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WikiProject Elements Talk

In my opinion I think when in the information table it says block then the block letter is given (s,d,f,p) it should not link to atomic orbitals i think it should link to the block information about that block eg s-block. Ok no information has been written yet. but thast my opininon - fonzy

Perhaps. The reason why I only linked the to the main article is becuase I did not forsee that any additional level of detail would be needed on this topic. I also did not make edit links to anything which I could not myself write on and the only knowledge I have of atomic orbitals is general at best -- the result would be several micro-articles on each of the blocks. I felt it would be far more usefult to include navigation aids in the form of group 1 element etc. However, since you seem to be interested in this topic, perhaps you can write some articles on each of the blocks. Then I will change the template and the already converted articles myself. Welcome to the WikiProject BTW. :-) --mav

- I'm only 16 but hey i'll give it ago. - fonzy

- I have done abit on s-block not much at the moment there. I'll do a tiny bit to p-block,f-block,d-block and g-block too.

I like the color scheme for the periodic table. However, I would make the background white for noble gases. White may better signify a nonreactive nature for some people. David 11:24 Aug 16, 2002 (PDT)

That may be true. However it was decided to leave white for elements that are not known to exist yet are between elements that are known to exist. Having the nobles white would also leave that part of the table drab and boring. Light blue is a rather soft and unreactive color for me. --mav

I think using white for unknown or unverified elements is excellent. However, I must respectfully disagree about the use of light blue. It has no chemical behavioral relationship to any of the noble gases, not even when they are excited to plasma state. I suggest the use of a very light gray, indicating a nonreactive nature by its neutrality. David 14:14 Aug 17, 2002 (PDT)

Silver is already being used for the true metals and light grey is a bit too similar to silver for my taste. But I won't be getting to the nobles for a while though so there still is much time to think of something better than blue if need be. --mav

 i think its fine if red is reactive acid etc blue is the opposite :-s- fonzy

Why not have a row of what the elements are called in different langauges (like webelements.com)then possibly you coudl link to the othwer wikipeidias article from that. -fonzy

WHy is it important to have a list of alternate names here and not in any other article? This is the English Wikipedia so there is no need for this. I already plan on linking every language via inter-language links. --mav

..because of intrest. -fonzy

I took fonzy's Lithium nav bar and placed it into the table. I have also created an orientation map for Lithium that has relative atomic size and a Lewis structure. More navigation bars may be needed. For example, it would be neat to have a verticle nav bar for navigating groups and another horizontal nav bar for navigating periods. However, having two horizontal nav bars may be messy and confusing. So if we only have one of each, then I say it is far more important to be able to easily navigate periods instead of atomic numbers. What does everybody else think who is interested? Also, for the nav bars, should we use element symbols or names? I kinda prefer symbols for the vertical bar and names for the horizontal one(s), but I would like to see how both looked first. --mav

Nice! Does anyone know offhand whether Wikipedia supports client-side image maps? It'd be cool if I could set it up so that clicking on an element's square on the table image brought the user to that element. I suspect not, though, considering Wikipedia's "proprietary" image tags. I'll play around a bit tomorrow when I've got more time. As for the nav bar question, how about something like:

	1 Hydrogen
2 Helium -	3 Lithium -	4 Beryllium
	11 Sodium

I haven't been following the element table discussion lately, so I apologize if that has already been suggested. Also, I have no idea what's more "important" to have navbars for; it's been quite a while since I took an inorganic chemistry course. :) Bryan 06:21 Sep 29, 2002 (UTC)

Coolness! Thanks for the input and the gift of the table. I'm not certain that image maps are out of the question because Brion mentioned the off-hand possibility of doing that for the county locator maps (but then said that such a thing would be madness). We will see if it is possible after he chims in. However since the mass majority of images here are clickable to description pages I'm not sure if users familiar with our weird image behavior will even bother clicking on the images. And other users who are not yet familiar may get confused with the different image behaviors.

Since the perio table is organized based on periods and groups, our nav bars (and/or box) should at least have periods and groups in them. I will experiment with your box idea in my sandbox. The cool thing about doing this, is that when you go down a group you will see atomic size increase as additional shells are added with each passing period. And when you go across a period you will see additional electrons added to the element's shell diagram. However, in order to make the effect magic, I'll have to make the table come before the intro/definition paragraph. That way the image stays in place, exactly the same while the Lewis dot structure, shell diagram and locator square moves. Cool eh?

