Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2013-10-23

Elements of the world

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My Chemical Romance

• WikiProject Algae
• WikiProject Astronomy
• WikiProject Biophysics
• WikiProject Chemicals
• WikiProject Chemistry
• WikiProject Elements (first interview)
• WikiProject Fungi
• WikiProject Lepidoptera
• WikiProject Medicine
• WikiProject Palaeontology
• WikiProject Physics

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This week, we headed to an elementary subject with WikiProject Elements. Founded by Mav in 2002, this project has grown to have 19 featured articles, 2 featured topics, and 68 good articles. The project also has a list of templates, and a periodic table of elements filled with pictures. This week, we interviewed King jakob c 2, Double Sharp, Sandbh, Jacob S-589, DePiep, and StringTheory11.

What motivated you to join WikiProject Elements? Do you have a professional background relating to elements? Have you contributed to any of the project's good or featured articles?

King jakob c 2: I've been interested in elements for years, but I'm don't have a professional background relating to elements. Back in January, I started working on expanding Chalcogen to a Good Article (It looked like this before the expansion). I got lots of help from the Wikiproject on the way, and I was interested in working on some more periodic table group articles, so I decided to join. As I said above, I did most of the work in getting Chalcogen from start-class to good article. I also reviewed the good article nomination for Thulium.

Double sharp: Interest in chemistry, mostly. I haven't got any FAs yet, though I plan to, but here are my GAs: carbon (just a bit of work, mostly citations), alkali metal, meitnerium, roentgenium, darmstadtium, ununtrium, ytterbium (some of it), hassium, thulium (just a bit of work, mostly citations).

Sandbh: I joined so as to benefit from the advantages of working in a project team, including getting to know some of the more senior project members better, whose previous contributions I'd been regularly encountering. I have a professional background but not in the elements. When I was younger I thought I'd be an architect (family influence); then a metallurgist (because I thought the name sounded cool); and then a chemist (out of intrinsic interest; I think I was the only person, apart from my teachers, who read the Journal of Chemical Education in high school). However, life didn't turn out that way. If you have a professional background—good. If you don't—good. Some of the best ideas in science have come from people who've been regarded as 'amateurs'. I don't keep that much track of the grade status of the articles I've worked on.

Jacob S-589: I was interested in the elements for around four years before I joined; I really joined so that I could try to improve things and fix typos... the little stuff, but the big stuff too.

DePiep: My route to the elements: I have an academic technical background, but not in physics or chemistry. I had build many templates with CSS and {{#if:}} code elsewhere. Then I discovered the multitude of periodic table (PT) templates, graphs & infoboxes that could use a cleanup (April 2012). We standardized colors and legends and layout and such. I learned that scientists (who are working on content text) have a tendency to organize the project like a private laboratory: "Don't worry, I know where the stuff is". I'd say that is nice if not cute. Once I got that I could talk more effective, forgetting that every academic works and thinks like I do. I avoided stepping into scientific knowledge stuff and started working to just show the pages better (some people even ask me for things now). I discuss color effects, the visual strength of column structure, layout standardization. We at enwiki now have the element names in the basic PT (from), lots of readers will like that. It is now atop on my userpage, first thing I see when the wikisun rises (wikiwakeup). Still I have not written a single FA/GA page because templates & graphics are not part of the judgement... but my edits are on each and every FA/GA page ;-). My greatest wiki experience was one day last August. On a Saturday morning I woke up to see that a content consensus decision was made in the project, after a 15 months long talk. That day I could edit some 500 article pages in content space (mostly through templates; edits were sitting prepared in a sandbox). The power to edit every periodic table page in a #1 encyclopedia. Felt being Mendeelev, took a holyday.

StringTheory11: I'm quite interested in the physical sciences, so I guess I joined due to this. I remember that one day, I stumbled across this project through some link, and eventually after improving a few articles I decided to join. I have been a primary author in bringing alkali metal and ytterbium to GA status (DS is now attempting to bring alkali metal to FA, as far as I'm aware), and was the primary author in bringing periodic table to featured article status. However, once something's at FAC, we all pitch in and help, which helps build a collaborative atmosphere. I do not have any sort of professional background in chemistry.

Do you actively try to make the pages in the Periodic Table by Quality better?

Double sharp: If you mean "do I improve the articles", yes. Mostly, though, this is on the elements I happen to know a lot about (main group, actinides, or transactinides).

