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• 06 Apr 2025 – Template:Extended periodic table (by Aufbau, 50 columns, period 8) (talk · edit · hist) TfDed by Jonesey95 (t · c) was closed; see discussion

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• 15 Apr 2025 – Manganese (talk · edit · hist) was GA nominated by Keresluna (t · c); see discussion

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• 14 Jan 2025 – Hydrogen (talk · edit · hist) was put up for FA review by Boneless Pizza! (t · c); see discussion

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• 21 Apr 2025 – Carbon (talk · edit · hist) was nominated for GA reassessment by Z1720 (t · c); see discussion

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• 12 Mar 2025 – List of important publications in chemistry (talk · edit · hist) move request to List of publications in chemistry by 1234qwer1234qwer4 (t · c) was moved to List of publications in chemistry (talk · edit · hist) by Cowboygilbert (t · c) on 19 Mar 2025; see discussion

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Isotope images

Andrewrburgoyne (talk · contribs), presumably Dr. Andrew R. Burgoyne as implied by image credits, has recently added quite a few valuable images of radioactive isotopes to articles such as isotopes of lead, radium, actinium-225 (list of uploads on Commons here). Is there an ideal place for these images to be used? I found difficulty placing the new images in our article Radium, specifically. Also uncertain about the description of the glow from several of these isotopes as Cherenkov radiation, which was brought up at the reference desk as more likely to be air ionization, and the method of crediting in multiple places (caption, watermark). Reconrabbit 14:36, 4 March 2025 (UTC)

Unblock request from Eric Scerri

Eric Scerri, a world authority on the periodic table, was recently indef blocked for updating his own publication details. He has posted an unblock request User_talk:Scerri, which I have supported. Sandbh (talk) 10:45, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

Fixing ping to User:Scerri and link to the talkpage. DMacks (talk) 11:13, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

This comment here is misrepresents the situation, both factually for timeline (or else that it's an IP rather than account situation) and connotation for the description of the edits. That's not helpful. DMacks (talk) 12:04, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

Block is from 2008 it looks like. Can the request be formatted in an unblock request template by someone other than the user himself? (Add'l context: Eric Scerri has been edited sporadically over the years to keep the "Articles" section up to date by IP editors that geolocate around Los Angeles.) Reconrabbit 13:47, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

I left a note on their talkpage about using the proper template, and some advice about what details to include in their comments that uninvolved request-handlers would want to know about. I didn't go into as much specific detail, but certainly did touch on the issues that Reconrabbit (above) and Johnjbarton (below) mentioned. The request as it was made would almost surely be insta-declined, no need to clutter up the queue. DMacks (talk) 16:21, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

Oppose Expertise in a subject area is not relevant for issues of WP:conflict of interest. Being a nice person is not relevant. Claiming that edits are "details" is not relevant. If you look at the User contributions for Scerri they are close to 100% additions of a book by Scerri across many pages. Their contribution appear to be only self promotion. Johnjbarton (talk) 15:59, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

Thank you @DMacks, @Reconrabbit, and @Johnjbarton for the clarifications.

I appreciate your patience — I now realize that my original comment above unintentionally misstated aspects of the situation. I wasn’t aware at the time that Dr. Scerri’s account had been blocked since 2008 (=:o), and I didn’t review the full edit history or block rationale before posting. I was preoccupied with another pressing RL matter and acted quickly, simply intending to support what I understood to be a good-faith effort by Dr. Scerri to resume constructive participation.

In hindsight, I should have done more homework before commenting, and I regret any confusion that resulted. I certainly didn’t intend to mislead or downplay the concerns about the nature of his past edits.

Following up, I’ve since spoken with Dr. Scerri, who has confirmed that he is happy to accept the unblock conditions proposed by @DMacks — specifically, a restriction on adding citations to his own work without prior discussion, and a general willingness to respond on-wiki if any of his edits are questioned.

I hope this shows a genuine openness to working within Wikipedia’s expectations and norms. Thank you again to everyone who has engaged thoughtfully and constructively in this discussion. --- Sandbh (talk) 05:06, 1 April 2025 (UTC)

Images and infoboxes

I guess all of the Element pages have infobox-es. Any right-aligned images that should render before the end of the infobox get pushed below the infobox and any left-aligned images in the text after right-aligned image will be pushed down as well. As suggested by DMacks, it appears that the images want to render in order and the right-aligned image is stacked below the infobox.

