Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Elements
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[edit] Version 0.5, assessing/tagging element articles on talk pages
As part of Version 0.5, we are planning on including all of the (known) chemical elements on our test CD version of Wikipedia. As part of this I will be tagging all of the element talk pages, but before I do this I want to get your opinion. You need to be aware both of the growing trend towards article assessment, which has been done on around 50,000 articles (using the system started WP:Chem!). You should also know about the automated lists generated by Mathbot, including both the Chemistry and the Version 0.5 lists. There are various options:
- Add in {{Chemistry}} and {{V0.5}} templates to the talk pages (this would be normal practice if I didn't ask!). This will ensure the article is included in both project lists.
- Add in {{V0.5}} only, if this project objects to the Chemistry template. The article will not appear in the Chemistry list.
- Write a new unified template, which links to Version 0.5, and both the Elements and Chemistry WikiProjects. The article would be included in both project lists. You can see an example of a combined template here, though I have something rather smaller in mind.
Please let me know your preferences, before I go and tag 115-odd article talk pages! Thanks, Walkerma 21:10, 23 August 2006 (UTC)
- It's about time these articles get some decent WikiProject Elements banners. If you can create a nice and simple combined template in the course of your work, that would be great. Femto 11:33, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
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- I'll try to put together a demo for you to look at. I meant to mention, I'd put this project at the top, the V0.5 would be tucked less prominently. Walkerma 15:36, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
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- Can you take a look at Talk:Samarium, and let me know what you think? This template directs to this project, it also adds the article into the chemistry bot listings and the Version 0.5 list too. Walkerma 02:33, 25 August 2006 (UTC)
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- The template is {{Chemical Element}}. Walkerma 02:38, 25 August 2006 (UTC)
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- Looks good, if you're happy with it I am too. Femto 13:27, 25 August 2006 (UTC)
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- I have glanced over all of the articles. I still need to go back and change some importance values for lesser elements from High to Mid (see talk at WP:Chemistry), but all known elements have been tagged and are included in Version 0.5. I wanted to mention two elements that seemed to stick out as needing attention (considering article quality/length vs importance) - bromine and osmium should receive the attention of this project next. In general (for most articles) the physics side of the articles is good but the chemistry side is weak, IMHO. Walkerma 03:53, 10 September 2006 (UTC)
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[edit] Infobox Consistency
Can I suggest that the WikiProject clean up whole lot of the infoboxes? I just noticed that the pages Lead, Mercury (element) and Cadmium all have different infobox colour schemes. — JeremyTalk 06:35, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
- The colour match the color of the element in the PSE on every element page!--Stone 09:39, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
- See Wikipedia:WikiProject Elements#Color standard for details on the colors used for chemical series. Femto 11:37, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Notable characteristics
I'm going to excise the word Notable from the headings because it's an inherently POV and subjective term. Notability is asserted for facts through their inclusion in wikipedia; specifying that something is worthy of note is a subjective judgment, however, and should not be part of the encyclopedia's voice. Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 22:23, 14 September 2006 (UTC)
- I don't much care either way so long as we are consistent. --mav 00:32, 15 September 2006 (UTC)
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- Ditto. I admit I like "selected" isotopes, and no preference on the "characteristics" heading. Femto 11:30, 15 September 2006 (UTC)
[edit] New GA
I don't know, but I thought you guys might be interested in knowing that one of the articles within the scope of your wikiproject, copper, is now a good article. - Blood red sandman 06:22, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Project directory
Hello. The WikiProject Council has recently updated the Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory. This new directory includes a variety of categories and subcategories which will, with luck, potentially draw new members to the projects who are interested in those specific subjects. Please review the directory and make any changes to the entries for your project that you see fit. There is also a directory of portals, at User:B2T2/Portal, listing all the existing portals. Feel free to add any of them to the portals or comments section of your entries in the directory. The three columns regarding assessment, peer review, and collaboration are included in the directory for both the use of the projects themselves and for that of others. Having such departments will allow a project to more quickly and easily identify its most important articles and its articles in greatest need of improvement. If you have not already done so, please consider whether your project would benefit from having departments which deal in these matters. It is my hope that all the changes to the directory can be finished by the first of next month. Please feel free to make any changes you see fit to the entries for your project before then. If you should have any questions regarding this matter, please do not hesitate to contact me. Thank you. B2T2 23:57, 25 October 2006 (UTC)
[edit] New infobox template
After noticing how many templates it took to create an infobox for an element, I created a unified template that can handle every element's infobox. It eliminates 60+ various templates and it uses some pretty neat code to remove the need to have to input things such as color1= or color2=. After a little more testing, it will be ready to be implemented. If you have any comments or suggestions or concerns, please let me know on my talk page or on the template talk page. Thanks. --MZMcBride 00:07, 8 November 2006 (UTC)