Sandbh: No, not actively. I tend to work on or contribute to the categorisation-related articles, like metalloids, dividing line between metals and nonmetals, nonmetals, and periodic table.

Jacob S-589: When I first joined, I focused on some low-quality articles, but I really work on more of everything now.

DePiep: As told above, I do not edit articles but I do improve templates & graphs. I think I make them better yes. And by template, all of them at once. Mostly after talking, but I have an, eh authority, to edit minor things on my own with good reason.

StringTheory11: I used to be more active in this department, but reduced free time lately has prevented me from doing so (not to mention that I've also been working on articles outside of WP:ELEM lately). As I mentioned in the last question, I have two GAs and one FA here, and I've also worked to update the table itself when people forget to update it after changing quality. I've also brought a few other articles from lower classes up to B-class.

One of your eventual goals is to make all of the articles in your Wikiproject a Good Article. So far, you have done an amazing 57%. When do you expect for this goal to be completed?

Double sharp: Wow, so many. That's awesome. (But that's just the articles on the PTQ, which doesn't include some of the more obscure subarticles like compounds of zinc, history of fluorine, etc.) Some of our project members did analyses on this in the last days of 2011, a year when GA production was at a yet unsurpassed high. Naturally, TCO's prediction was thus optimistic and predicted that this goal would be complete in 2014. But now, from 2012, we've been focusing a lot on the overhaul of our periodic table and how we classify elements in it – witness our gigantic fifteenth talk page archive (warning: almost 400 kB), and that has naturally taken time away from most of our content authors. I doubt this will happen exactly as he thought then. We still have a long way to go for this, and many of the non-GAs are seriously important elements. Really. It's kind of a problem with WP as it is now, that the benefits of writing highly-viewed articles to readers are not appropriately reflected in what is worked on – presumably because they are too scary for one to consider writing them without a collaboration. (I've been trying to get some sort of collaboration up for an iron FA, because it's way too scary and important for me to feel like covering all the aspects, especially after writing alkali metal; if any Signpost readers are interested, feel free to suggest working with me...) But for the most important articles, I feel the goal should not be GA, but FA. GAs tend to stagnate where they are. How often have you seen a user work a GA he did not write to FA? (It doesn't happen all that often, does it? You can help buck this trend by doing that, preferably on one of our articles... :-P) As a result you have articles like tungsten, copper, lead and carbon which are worthy of being worked to FA, but have been stagnating at GA for a considerable amount of time. And when I work on something, I tend to not do everything at an equal rate, instead focusing in-depth into each area in turn and writing a lot of content about it. It's basically aiming for A as a stop on the road to FA, rather than having GA take that role. Now A doesn't have a formal process for review here (it used to, but it was barely used), and its definition tends to be simplified into "ready for FA", so it is generally not as respected for "accolades". (You can help change that.) B+ also tends to get hurt in redefinition to "ready for GA". I generally expect that we will most probably be able to get everything to GA as soon as we set our minds on to it – and so I'm not going to give you a date, because it depends a lot on how much time we have to edit here. But in general, I submit that getting everything to FA is a worthier goal. It will most likely be much longer before we get that goal done (our A-class articles have been thoroughly whacked at FAC several times: case studies are fluorine, metalloid, element 117), but it will be a much better thing to aim for. Harder it may be, but it will be better for the readers, who are our audience, after all. (P.S. some hypothesized elements may indeed never get there till they are synthesized, but I see no reason why a known synthetic element could never get GA or FA. I'm trying to prove that by GA-ing every period 7 element...)

Sandbh: I don't have any particular expectation as to when this might happen. I suspect this is partly becos we work on the project for fun, so while we're all here to write good element-related articles, we all have our own areas of interest. When these areas of interest align, coincidentally or consciously, there's usually a synergistic dividend.

Jacob S-589: I think that it probably won't be too long (by 2015 at most) for the more common elements, but the synthetic and hypothesised elements may never be up to such a high quality.

DePiep: "When" is not a good question on Wikipedia. Every step ahead is an improvement.

StringTheory11: I'm pretty sure that this won't happen for quite a long time, especially given the recent lack of GA nominations (apart from all those fluorine-related articles). However, I remain confident that we will eventually reach our goal, no matter how long it will take. After all, there's a relatively low number of articles.

