.2 28.6 28.2 27.4 24.4 16.8 14.7 15.1 14.7 13.6 — — 4.6 7.2

So the point stands: while the 6d metals should be a bit more dense than the 5d ones, ideas of them being almost twice as dense seem to be dead in the water. Double sharp (talk) 08:20, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

@Double sharp: I updated the densities of Lr–Rg per your sources; Cn was already updated with an even more recent from 2019. A lot of other figures are likely to be outdated as well; in particular, I haven't updated the covalent radii yet to match the newer densities. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 01:12, 24 March 2021 (UTC)
@LaundryPizza03: Nice, thanks. ;) Double sharp (talk) 07:27, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

How we handle predictions

Unfortunately, now there are two similar but different predictions from about the same time, and there isn't an obvious reason to choose one over the other.

Perhaps we should relook at how we handle predictions and keep them in the article body instead of the infobox? It is starting to look kind of like the situation with the isotopes, e.g. {{Infobox ununennium isotopes}}. There's many different predictions and it seems WP:UNDUE to take a side. In an infobox we are more or less stuck with either taking a side (bad) or not saying anything at all (less bad); in article text we can have more nuances and say "so-and-so predicts this, so-and-so predicts that, blah blah". Double sharp (talk) 08:20, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

@ComplexRational, DePiep, Droog Andrey, LaundryPizza03, and YBG: Comments, please? Double sharp (talk) 14:54, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

Leave to text unless there is clear agreement in the theoretical community. For example, it is generally agreed that unbiunium will have the electron configuration [Og] 8s28p1 in its ground state, so we may include this in the infobox. Properties that are actively disputed, such as the band gap of copernicium, may be summarized as "predictions vary", as we already do for the electron configurations of elements 122+.
We should also establish some rules on how we discuss the properties of superheavy elements in text, particularly with the unduly specific and often indiscriminate details of their predicted chemistry — for example, our article on unbinilium discusses the molecular bonding of alkaline earth metals to gold, which is not mentioned anywhere else on the site. Many of these predictions are based on different, possibly outdated models, as with the aforementioned densities of the 6d elements, but it is usually helpful to outline the history of the main predictions. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 20:03, 18 March 2021 (UTC)
Yeah, I can agree with that. ;) As a start, maybe we should start by saying exactly whose prediction it is. Double sharp (talk) 02:24, 19 March 2021 (UTC)

Interesting 2019 presentation re superheavies

https://21colloqueganil.sciencesconf.org/data/pages/03_Gall_Benoit_Colloque_GANIL_2019.pdf

Seems projections till 2030 only go up to E122. But now this gives at least a source for the obvious reactions (Ti+Cm = Og, Ti+Bk = 119, Ti+Cf = 120, V+Cm = 119, V+Cf = 121, Cr+Cm = 120, Cr+Cf = 122).

Other ideas with transfer reactions are also there. Then some considerations of making beams of Ti, V, Cr, and U(!). Double sharp (talk) 09:51, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

New article on superheavies from Science

Link. Not a research paper, but cool and quotes the investigators. Main points:

  • It seems 114 should not be a magic number after all. Or at least it does not confer as much stability as one might think. But 120 might still be. I guess we should probably update flerovium, then.
  • This is not so surprising, because theoretical predictions indicates the neutron shell closure at 184 is more important here than the proton shell closure (wherever it is).
  • Search for 120 at Dubna is on hold until Cf target can be provided (not enough Cf yet).
  • 119 and 120 will basically need brute-force. Beyond GSI possibilities. But RIKEN and SHE-Factory should be able to do it.

The original Dubna 114 chain (with the very long-lived nuclides) was mentioned as never having been replicated, which is true. This said, Hofmann et al. have elsewhere suggested that it might be from EC of 290Fl (2n channel) to neutron-rich 290Nh. Hopefully SHE-Factory can shed some more light on this reaction.