About an hour ago I got the idea of having atomic numbers in the locator map (perhaps have the font bolded for the showcased element). If the numbers filled 75-80% of each element square, would the print be too small to be useful for the majority of people (there will also be a larger version of each image to help those with visual impairments)? --mav

Hm... I think I prefer the image as it is right now, without so much clutter; putting numbers in each of those little squares is going to make it look really messy. But perhaps to draw a little more attention to the cell that belongs to the current element, you could put the atomic number in that one in particular? It takes a moment for my eye to find the thin black square that currently marks it, I think that moment would be reduced significantly if there was a black "something" in the center of the square too. Bryan 06:58 Sep 29, 2002 (UTC)

I agree and will make the necessary changes. --mav

Oh, and while I'm thinking of it, how big will the largest electron orbital diagram be in those images? The one for Lithium looks a little small, but that might be okay if other elements will have much larger ones to scale and you need to keep this one small so they'll all fit. Bryan 07:00 Sep 29, 2002 (UTC)

The largest will be from period 7 and will have 7 shells. I will make a mock-up of such a shell diagram to see if the current shell spacing can't be widened and the lines and dots made larger. --mav

You might want to see if making the atomic symbol larger looks good, too. It looks to me like there's enough space around the Li to expand it a bit, making it draw the eye more as well. Bryan 07:24 Sep 29, 2002 (UTC)

I'll try that. Although I was leaving the extra room for other possible periodic items. Do you have any ideas? I already plan on having small photos of each element in the "Appearance" part of the table and crystal structure in that part of the table. Hm, now that I look at it, I think the number idea for the showcased element won't work. Even at 800x600 I had to squint to see what number it was (it would be necessary to have the numbers at this font size so that three digit atomic numbers could fit in the boxes). Maybe a thicker black box would do the trick? --mav

Might work. Alternately, you could pick some completely different garish color to fill that particular square with to "highlight" it; the original color is present on every title bar in the table, so I wouldn't worry too much about losing information that way. Bryan

Bryan, do you know how to make a vertical table? What I had in mind originally was to have a simple nav bar for navigating up and down groups to the left of the image. I tried playing with the diamond table above but I found it not to be as intuitive as my above idea. --mav

Vertical as in with the lines rotated 90°, so that you have to tilt your head to read them? I wish I knew how to do that, it'd be handy in so many places! :) Unfortunately, I don't. There may be some obscure trick that can be played with stylesheets to accomplish it, or it may not be possible with existing markup. I'll look around for something like that in the morning, but I'm doubtful; I've looked for something like this before without success. Bryan

Ah. I thought you meant vertical as in "one cell over more than one row", which you do using the rowspan property in the <td> element, eg:

These cells	But this one is three rows high.
Are only
one row high

But if you do mean with text rotated 90 degrees, then, well, good luck to you! Anyway, hope this helps. Looking around, I might get involved in this Wikiproject. (I hope I didn't break anything when I refactored all those shell/orbital/etc. articles into electron configuration.) --Bth

This should help a good deal. Thanks! No, you didn't break anything by refactoring electron configuration. --mav

Of course, you could do something a bit like this ...

G r o u p 1	Hydrogen
	Lithium
	Sodium
	Potassium
	Rubidium
	Caesium
	Francium

... but that's a kludge behind the scenes and ugly in front of them. --Bth

Yeah that is a bit ugly but elements of the table may be useful. --mav

I like what has been doen to lithium. - fonzy but what i suggest where it goes helium - lithium - berylium is this:

2:hydrogen

3:lithium

4:berylium[?]

