Wikipedia:Featured list candidates/Discoveries of the chemical elements

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[edit] Discoveries of the chemical elements

A very good list with all dates cited. Feel free to leave comments. Tarret 14:28, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

• Oppose Off to a good start, but needs some work.
  • Title can probably be revised to "Chemical elements by date of discovery" (cf. "List of U.S. states by..." and so on.)
  • Lead needs better writing, and bolded topic.
  • Needs images
  • For the most part, the dates are pretty undisputed, so I don't think every entry needs a specific citation (except the most recent). You'll do fine with the general ones
    • If you keep them, delete the spaces in front of notes.
  • Seaborgium was only truly "discovered" once, even though both institutions reported it the same year, they did not do it at the same time. That should be noted.
  • Way, way overlinked. Multiple links to the same places have to go.
  • Some redlinks probably should go too (initialled searchers for the GSI, for example.)
  • The origins of uses of a few of the ancient elements by humans are roughly known fromarcheological data. That should be accounted for in notes.

Circeus 17:16, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

• Comment I agree with Circeus that this is a good example where the Element-Date-Person information does not need inline citations. The two references are compact enough for any reader to locate the info. In addition, trying to insert a new unsourced mythical element would be hard – compared to a dynamic list. However, your Notes should be better sourced. I agree that the Antiquity section is weak. The tables need to be formatted such that they are all equal width. You should include the element number for all of them. The chemicalelements.com site appears to be a personal web site of Yinon Bentor [1] and as such isn't reliable enough for WP. The About.com article isn't bad but is a tertiary source. I'm not sure what editorial control is in place, but the author of that article appears qualified. The individual element pages indicate their source. Ideally, your article should be based on secondary sources like those (see WP:RS). Colin°^Talk 22:54, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

• comment wouldn't it be more helpful to have a single table with sortable columns so the reader could sort by discovery date, atomic number or element name, as desired? Some of the tables currently do not even have a atomic number. Hmains 03:21, 15 March 2007 (UTC)
• Oppose Obviously a lot of work has gone into this, but it needs a lot more. The second reference link does not currently work. Both the first and second references are not peer reviewed or published by reputable presses, which should be the case for chemistry articles and lists (and is the case for the rest of the refs). For this topic I would use books such as Greenwood and Earnshaw's Chemistry of the Elements or even a CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics and not the chemistry.about.com site (which is ref 2, and says it is moderated by someone with an undergraduate chemistry minor). I agree about the sortable tables and think the blanket term "antiquity" for dates of elements is misleading - in most cases more interesting and specific dates are known. See the article on silver for example: it is mentioned in Genesis and archeologial evidence shows it being mined or at least separated from ores by 4000 BC. Finally, if a reference is used for almost every element, I don't think it needs to be shown on every element as an inline citation, just cite it early and note that it applies to all (or almost all) elements. Hope this helps, Ruhrfisch 18:55, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
• Comment — I would only support if the list is reorganized into one table and if there are more sources. – Zntrip 02:20, 23 March 2007 (UTC)
• Comment - I agree with all of the notes above, and have a few more:
  • Some elements have an unclear history of discovery. Oxygen, for example, can quite possibly be claimed to have been independantly discovered 4 times (by Priestly, Scheele, Sędziwój, and Lavoisier). A case can be made for each being the first "true" discoverer. The table makes a definitive statement about Preistly being it. Interestingly, the book "World on Fire" by Joe Jackson is an excellent book on the subject, and might make a worthwhile reference here.
  • Likewise, Davy may have discovered Aluminum instead of Oersted.
  • Likewise, Technetium may have been isolated prior to Perrier and Segre.
  • Several transuranium elements have contested first discoveries.
• To be sure, some of these disputed discoveries are controversial, but they are also well documented, and to ignore them in the list is to violate the "comprehensive" aspect of WP:WIAFL. --Jayron32|talk|contribs 21:08, 27 March 2007 (UTC)
• Comment: Like others have said, the most reliable references for this subject would be books about the elements (such as Greenwood), books about the history of chemistry (there are many, but one I have on my shelf is The Chemical Tree), or even better, books about the discovery of the chemical elements (again, there are several, but the only one I've read is Asimov's The Search for the Elements). Direct citations of the publications disclosing the discovery of "recent" (18th century and later) elements might be nice to have in addition to the book references, but not required. --Itub 10:06, 29 March 2007 (UTC)