Talk:LiBr

RFD

See also: Talk:AsH₃, Talk:CO₂, and Talk:SiGe

The following information passed a request for deletion.

This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.

---

LiBr

Chemical formula. Not a "word in a language". Equinox ◑ 10:31, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Do quotes like these cite it?

• 2013, Werner R. Loewenstein, Principles of Receptor Physiology, Springer Science & Business Media →ISBN, page 6

  Surprisingly, it was found that the addition of LiBr to dry acetone had no effect on the length of the collagen fibers, whereas subsequent addition of small amounts of water caused a powerful contraction to about one-third of the original length.

• 2002, Leo Mandelkern, Crystallization of Polymers: Volume 1, Equilibrium Concepts, Cambridge University Press →ISBN, page 400

  The initial addition of LiBr to the supernatant phase results in a depression of 7"m. A minimum in the melting temperature is reached, at about 7M LiBr.

• 2013, Raphael Ikan, Natural and Laboratory Simulated Thermal Geochemical Processes, Springer Science & Business Media →ISBN, page 129

  The addition of LiBr to NMP also caused a partial breakdown of the size exclusion mechanism, with chromatograms extending to well beyond the permeation limit of the column, similar to results from eluents of insufficient solvent strength

• 1994, American Society of Mechanical Engineers, Papers

  If a system could be designed to add the LiBr to a bath of water the process could work.

We have H₂O, CO₂, O₂, NaCl and so on (just see Category:mul:Chemical formulae). Smurrayinchester (talk) 11:07, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

H₂O, CO₂ etc - these terms may be encountered in everyday life and I'm not sure that LiBr is (until we invent an LiBr-cooled nuclear reactor, but it melts at 500+deg). A quick look at the literature produces a few more possible entries: "The results show that 10 min exposure to TNF-alpha (0.5-50ng/ml) of F508del-CFTR-transfected HeLa cells and human bronchial cells expressing F508del-CFTR in primary culture (HBE) leads to the maturation of F508del-CFTR and induces CFTR chloride currents." And I'm not familiar with our rules to make a judgement, a line may have to be drawn.   — Saltmarsh^{συζήτηση-talk} 11:26, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Does the size of the using community matter? Should we have Torre Straits Creole but not chemist's or geneticist's vocabulary or abbreviations thereof?

Some discretion is necessary with respect to hyphenated compound IMO, so F508del-CFTR-transfected seems prima facie to be less inclusion-worthy that F508del-CFTR, which seems less inclusion-worthy than F508del. I doubt that there is a simple, universally acceptable rule for such compounds however. With less technical terms we bend over backwards to include compounds on the flimsiest of pretexts. DCDuring TALK 11:45, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

IMO: keep. DCDuring TALK 11:39, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

keep - but hyphenated terms may be different.  — Saltmarsh^{συζήτηση-talk} 11:50, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

delete as per AsH₃ -- Liliana • 18:26, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Well, if Li and Br are "words in a language" then LiBr must be as well. Keep all (or delete all). SemperBlotto (talk) 19:22, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

• Keep per Talk:AsH₃ —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 19:50, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
• Question. Let's say, for the sake of argument, we were to include all chemical formulae that are attested in running text. Can someone give me a rough idea of how many entries we would be looking at? bd2412 T 01:33, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

  There are more than 71 million chemicals "registered" in the Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) DTLHS (talk) 01:42, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

I don't buy Blotto's argument (i.e. Li and Br are okay, so LiBr must be okay). Consider the MVC opcode that's undergoing RFV, and suppose we can write the instruction MVC 5. Well, MVC is a dictionary term (for sake of argument) and 5 is a dictionary term (apparently, being a number), but that doesn't mean MVC 5 gets an entry, since the rules of composition are not English language but rather programming-language rules. Similarly here, the rules of composition are those of chemical formulae. Equinox ◑ 01:45, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

"MVC 5" wouldn't be included because it doesn't make any sense. The MVC instructions takes three parameters, the addresses of the source and target, and the number of bytes transferred. And anyway, it would be sum of parts. SemperBlotto (talk) 10:39, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

1. "Suppose" means "accept for sake of argument" so the exact assembler syntax is irrelevant; some instructions do have one parameter. 2. It's not SoP because the ordering and meanings of parameters can vary between instructions, in the same way that the way that the symbols and numbers in a chemical formula have to appear in a certain order to mean a certain thing. Again, as I said, there are rules for these things but they are not natural language. Equinox ◑ 08:31, 6 September 2015 (UTC)

As a practical matter, we can't make 71 million entries, much less police that number. What standards would we use to sort out a reasonable number to work with? bd2412 T 02:06, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

We could include only compounds which have a common (not IUPAC-derived) name. DTLHS (talk) 02:14, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

I'd only keep chemical formulae that are used in English outside of a chemistry context. H₂O and CO₂ would certainly meet that rule, along with others. -- Liliana • 08:55, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

I'me not advocating that we add the chemical formulae of all those 71 million compounds, only that we don't delete any that somebody has taken the trouble to add. Personally, I've got better things to do with my time. SemperBlotto (talk) 10:44, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

It's much the same with taxonomic names. Of the millions of species and genus names only those that have linguistic interest (eg, in etymology, as type species and genera), are used in definitions, or are topical enough to appear in newspaper and magazine articles are likely to get entered. There is no good justification for deleting others that happen to be entered and meet attestation criteria if challenged.