- fonzy

-- I will try that and see if it works (it might be too lound visually). I will play with this tomorrow (feel free to experiment before then, but please do so in your own sandbox - user:fonzy/sandbox since we are tinkering with the live Lithium article). --mav

On second thought this would be a bit much - the colors are already indicated by the locator map. I will still experiment in my sandbox tomorrow to make sure. --mav

On that new layout i think you shoudl still include Helium.--fonzy

I disagree. The horizontal nav rows are for periods and the vertical columns are for groups. Helium is not in the same period as lithium. --mav

OK folks, I hacked together what I think is close to the best solution. If somebody knows how to get the text in the column to center right then I will be a very happy person and most grateful. :) --mav

I added an "align="center"" to the vertical text cell, is that the effect you were after? Also, I did a lot of hunting around to see if I could find a way to achieve this effect with CSS, and all I found was some microsoft-specific thing which didn't even work in IE5, a javascript snippet which didn't work anywhere I tested it either, and some mention on the w3c webpage that they'd be looking at ways to support vertical text soon. So I think this is the best you're going to get for now. :) Bryan 19:57 Sep 29, 2002 (UTC)

I think Jeronimo did this with the list of countries by population so I will look into it. Yep, he used valign="center" which I'm already using but since the vertical column is not centering the way I want I added a couple <br> to it. --mav

Maybe it would be nice to give the table a different heading than "properties", like we do with the country template, for example. Probably having "Oxygen (O)" or something similar would be best. These can then be removed from the first table block, of course. Jeronimo 10:39 Sep 29, 2002 (UTC)

I think I've already done this with the period nav bar at Lithium. There the word "Lithium" is bolded. --mav

Can someone check over what I've done at Carbon/Temp? Also, is there a better source online for hazards (I've currently used the "health hazards" link at webelements)? --Bth

I just did and it looks good. I did take the liberty of making some changes and added additional detail (check out the history to see what I did). I did have to rewrite the precaution text because that text is covered by a proprietary license. I also added LANL text that I rewrote. The UC Regents claims copyright on many texts produced by LANL and the LANL text may be covered by a less strict, but still proprietary license even though the money used to pay the person who wrote the LANL text came from the federal government. So I call this text quasi-public domain and lightly rewrite and reorganize it (just so it passes the Google test). I have done this for each of the converted elements so far. Also, for the nonmetals I wanted to have a "Biological Role" heading but that info is dispersed throughout the article. If you don't get to it before me I would like to make such a heading (then it would be possible to talk about Si in relation to carbon and why Si is an inferior basis for life (which would be a brief lead-in to the carbon chauvinism article.)--mav

When I clicked on the "larger image" link below the locator map, I fully expected to get to the periodic table, so that I could click on other elements. (In fact, the first thing I tried was to click on the little boxes in the locator map itself...). The larger, non-clickable image of the locator map itself doesn't help, since it still doesn't contain the names of the elements. I would link "larger image" directly to periodic table. AxelBoldt 16:27 Sep 29, 2002 (UTC)

Hm. I could accomplish this by copying the current perio table at Periodic table into another page. However, what should I name the link? "Larger image" doesn't work since the other page will have an HTML table in it and not an image. "Periodic table" doesn't work either because the page it links to would not be the article on the periodic table but will be just the table itself. --mav

Pretty cool! I do agree with Axel; I expected a link to Periodic table (or perhaps one of the several alternate tables which don't have a boring article prepended to them); I'm not sure what purpose the "larger image" serves. (Actually, as a user I'd expect clicking on the image itself to get me the full table; at the least the image page should link to it.) I've tweaked it in accordance with my thoughts, feel free to tweak it differently.

Also, the image itself feels a little on the big side; but the table's already that wide, so I can't rightly complain. --Brion 00:25 Sep 30, 2002 (UTC)

Thanks! I like your changes and can't think of a way to improve them (except maybe swap the periodic table link with one that went to a page that only had the table and no article). The image is perhaps a bit on the large size, esp since the colored squares don't contain any info. My original plan was to have a much less wide image of the perio table right next to an image of the elements shell structure but then I noticed the large valley inbetween the s and p blocks so I decided to fill it. I will experiment with my original idea later. If I do do this, this will free up yet more space. Is there anything else that might be cool to include in the image?