Do you participate in the Isotopes task force?

King jakob c 2: No, but I've done some minor work involving isotopes over at Wikidata.

Double sharp: Yes. Considering my main focus in writing has shifted to the superheavy elements for now, it's a very logical step to look through the isotopes – they make up almost all the things we know about those elements, after all.

Sandbh: Oh, no. The elements in their standards states are challenging enough for me.

Jacob S-589: I work a little on the pages, mainly when there's a discrepency between the infobox and the isotope page itself.

DePiep: No, but sometimes I synchronize it. There is a good isotopes page system, with redirects. Automatable. We had better make more natural links with chemistry, molecules for example. Though that is a more complicated area.

StringTheory11: No; this task force is honestly pretty much dead at this point.

How can a new contributor help right away?

King jakob c 2: I'd say good tasks for new users would be expanding some start-class and stub-class articles, or maybe participating in the discussions on the project's talk page.

Double sharp: I tend to disagree with that, because I'm quite sceptical regarding whether the d-block groups actually deserve their own articles (horizontal similarities across a period become important here, so you can't just understand an element in relation to its vertical neighbours, which you can sort of do in the p-block). But participate in the discussions, if you have a substantiated or substantiable viewpoint! (I should warn though that they mostly centre around classification of elements in the periodic table, and I would recommend doing a lot of background reading on this. The pdfs we link to in the discussions can be very helpful for this.) But most importantly, work on the articles. Preferably an element article, but anything is welcome. You will learn a lot about the chemistry and physics of that element in the process, and will have fun (I hope) working with us.

Sandbh: Just being a new contributor helps. Contributions to our project talk page are always welcome.

Jacob S-589: Try to help out with short-term goals. Since I'm a fairly new user myself (a few months), the times when I would try to do something and be corrected or pointed in the right direction are still fresh in my mind; you really tend to learn as you go.

DePiep: Phew, elements is a tough topic. In high school, one could check facts. In uni, at 20, one could challenge statements. Use the talk page to discuss (great nowadays, having internet). Relations with chemistry (molecules) or physics (isotopes, ...) are a challenge. Still there are non-project editors who make the improving point. Not exactly a "new" editor (new to the project?), but Axiosaurus recently challenged the poor element/post transition element issue, after the August 2013 changes. Today his comments & contributions are discussed at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Elements#Make_the_group_12_elements_poor_metals.3F. I'm not into it that much, but it looks like his contributions will have effect.

StringTheory11: There's a ton of stuff that a new contributor can do. If someone wants to help out, they can really do anything from bringing some start-class article to C-class to just working on fixing typos. If there was a number one thing that needs to be done though, I would say that the most important thing to do would be to improve our most viewed articles, such as gold and iron, which have incredibly large numbers of views.

Is there anything else you'd like to add?

Sandbh: 'The elements surprise us in our researches, challenge us in our categorisations, and follow us in our slumbers. They stretch like an untamed sea before us, mocking, puzzling, and mumuring faint relevations and possibilities.'—adapted from the words of Sir William Crookes, in 'The genesis of the elements,' Proceedings of the Royal Insitution, XII, Friday, February 18th, 1889, pp. 37‒60 (37) [PS: How awes is the Internet Archive?]

DePiep: One interesting thing about elements and periodic table is, that is is a very very old wikipedia topic. Some pages were copied into wp from nupedia in September 2001. When there were 2800 articles and 55 editors. ([1]; now defunct because the template was deleted?). In 2005–2007 the basic templates were made (by famous editors, some still around). Nowadays we are still changing editing upon these basic things. Let me add this quote about the periodic table: "Her character is a constant revealing to me". And character the periodic table has. (Actually, it was CC who said this about his wife OO -- praise the sun when you can say it).

Double sharp: Since everyone's using a quote, here's one: "I frequently think about beryllium..." (Nimur on the science reference desk). That's especially appropriate, because beryllium was pretty much our first article to be organized in something approaching our current pages: see this 2002(!) revision. I suppose we could consider 17 September 2002 to be our unofficial founding day, in which case we're now just over 11 years old as a project (though the founder is missing).

StringTheory11: As somebody mentioned, we have quite a few GAs and FAs. However, this work isn't done by a long shot, and we could use all the help we could get!

Next week we'll head to the graveyard to learn about dead projects. Until then, don't forget to check out the archive!

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