- Copied from my user talk. Femto 15:29, 29 November 2006 (UTC):
- When editing an element page, you're greeted with a lot of code that's unpleasant to look at and undoubtedly confusing to newcomers. I'm proposing that the element infobox be changed to something similar to what is currently used by planets. It would drastically reduce the amount of code and make the page much more user friendly. Each element would have something similar to {{Elementbox/1}} at the top of the page. On the actual infobox, there would be a box at the bottom that would say "Edit this template," most likely below the references section. The information provided in the infobox doesn't regularly change, so accessibility isn't a real issue. Also, the individual subpages of Template:Elementbox would still refer to Template:Elementbox, allowing the elimination of the innumerable templates currently in use, and also shortening the list of templates used on a particular element page. I'm strongly, strongly in favor of this proposal. I'd greatly appreciate any feedback you have on it. Thanks. --MZMcBride 22:30, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
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- You can dig through the archives and will find that my opinion is that wherever possible, content should remain directly editable from the page it's on. However I admit I'm less opposed to separated infobox pages now, and if it makes a more elegant code, it would be quite fine with me - provided that the Elementboxes will show more scrupulousness about the edit button than the Planetboxes (note that several don't have one). Femto 15:29, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Titanium
Titanium is up for a featured article review. Detailed concerns may be found here. Please leave your comments and help us address and maintain this article's featured quality. Sandy (Talk) 14:56, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Statistics
Could you provide statistics concerning your articles? --Meno25 02:13, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
- You mean those bot-gathered Version 1.0 Editorial Team assessment statistics? I for one have no idea how that process works, I'm afraid. Femto 13:07, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
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- All of the known elements are included in the bot-based assessments, but not separately - they are included in the chemistry listing - see Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Chemistry articles by quality. Walkerma 00:41, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Stablepedia
Beginning cross-post.
- See Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team#Stablepedia. If you wish to comment, please comment there. ★TWO YEARS OF MESSEDROCKER★ 03:41, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
End cross-post. Please do not comment more in this section.
[edit] Printing trouble
My kid is trying to print out Iron for a science-fair project. The printout looks terrible -- the table occupies almost all the page, leaving a six-letter-wide column on the left, into which the the first paragraph overruns (chemical, element being more than six letters, etc). The problem seems to be that the table for the vapor pressure is hogging all the space: there's a lot of white-space pad in the vapor-pressure cells, esp in the print version. Other elements aren't so bad, since they don't list that many vapor pressures.
The ideal fix would be to narrow the white-space pad. I'd do this myself, except I looked at the page markup and almost fainted; I don't know what to fix, and if I did I'd probably get reverted. The problem occurs for multiple browsers; firefox, msie (under windows), and konqueror. Help!? linas 05:40, 9 December 2006 (UTC)
- Just checking that we see the same thing, you're trying to print the output from the Printable version link, yes? It's not the vapor pressure table, far as I can see, that one just looks so bad because it gets expanded evenly. The culprit appears to be the inline reference link in iron's Crystal structure entry. Links get expanded into a long line of plain text in the printable version view. It was changed to a ref tag, how does it look? Femto 18:15, 9 December 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Wikipedia Day Awards
Hello, all. It was initially my hope to try to have this done as part of Esperanza's proposal for an appreciation week to end on Wikipedia Day, January 15. However, several people have once again proposed the entirety of Esperanza for deletion, so that might not work. It was the intention of the Appreciation Week proposal to set aside a given time when the various individuals who have made significant, valuable contributions to the encyclopedia would be recognized and honored. I believe that, with some effort, this could still be done. My proposal is to, with luck, try to organize the various WikiProjects and other entities of wikipedia to take part in a larger celebrartion of its contributors to take place in January, probably beginning January 15, 2007. I have created yet another new subpage for myself (a weakness of mine, I'm afraid) at User talk:Badbilltucker/Appreciation Week where I would greatly appreciate any indications from the members of this project as to whether and how they might be willing and/or able to assist in recognizing the contributions of our editors. Thank you for your attention. Badbilltucker 17:38, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Periodic table as the place where elements are defined, and where they "live"
Once upon a time in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (basically, up to 1914), the elements in a sense did "live" on the periodic table, since their atomic numbers, which defined them as elements, were basically the numbers of the order in which they were placed on the table. Sometimes these were even different from the ordering the atomic weights, which actually were the only measurable thing chemists had. (See the famous example of cobalt and nickel, numbers 27 and 28, where nickel's atomic weight is actually less than cobalt's). But then in 1914 Henry Moseley, by showing that atomic number was measurable directly, changed all that. It wasn't long before it was realized that elements are defined by objective atomic number, and that this is the number of fundamental positive and negative charges in them (The story of how this was worked out is more complex than you read in the folk-history of chemistry, and involves people most have never heard of like Antonius Van den Broek. I'm in the process of fixing this up history up, now, in the middle of work on the Moseley article.)