How about image maps? Are they possible with images uploaded to Wikipedia? I don't know how to make them but Bryan seems interested in making a template for me. --mav

The great thing about making an image map for this periodic table is that I'd only have to do it once, and then it could be copied verbatim along with the image. :) Bryan

Perhaps a crude test is in order? Just to make sure it works here in the wiki maybe you could code a very simple single link somewhere on an image and then upload it? --mav

I just did, over in User:Bryan Derksen/Sandbox[?]. It evidently didn't work as well as I'd hoped. :) Bryan 03:35 Sep 30, 2002 (UTC)

No, at present there's no way to do image maps. It might be nice to do, though; bring it up on Wikipedia-L and we'll hash it out. --Brion 03:46 Sep 30, 2002 (UTC)

I just sent a message to the mailing list. --mav

Copied from Talk:Carbon/Temp so we can keep everything in one place

Sorry to do this here rather than at Wikipedia Talk:WikiProject Elements, but that page seems to have got too long for my browser to allow me to edit. Anyway, sorry about the licensed material from webelements, I was in a cut and paste frenzy after folding in the existing Carbon stuff and temporarily forgot about such issues. Also, I see you (mav) have added the 5th and 6th ionisation energies. I decided not to do this by comparison with both Beryllium and Potassium, which only list the ionisation energies to the first full shell. It's OK for Carbon, but it would be daft to list all 82 at Lead, say. We probably need a consistent policy on this. --Bth

I guess it is time for me to make a talk archive over that the WikiProject Elements talk page. No biggie at all about the licenced material -- it needed to be rewritten anyway for clairity. This didn't take me much time at all. Hm I had no idea Lead had so many ionization energies, WebElements only lists 5 so that is the number I put into the table. However, with the earlier elements that I did I only included the first 3 or 4 ionization energies regardless of the number the WebElements listed. I still need to go back and fill in the others. Speaking of which, WebElements may be showing aritrary numbers of ionization energies so what I've been doing may not be the best solution. What do you suggest? Is there a natural breaking point that we can use? --mav 18:59 Sep 30, 2002 (UTC)

Response

Well, the nth ionisation energy is defined as the energy required to remove the nth electron, so there's as many ionisation energies as electrons. You do have a fairly natural breaking point, though -- when you've removed all the outer shell electrons to get to the full shell underneath the subsequent ionisation energies are fairly similar to those of the noble gas with that electron configuration. So, I would say list four for Carbon, three for Aluminium, seven for iodine, etc., etc. I don't know whether this is WebElements' scheme. Given that they gave all six for carbon I suspect not. --Bth

Great idea! Being a biologist, I was a bit vague on what ionization potentials really were. --mav

ABout the navigation Image. RE: Colour of lettering.

The Li is black which i agree on, i agree on all elmentts that are solid at room temprature. But if you did a gas (at room temprature) change thc olouring to green. If its a liquid Boue. also is the element has been artifically made maybe a red outline round the lettering. - fonzy

I like the idea and I will keep it in mind. --mav

Let me see if I'm figuring this out...(sorry if this is more Wike-Elemental mechanics than metadiscussion of the element layout itself)... To convert an element to the new template form I create a link on the WikiProject Elements page (as an example, for Iron I'd create a link called Iron/Temp) and then paste the raw template into the Iron/Temp text box. Next, I'd add info as needed.. once finished, Iron/Temp would be deleted (somehow) and the text in it moved to Iron. Is that the normal sequence of events in working on the elements? Dwmyers

You could do it that way - there's no reason not to. But what I do is first create a header like the one currently at Selenium that asks people who are visiting the page to edit the temp version at Selenium/Temp. I then create the template page from the link on the main article's page. After that I activate the links on the template page and integrate any info that is in the main article. At that point I follow the data acquisition guide to fill in the table and then fill-in the text headers with public domain text from the USGS mineral database and with rewritten text from LANL. The last thing I do is create a intro/definition paragraph by using public domain dictionary definitions from dict.org. I use the conversion log just to keep track of what has been and what is being converted. Deletion of the Temp page isn't mandatory -- it's just something I do to temp pages where the only person who edited it was me. Therefore I'm not erasing anybody's contributions by nuking the page when I'm done with it. Pages that are significantly worked on by two or people can just as easily be redirected to the main article when the convertion is done. Welcome to the WikiProject BTW. --mav

