Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Discovery of the nonmetals

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was merge‎ to Timeline of chemical element discoveries. The other target page proposed is just a Redirect to this article. Maybe check on this first before proposing Redirects as target pages. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 19:46, 10 January 2024 (UTC)

Discovery of the nonmetals

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Discovery of the nonmetals (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log | edits since nomination)

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This article has been unreferenced for years, and although I could potentially find sources for many of the sentences, I couldn't confirm that the concept itself is notable. Boleyn (talk) 15:55, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

• Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: History and Science. Skynxnex (talk) 16:18, 3 January 2024 (UTC)
• Delete: seems to be a content fork of Timeline of chemical element discoveries. Owen× ☎ 23:26, 3 January 2024 (UTC)
• Retain: The article is linked from Nonmetal, here, and was created to reduce the size of that article. It’s easy enough to find sources however my focus has been on getting the parent article up to FAC status. — Sandbh (talk) 23:45, 3 January 2024 (UTC)
• Merge to Timeline of chemical element discoveries and/or Nonmetal. Currently, the article just lists individual element discoveries, without having an overarching idea that isn't better covered in another article, though any content not at the proposed targets should be consolidated, and this title would at least make a plausible redirect. I believe a more appropriate scope for a standalone article would be history of classification of nonmetals (as a group). Additionally, both this article and the section in Nonmetal are fairly short, so I don't think prose size is a major issue here, but a repurposed article would more clearly establish independent notability (categorization of elements is well-discussed in the literature) as well as providing a more substantial split. ^Complex/_Rational 01:46, 4 January 2024 (UTC)
  • ComplexRational, do you think a "timeline" article may be too narrow? Surely there's enough of a connecting thread to have an article like History of chemical element discovery, or something prosaic like that. Remsense留 07:05, 6 January 2024 (UTC)

    We already have Chemical_element#History, which first describes the history of the concept before linking to the timeline article, as well as History of the periodic table, which discusses their categorization in detail. I'm not so sure what a new article would cover that isn't tied to the history of elements or the periodic table and isn't a content fork of the timeline. ^Complex/_Rational 23:05, 6 January 2024 (UTC)

    I suppose it seems like there's enough history to split off and summary-style the former: for one thing, I know for certain that there's enough connective tissue post-WW2 to write a dedicated history article about. The book Superheavy by Kit Chapman could be leaned on for that period.
    

References

Remsense留 06:31, 7 January 2024 (UTC)

There's certainly more than enough information around to expand the timeline into a dedicated history article. Such an article would presumably start with the elements known to the ancients and the alchemists, then seguing into recognisably modern chemistry as Lavoisier defined what an element was and phlogiston fell by the wayside. Then for another half-century or so the tools of analytical chemistry (together with electrolysis for isolating the elements people already knew were there but couldn't separate, like Na and K) would continue to be the way people discovered new elements, before the arrival of spectroscopy, periodicity, radioactivity, atomic numbers, and finally artificial synthesis of elements. So it's not quite the same thing as the history of the PT, although from gallium onwards they are certainly very close. It would probably take some work, though.

With that said, I don't think metallicity vs nonmetallicity inherently has anything to do with discovery history. Carbon and sulfur were known to prehistory for about the same reason gold was: they occur as the free element in nature. Tellurium was outright thought to be a metal when first investigated (it is a semiconductor with a small band gap). Double sharp (talk) 08:24, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

Agreed on the lack of a need for a distinction. Remsense留 20:50, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

• Merge content and redirect, there is no inherent value to split Timeline of chemical element discoveries to two. CactiStaccingCrane (talk) 14:31, 6 January 2024 (UTC)
• Merge to Timeline of chemical element discoveries or Discovery of chemical elements. I don’t think a split is needed, but if one is desired, a metal/nonmetal split seems only slightly less arbitrary than even/odd atomic numbers. There is a huge overlap in players and processes. If one is ever needed, a chronological split makes far more sense IMO, as the processes and players naturally vary significantly between eras.— Preceding unsigned comment added by YBG (talk • contribs)
• Merge (or rather redirect) to Timeline of chemical element discoveries, which is a much fuller and more satisfactory article. Peterkingiron (talk) 17:20, 9 January 2024 (UTC)
• Merge to Timeline of chemical element discoveries or Discovery of chemical elements – I'm partial to writing a full prose article rather than simply having a timeline, but that's outside the scope of the AfD. Remsense留 20:53, 9 January 2024 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.