Double sharp (talk) 08:27, 15 February 2021 (UTC)

@Double sharp: Indeed, many of the sources and models suggesting 114 as a magic number indicated that the N = 184 effect should be stronger/dominant in the region, with the longer half-lives lying on the beta-stability line for isotopes of 108–114. The paper on 284Fl stated that its short SF half-life was a consequence of the neutron shell effect greatly weakening by N = 170, which is consistent Oganessian's statement in this linked article and with the theoretically predicted decay modes in this region (both the JINR and KTUY models predict rapid α/SF the further one moves away from N = 184). As such, I am not surprised by these claims that there are no observed strong shell effects for Z = 114. Maybe an update is due there, but I would not think so for the island of stability article, where the emphasis is on the neutron shell closure and many different claims are mentioned? ComplexRational (talk) 14:13, 15 February 2021 (UTC)
In any case, I updated island of stability with some of this information: [9] ComplexRational (talk) 02:37, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

Taking into account recent udQM research, one could expect a continental shelf of transition nuclei instead of stability island, where nucleon shells are smeared out, and nucleons themselves become as virtual as mesons between them. That reminds gradual change from dispersion forces to metallic bonding in chemistry (cf. radon vs. mercury, or iodine vs. gallium). Clear deviation from A/Z = 2 + (A/555)2/3 trend after nobelium looks like a first warning. Droog Andrey (talk) 20:43, 24 February 2021 (UTC)

@Droog Andrey: Most intriguing. Reminds me of this study of Og. My apologies if I now ask two stupid questions. ;) Does that mean Z and A are going to start having to mean just the nuclear charge and approximate mass instead of actual counts? And does that mean we might actually be in this continental shelf already in the 6d and 7p elements we already have, and just not know it for sure yet? ;) Double sharp (talk) 08:04, 25 February 2021 (UTC)
@Double sharp: Who knows. I'd bet on heavier isotopes of 6d and 7p than we already have. For udQM, A would mean the number of quarks divided by 3. Droog Andrey (talk) 21:06, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

More news. Looks like this year, SHE Factory will focus on studying Fl, Mc, and Og some more. Eighth row elements will have to wait till 2022, unless RIKEN gets lucky with its 119 campaign. Double sharp (talk) 03:33, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

News in Russian. Double sharp (talk) 13:30, 26 March 2021 (UTC)

Some of Oganessian speaking: one, two. Both in Russian. Double sharp (talk) 13:36, 26 March 2021 (UTC)

Regarding what we do with new elements

I realise that this is something currently topic-banned Sandbh mentioned (over at de.wp where he is not topic-banned), but it seems to be a reasonable point, so I raise it myself instead.

He mentioned that we took the preliminary report above as good enough for changing group 3, but always waited for the final IUPAC approval for new elements, and that he found this strange. I have to admit that there is a good point here, although I draw an opposite conclusion since the consensus in favour of changing group 3 now was so clear. So instead of questioning that, I question if maybe we should be changing the names early for consistency.

(For reference: what happens when a new element is claimed to be discovered is that first the discoverers publish the discovery, and submit it to the IUPAC/IUPAP JWP as a claim. The JWP then analyses the claim and gives its conclusions. Then the discoverers are invited to propose the name. Then they do. Then after a comment period of a few months, IUPAC makes it official.)

The reasoning: we have never waited for the JWP to approve the discovery. We always considered the element discovered once it was in peer-reviewed journals. For example: moscovium (then ununpentium) was only approved by the JWP in 2015. Before that, in 2011 it was considered that the evidence was insufficient to approve it. That did not stop us from already treating it as having been discovered already before 2015. In fact we already had a GA on it back in 2014. Because: that's what pretty much everybody was doing. That's even what NIST was doing: in 2001, they added elements 114, 116, and 118 to the table, based on the Dubna and LBNL experiments. Of course, they then had to remove 118 the next year (that was the case of fakery by Victor Ninov), but that is not likely to happen again. And by 2010, the elements up to 118 were all there. Greenwood and Earnshaw already mention in 1997 that the discoveries of 110, 111, and 112 were generally accepted then already, even though in the case of 112 it took till 2009 for IUPAC to approve it.