Could we start implememnting thae navigation to otehr elements? - fonzy

I'm still waiting to see if we can use image maps. --mav

Ooooo - ok. But wnt that take a while to implement int wikipeia? - fonzy

I'm not sure. It's fine with me if it does since I hadn't planned on implementing the nav bars and locator maps until after all the elements were done. The only reason why I whiped-up a prototype at lithium was in response to your addition of a nav bar. But the nav bars at lithium will not work without images and I don't want to have to redo each image when/if we can use image maps. --mav

The people doing density conversion of gases have been off by a factor of 1000. Gas densities are expressed in different units from solids in our reference sources...

solids = g/cc or grams per cubic centimeter
gases = g/L or grams per liter or grams / (1000 cc)

Our charts express densities in kg/m³ or kilograms per cubic meter.

1000g = 1 kg, therefore 1g = 10^-3kg
1 liter = 1000 (10^-2m)³ = 1000 * 10^-6m³ = 10^-3m³

Therefore 1g/L = 10^-3kg/10^-3m³ = 1 kg/cubic meter.

You can check and see easily if g/L values of gas density are reasonable. Take the gas density. Multiply it by 22.4, to get exactly one mole of gas at STP. See if the weight is a common multiple of the atomic weight(either the weight proper or twice the weight). If so, the density is reasonable. David M

Oh my! That has been me. I will fix my mistakes this weekend - feel free to beat me to it if you have time. --mav

done -- Dave M

Thank you! I will be more careful in the future. --mav

Just as a suggestion, is there space to put isotopic spin in with the isotope information? Perhaps to a radiochemist, the decay patterns, etc, are important, but to someone doing magnetic circular dichroism, or electron spin resonance or nuclear magnetic resonance, the spin state of an isotope is something you want to know, because they affect the spectra you observe. I'll note that environmentalchem has that info, its just a question of finding space for it.dwmyers

Hm. That is one of the things I seriously considered putting in the table before but I and several others settled on what is in the table now for width and clutter concerns. A nuclear physicist gave the table the go-ahead back in March but I'm always willing to improve the template (and spin is a neat piece of info). I will think about if/where to place that info but since the table is already way two fat for my taste it will probably be difficult to include this additional info without giving up something else. We could have everything done by symbols in the iso nested table. I guess that decay mode can be α, β or ε instead of alpha, beta and epsilon but then about half the browsers on the planet display a ? or a box.

BTW, it has been some time since the template has had a fresh set of critical eyes look at it. If you (or anybody else reading this for that matter) have a few moments maybe you can read my "Ready for comments" call at the top of the talk archive and then look at the template to make sure it is organized logically, does not have unneeded data fields, and is not missing important data fields. At this point it wouldn't be possible to enact anything more drastic than a few data field adds and rearrangements but most the 20+ elements already done need to be updated to reflect recent changes I made to the template which prepares it for the future phase two locator maps and nav bars (the image and the nav bars will be in their own nested table that can be dropped-in the the converted tables at any time). I was planning to do the conversions next weekend or the weekend after. If you have any ideas on further improvements we could discuss these with the other project members before I do the conversions. --mav

Do we have a standard resource for the magnetism of an element? It is not listed in the "Where to get info" collection on the Project page. David M

I wish we did since that is an important piece of info. There was at one time a very good perio table of magnetism on the net but it disappeared shortly after this WikiProject was started. That was going to be the resource. --mav

Actually there is; http://bmrl.med.uiuc.edu:8080/MRITable/MRItable which might help. --mav

I assumed that what we were after is the simple statement diamagnetic, paramagnetic, and ferromagnetic? David M

I was hopping you or somebody else would be able to extract that info from the technical details. It's all Greek to me. --mav 19:00 Oct 8, 2002 (UTC)

Try this URL. The important term we need is magnetic permeability. >> 1 is ferromagnetic. > 1 is paramagnetic. < 1 is diamagnetic. http://newt.phys.unsw.edu.au/~epe/1259.L6/1259.L6.small Dwmyers 21:28 Feb 19, 2003 (UTC)

Here we go: magnetic susceptibility = relative magnetic permeability - 1. So.. susceptibility >> 0 = ferromagnetic. Susceptibility a little greater than 0 = paramagnetic. Susceptibility that is less than 0 = diamagnetic. That's the key. So we can decode your url now. Dwmyers 21:56 Feb 19, 2003 (UTC)