Now, the relevance here is that most of the chemical element wiki articles start out (or used to start out) with something like "Carbon is an element with atomic number 6 in the periodic table." This language harks back to the bad old days when elements lived on the periodic table and seemed to be defined by their place on it. Nothing is now farther than the truth. Elements are now defined by atomic number (number of protons) and all this has nothing to do with the periodic table. In fact, a number of different periodic tables have been proposed, some of them quite different from that of Mendeleev's. So, in short, I've been taking this kind of language out of the element articles, one by one. I don't mind if the LEAD section includes information on where the element is placed on Mendeleev's table, but that would be by column and row, and it's easier to show it than talk about it (they keep changing the names of these darn columns anyway, and who can keep up??). But saying than an element is number blah-blah on the periodic table is not helpful at all. I think the more correct view is that it's "atomic number blah-blah," period. Table or no table. Comments? SBHarris 19:36, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
- You are right, of course, that an element has an atomic number regardless of the periodic table. Perhaps it is true that the language harks to the old times, or perhaps it was just that someone thought it would be a really good idea to link to periodic table right at the beginning of the article and couldn't think of a better way to introduce it into the sentence (I've seen something like that many times on Wikipedia). Itub 15:36, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
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- Indeed, the phrasing dates waaay back to ye olden times when the element articles were wee little stubsies with only one sentence. You were glad to get a link to the periodic table! We had to carry those links on our backs, 20 miles through 6-foot snowdrifts, uphill both ways. And we liked it. And lived happily ever after. …Agreed, there are better ways of introducing an element, though personally I've little idea how the perfect opening sentences should look like. Femto 16:43, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
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- Perhaps a separate sentence? "Element (whatever) is a halogen/alkali metal/chalcogen/noble gas, etc., placed on column (whatever) of the periodic table along with similar elements which react chemically in a (short description) way." This works a lot of the time, and perhaps we can use it when it does. It breaks down a bit in the middle of the table and for heavier elements, where chemical similarities wander diagonally on the table, due to all those spin-orbit and relativistic effects on outer electron energy. I'm amazed that the classical Schrödinger repetative pattern show up grossly at all! But gosh, there it is. Anyway, in those cases, we can note that also, though it may have to come out of the LEAD and go into the overview. If there's no other reason to, is there any reason we SHOULD try to get the linked term periodic table into the text LEAD for ALL elements, given that there's a picture of it right there? Which is captioned with both linked terms periodic table and extended periodic table? SBHarris 18:47, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
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[edit] Infobox thin spaces
Do the thin spaces ( ) in the infobox introduced by User:Coolhandscot don't display properly for anyone else or is it just me? Femto 12:57, 20 January 2007 (UTC)
- For me at the moment (on IE6.0), they appear like standard spaces. Physchim62 (talk) 16:36, 20 January 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Uranium peer review and future FAC
Please help get uranium ready for FAC by editing the article and/or commenting on its peer review. Thanks! :) --mav 01:04, 19 February 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Chemical element is now the Core Topics Collaboration
Please help out on improving Chemical element, the current Wikipedia 1.0 Core Topics Collaboration. This Core Topics project has tried to identify the most important topics on Wikipedia, and improve these up to A-Class if possible. This particular article is now around the Start/B border, it should be a lot better for such an important topic. After all, which article could be more important for the elements project? Please help! Cheers, Walkerma 15:42, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
[edit] A new type of Periodic Table
Good. Now that I have your attention, allow me to introduce what some of you may have been waiting for. I have created the 
as reference for Wikipedia articles on the elements. It is color-coded by the quality of the article.
It's easy to edit and I will update it periodically (tee hee). —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Cryptic C62 (talk • contribs) 01:12, 20 March 2007 (UTC).
[edit] Element info boxes and atomic mass/atomic weight
I noticed in the chem info boxes the listing of the "atomic mass" rather than the "atomic weight". This at first appears to be a progressive move away from the now somewhat deprecated "atomic weight"; however atomic weight has been replaced by "relative atomic mass" not "atomic mass". Atomic mass means something different I am not even aware of widespread misuse of the term atomic mass in this manner, although I could imagine it given the shorter term being the less frequently intended. As long as there isn't a long and widespread precedent of misuse and confusion I strongly suggest that we stick to using the terms according to their IUPAC definitions.
Please see the following if you are unaware of the meanings of these terms:
- The IUPAC definition of "relative atomic mass (atomic weight)"
- The IUPAC definition of "atomic mass"
- An IUPAC article in Pure and Applied Chemistry detailing the the reason for this schism and the motivations for the definitions
To summarize: "Atomic weight" was replaced by "relative atomic mass" and "atomic mass" was reserved for individual atoms or nuclides (i.e. not isotopically weighted).
Just trying to make wikipedia more accurate. --Nick Y. 23:08, 21 March 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Wikiproject Elements Userbox proposal
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This user is a member of WikiProject Elements. |
What do people think? Abridged 14:52, 26 March 2007 (UTC)
- I like it, and not just because it uses my awesome periodic table. I shall use it immediately! --Cryptic C62 · Talk 15:56, 26 March 2007 (UTC)
- Looks nice.--Nick Y. 16:29, 27 March 2007 (UTC)