But if we don't wait for IUPAC for the discoveries, and we're content with preliminary reports for the group 3 thing that IUPAC mentions as one of the things they're doing on their page, then it seems indeed a bit inconsistent to wait for the names to become official. Especially because by the time the names are released to the public, IUPAC has already reviewed and considered them and recommended them for acceptance.

So perhaps we should change what we do in these cases. Instead of move-protecting for months, when everyone already knows what the name will soon be already, perhaps we should just move the articles and add notes saying that the names and symbols are only proposed for now. Ever since the great Transfermium War debacle, the names have never changed anyway, and only once did the symbol change (copernicium, where Cp became Cn).

So I start some polling. Double sharp (talk) 15:15, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

@Double sharp: I question your method and route. Instead of explicitly making your own point here, your are using de dewiki route to advocate topic(s?) of a topic-banned editor. This, within hours after a dewiki editor wrote 1. bitte keine internen Streitigkeiten aus der englischsprachigen Wikipedia hierher tragen and more (by de:User:Orci [10] [11]). The dewiki thread also introduces similarities to problematische discussion setups we had here.
I think this touches the essence of the topic ban, and the editor involved is not helped (quite the opposite). I am not in to discuss by proxy. -DePiep (talk) 20:35, 18 March 2021 (UTC)
  • Bad introduction, bad question. Is says like "we changed Group 3 presentation on a whimp, but do not so wrt new element's new name". This is sloppy. The group 3 change is based on an RS analysis of the PT. We're not waiting for confirmation in this. OTOH, the naming process of a new element has a different route, I am happy to inform you.
It is unclear what the actual problem is. For starters: nothing actual at all: no new elment claim is existing, let alone a proposed name ("suggested" or "rumoured" name better here). This should kill this question already as irrelevant.
Then again: what is the problem? The period after a discovery is claimed but not verified (but hey mistakes not likely to happen again)? The period when IUPAC has invited discoverers to propose a name?, the period when the name is put up for scrutiny in the scientific world? And why refer to the transfermium wars (now this is a situation that quite likely will not happen again).
I'm sorry, irrelevant question. I will add such option to the list before !voting. -DePiep (talk) 20:53, 18 March 2021 (UTC)
@DePiep: Thanks for this argument. It certainly does convince me that the situation is different. Changed my !vote. ;) Double sharp (talk) 02:14, 19 March 2021 (UTC)

Polling yet again

When IUPAC announces the discoverers' choices of names and symbols, should we:

  • Option 1. Continue to wait for the formal approval by the IUPAC council, that occurs after the public review (current practice); or
  • Option 2. Update the name and symbol immediately?
  • Option 3. Question posed awkward, is not actual nor clear. Close discussion as "irrelevant". (Added late, see proposal-talk above -DePiep (talk) 20:57, 18 March 2021 (UTC))

@YBG, DePiep, Droog Andrey, ComplexRational, LaundryPizza03, and Unbinilium-322 Dibromide:

!Votes
...But the later-added option 3 really is best: can't make policy now about a rare future situation based on rare past situation without evidence that we actually know enough about the future to predict how it will all play out. WP:NOTBUREAU. DMacks (talk) 21:23, 18 March 2021 (UTC)
Let me add: (1) When IUPAC had published their name proposals, our infoboxes mentioned it as such [12]. (2) How would an earlier proposed name be RS-sourced? The discovering lab publishes a peer-reviewed paper that says "we will propose the name Xyz and we will use that name from now on throughout"? We could mention that in article (as a curiosity), but still should not acknowledge it as a name. -DePiep (talk) 14:13, 26 March 2021 (UTC)
I had in mind the IUPAC-published name proposals, because this is the first time the names are publicised. Double sharp (talk) 15:08, 26 March 2021 (UTC)
  • Option 1: Wikipedia is not a crystal ball. The name is not final until it is approved, just as we don't speculate on the title of an upcoming film until it is confirmed. (Instead, we use a placeholder like Untitled fourth Matrix film.) The Transfermium Wars and the last-minute change in the proposed symbol for copernicium (from Cp to Cn) strengthen this case. The difference is that the proposed placement had already been supported by RS and isn't necessarily a formal matter like naming a new element or an upcoming film. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 21:41, 18 March 2021 (UTC)
  • Option 1 or 2 --but-- definitely not 3. What helped us in the past was that we had a consensus on what to do before the even occurred. In a completely different arena I have seen the benefit of gaining consensus before the fact when things are less likely to be combative. I have been content with our existing practice - option 1 - but would be glad to opt for option 2 provided we agree on an appropriate trigger consistent with WP:COMMONNAME and WP:NAMECHANGES. YBG (talk) 05:46, 19 March 2021 (UTC)
    • @YBG: I'm convinced now by DePiep and LaundryPizza03 that it's fully consistent to carry on with our current approach (1). On the other hand I'm also convinced by you that it's worth having a standard practice before the situation arises. ;) Now, in any case; although I'm not keen on 2 anymore, if you'd asked me yesterday I would've proposed the trigger to be when the names and symbols are posted on the IUPAC website for public review. By this time they have already gone through IUPAC and are recommended for adoption, but they are not the formal name and symbol yet until the 5-month public review concludes. Since the transfermium war ended, the names have never changed in this period, but the symbol did once (copernicium; Cp became Cn). I leave it to you to decide if you think this is a convincing enough trigger. ;) Double sharp (talk) 06:21, 19 March 2021 (UTC)
      FYI, in context, I interpret option 1 to be rename at the end of the 5-month comment period and the most likely implementation of option 2 would be at the beginning of the 5-month period. Before that, WP:CRYSTAL would seem to apply; after the initial publication, it seems less likely. I think we could have coped very nicely (thank you) had we published Cp and then 5 months later revised it to Cn, provided of course we included the appropriate disclaimers like "proposed name". YBG (talk) 04:22, 20 March 2021 (UTC)
  • Option 1 is good as a general guideline for most cases, though right now I'm leaning more in favor of Double sharp's "original" trigger, namely once the name is posted on the IUPAC website and starts to make its way into common use among publishers. Option 2 can indeed be too soon in some cases, but to relate back to the film analogy, I would think that titles are confirmed and finalized (only rarely changed) before the release of the film, which would be akin to the official approval we have been using thus far. Once IUPAC confirms, it's no longer loose speculation, though I'm content to stick with current practice unless some controversy arises whenever a new element is discovered. ComplexRational (talk) 19:43, 19 March 2021 (UTC)

A historical note

So far, only nine elements got named after WP was founded, in five batches: Ds (2003), Rg (2004), Cn (2010), Fl and Lv (2012), Nh and Mc and Ts and Og (2016).

Mostly we waited for the final moment where it became official. See the discussions at Talk:Copernicium/Archive 1, Talk:Flerovium/Archive 1#Requested move, Talk:Tennessine/Archive 1#Requested move 10 June 2016. For Rg, it seems that the name was installed early and then reverted the next day as only the proposed name.

For Ds, we did do it early. Ds was renamed in March 2003 (the announcement was January), whereas the final approval happened on 16 August.

So, out of the nine cases: for eight we apparently waited, and only for the first one did we do it early.

I suppose there will be time to sort it out when it happens. Cross-sections for 119+ look awful, so maybe there is no point in legislating right now for something that will likely be a real rarity. Double sharp (talk) 12:54, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

Proposed closure

OK, it is blatantly obvious that what we have here is not a consensus for anything. Therefore, I suppose we can just treat it as DePiep suggested: "Close without conclusion. Come back when there is an actual case."

That is, we will not discuss this until (1) a new element gets synthesised, (2) IUPAC and IUPAP decide it meets the criteria of a discovery, (3) the discoverers propose the name, and (4) IUPAC releases the name for the 5-month public review. That should be a long way away. Double sharp (talk) 09:41, 26 March 2021 (UTC)

Eh, IMO we can put in mainspace, somehow, any RS about synthetisation (1st succes; confirmation: all fine. Even if a RS must be retracted in RL, we can follow without losing [our WP] face). Depends on RS-quality. However, naming issues that are lab-gossip can be ignored. Altogether: when occurs, rediscuss. -DePiep (talk) 21:06, 26 March 2021 (UTC)
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