I don't see why we can't include scientific vocabulary of all kinds on the same basis as we include nonscientific vocabulary from well-attested languages. We could have a vote to impose some additional requirements not in CFI for scientific terms, but I don't see the justification for an exception to our treatment of abbreviations and other symbolic expressions of other types. DCDuring TALK 22:23, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

Speaking as a mathematician, I dislike seeing mathematical terms in dictionaries, ours and others. Part of it is inherent in mathematics itself—no subject is as navel-gazing as math—but part of it is even getting the highlights usually results in something wishy washy, less than informative, and too often incorrect: topos, mouse, Fourier transform, Lebesgue measurable. I'm not interested in fixing premouse, which at least gets points for honesty, or adding real mouse, which is actually SOP, but only if you know which "real" and which "mouse" are being talked about. Mathematics is also different in that we work with our own technical notion of "definition" which is not the same as the lexicographic notion. Worse, the actual technical definition often varies in context.

I'm not a chemist, but I am unimpressed with the LiBr citations above. How are they not SOP? Outside of chemistry, something like LiBr has a chance of becoming a fixed term who meaning is disconnected from its scientific etymology, at which point including it here serves a point. As an example, we correctly have U-235 and ought to have C-14 and Pu-239, but I don't see every nucleus and atomic weight combination as having use outside the technical literature. Choor monster (talk) 18:18, 6 September 2015 (UTC)

• Keep. We probably don't want to include every chemical formula attested in running text but it is practical enough to include the short ones, isn't it? In Category:mul:Chemical formulae, the longest one is CH3COOH; the category has 54 entries. The argument made in Talk:AsH₃ about opening the door, and indiscriminate collection is familiar from discussions of placenames and company names, and is implausible to me. It leads to the style of regulation in which the regulator makes it all too easy for himself. If we worry about the number of items in some category, we can seek criteria that will put limit on that number, even somewhat arbitrary criteria. --Dan Polansky (talk) 08:26, 6 September 2015 (UTC)
  • As a practical matter, this dictionary really would be impossible to maintain if it had 75 million entries, of which only 4 million were words that might actually be found in a typical dictionary. bd2412 T 15:30, 6 September 2015 (UTC)
    • I agree. That is why I think that a limit on length would do. One of the simplest limits could be this: keep a chemical formula only if it involves no more than 3 chemical elements and no more than 10 atoms. Alternatively, keep a chemical formula only if the chemical it denotes has a CFI-meeting name: e.g. H₂SO₄ has sulfuric acid or LiBr has lithium bromide. This criterion ensures that the inclusion of chemical formulas no more than doubles the number of items in the dictionary. But again, we can play with various length limit criteria. Either way, LiBr would be kept, if anything. --Dan Polansky (talk) 17:06, 6 September 2015 (UTC)
• Keep: And let me go on record that I don't see there as being a ceiling on entries. Purplebackpack89 19:04, 6 September 2015 (UTC)
• Keep: we have good cites for it. I seriously doubt we can get 75 million entries with three independent cites, and we have lithium bromide, so obviously having an entry for the substance isn't a problem.--Prosfilaes (talk) 22:29, 6 September 2015 (UTC)

I think citations are important to show use in a language (or languages) but I have no objections. Perhaps change to noun, as nominal use has already been shown by the citations above. Renard Migrant (talk) 15:27, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

• Keep: The argument for keeping formulae which link to word entries is excellent. The argument for closing an open door has already been shown to be wrong. (cf. placenames, company names, astronomy, etc.) I see only 54 entries have flooded through this particular already open door. There should be more, not less. -- ALGRIF talk 13:23, 9 September 2015 (UTC)
• Keep If Wikipedia can maintain a full article about it, we can maintain a succinct definition. Seems reasonable to keep the formulas of the chemical compounds which are attested and commonly used. Pengo (talk) 12:51, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
• Keep. After considering this at some length, I think that we need to carefully define the parameters of what chemical formulae we should include, but that there is no reasonable limitation that would exclude this basic formula. bd2412 T 15:15, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
• RFD kept per no consensus for deletion. With so many keeps above, there does not seem to be a chance for deletion. --Dan Polansky (talk) 13:57, 20 September 2015 (UTC)
• Could someone move this to the "Discussion" tab in the entry for safe-keeping? - ALGRIF talk 10:27, 29 September 2015 (UTC)