This was the key url to figuring all that out. Excellent discussion of all the magnetic parameters: http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Workshop/advice/coils/mu/#mu

Very cool. Having magnetic properties will be most useful. Now if only I could figure out how to include spin in the table... --mav 22:34 Feb 19, 2003 (UTC)

We have more problems though. The chart has magnetic susceptibilities of elemental compounds, not the element. Prime example is oxygen, which gives the susceptibility of water. Water is diamagnetic, oxygen is paramagnetic. Also, different allotropes of elements may have different magnetic properties, if what I am reading is correct. For example http://pearl1.lanl.gov/periodic/elements/25 Ugh. Dwmyers 15:26 Feb 20, 2003 (UTC)

Another possible approach. I was trying to slug through a url on crystal field theory ( http://chemed.chem.purdue.edu/genchem/topicreview/bp/ch12/crystal ) when I saw this quote: "Compounds in which all of the electrons are paired are diamagnetic - they are repelled by both poles of a magnet. Compounds that contain one or more unpaired electrons are paramagnetic - they are attracted to the poles of a magnet." This leads to the possibility of predicting magnetism of many elements just from the orbitals of the stable elemental form at STP. Dwmyers 15:36 Feb 20, 2003 (UTC)\

Interesting. I'll have to look into that this weekend. --mav 20:47 Feb 20, 2003 (UTC)

i just found that oen and was about to give you the URL :-S -fonzy

The following has been moved from Talk:Carbon/Temp

Why not have a seperate page for them? (The ones with lots of them). - fonzy

eg.: Iron_Ionization_Protential[?]

PS- i do think they shuld all be listed, not on the main table of course as that would be silly. - fonzy

That might be an interesting thing to do, however I don't know of a source for all the ionization energies - WebElements at most lists 12 or so even when theoretically you can have ionization energies for each and every electron that an element has. I would, in fact, be surprised if anybody has ever even bothered doing this for even most elements - let alone all. I would file this away as an interesting idea with minimal utility that would take a lot of work to even partially do. It would be more interesting to have [Isotopes of X] which would have a detailed and complete table of isotopes of an element and their properties. This would be similar to EnvironmentalChemistry's isotope tables. See [1] (http://environmentalchemistry.com/yogi/periodic/Mo-pg2) --mav

I've noticed that in many of the new element articles, radicals or functional groups are linked to instead of entire compounds, e.g. "boron nitride[?]" instead of "boron nitride". I find this rather annoying, since in a few cases the compound article exists. Even where it doesn't, this practice tends to obscure newly-written compound articles. I'm happy to change the whole lot, but since the practice is so widespread, I thought I'd better ask here first. Same goes for indirect references, e.g. "its hydroxide is used for..." instead of "its hydroxide is used for..." Of course, if the compound article isn't written for 10 years, the link is pretty useless, but people can always type in "hydroxide" into the search box. What do you think? -- Tim Starling

Yes, please do link directly to the compound articles and continue to work on creating the individual entries. I haven't been making direct links because I didn't think anybody would be making very many individual compound articles for a very long time. But since you are doing so I will change my future linking behavior and won't mind at all if you go through all the WikiProject Element articles to link the specific compounds. Also, even though I really don't care for stubs, I've been creating them in order to fill red links in new WP Element articles. I've been primarily doing this for minerals but I could also do this for compounds. The mineral stubs are easily created by using text from http://dict.org. Is there a similar source for creating quick and dirty compound articles? Also, what is the criteria for adding compounds to the compound list I think I remember you working on? Cheers! --mav

Firstly I haven't exactly been creating huge numbers of compound articles - on List of compounds there's one of mine and 64 from other people. The criteria for entry on the list has been:

no minerals
no proteins
no classes, mixtures or polymers

I don't know where we can get plain-english descriptions of compounds, but the NIST Chemistry WebBook (http://webbook.nist.gov/chemistry/) has the basic data, like appearance, safety, m.p., formula weight, etc. If we're going to get serious about this, it might be worth making a new WikiProject. Tim Starling

Update: see User:Tim Starling/Inorganic compound project -- Tim

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