I fixed Beryllium but this will be an on-going issue as images are added/moved. Johnjbarton (talk) 15:22, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

Lead sentence

To make it transparent for whom it may concern: I assumed a given sentence structure was standard (being preexisting in the majority of the periodic table) for the first sentence of element articles. I also assumed said standard had been chipped away at in spots over time (seemed like it at e.g. Neon), so I went and standardized all the outliers across the periodic table. If anyone thinks I unnecessarily disrupted things in the name of a fairly minor, possibly imagined, style convention and wants to hit me over the head with a mallet or have me undo/redo those edits, please feel free. Remsense ‥ 论 16:26, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

There was an extensive discussion and eventual consensus a few years ago to standardize the first sentence (or maybe two) of element articles. I can't find a link to it at the moment. DMacks (talk) 15:45, 26 April 2025 (UTC)

If I need to remedy the situation, don't hesitate to ping me. Remsense ‥ 论 15:48, 26 April 2025 (UTC)

Discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Chemistry § Uniform approach to extraction and refining of industrial metals

 You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Chemistry § Uniform approach to extraction and refining of industrial metals. Gracen (they/them) 15:51, 15 April 2025 (UTC)

Style guide needs update

Our style guide badly needs an update to incorporate consensues since it was written, as indicated in WT:WikiProject Chemistry § Uniform approach to extraction and refining of industrial metals (also linked above). Any thoughts on how to accomplish this? — YBG (talk) 15:37, 16 April 2025 (UTC)

Good article reassessment for Carbon

Carbon has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Z1720 (talk) 16:42, 21 April 2025 (UTC)

Bad template causes duplicate reference errors

Looks like the {{Isotopes table}} template is causing duplicate reference definition errors in every single page that uses it. I haven't tracked it down fully, but it seems like the duplicate is coming from {{Infobox element/symbol-to-saw/CIAAW-saw-element-page}}. Is anyone actively working on investigating this and fixing it? -- mikeblas (talk) 15:36, 26 April 2025 (UTC)

Or, maybe not. It's always the template page itself that has a duplicate reference, which means it might be coming from a problem in the documentation. The template structure in the chemistry projects is really a house of cards; why is such a complex system necessary? -- mikeblas (talk) 15:47, 26 April 2025 (UTC)

Template:Infobox_isotopes_(meta)/doc has the error, which is the /doc for all [[Template:Infobox * isotopes]]. The documentation gives lots of examples of usage, two of which emit that standard ref, and is therefore a dup. In real-life use, there would not be more than one use on any given article. DMacks (talk) 15:55, 26 April 2025 (UTC)

The ref is generated by Template:Infobox element/symbol-to-saw/CIAAW-saw-element-page/format. The ref is specific to a given element, but has the generic ref-name "CIAAW". Therefore, whenever this template is called for more than one element on the same page, it will be a ref error. I can envision actual article use-case for that (comparing sets of isotopes for different elements) as well as obviously in the documentation. Easiest solution is probably to include the element symbol in the ref-name. DMacks (talk) 16:28, 26 April 2025 (UTC)

Why is that reference given a name at all? Are you sure these are the causes? I think the errors only recently appeared, but those two templates haven't been modified for months (at least). -- mikeblas (talk) 01:06, 27 April 2025 (UTC)

I have no idea your frame of "recently", but the most recent change I see was in January,[1] and that change was adding the name to it. I recall there was a discussion a few months ago about duplicate refs in infobox vs article. I wonder if this was an attempt to enable that, with an unfortunate side-effect? Pinging Nucleus hydro elemon... DMacks (talk) 02:39, 27 April 2025 (UTC)

I made this claim about a similar system for oxidation states back a few months:

• References in particular are nasty business in this system so we have to work around issues. If the refs are defined in the oxidation state data they may duplicate those in the article; if not they may be missing. The only solution for refs needed in both places is to add the definition to the reflist ref= parameter in the References article and use in the oxidation state data.

Johnjbarton (talk) 02:56, 27 April 2025 (UTC)

I think the least-worst handling is to have a truely unique 'name' in the infobox. That means there will never be an error--neither duplicate definition nor no definition. Instead, there might be the same ref with two different names, so it will be listed twice in the refs list. I can't find an actual guideline that this is wrong, merely that merging multiple uses of the same ref is a supported feature. DMacks (talk) 04:10, 27 April 2025 (UTC)

Why is that the only solutoin? I would've thought adding references exactly where they were needed (no more, and no less) would have been possible. Don't all articles (and their templates) do that? -- mikeblas (talk) 01:05, 28 April 2025 (UTC)

I was attempting to solve duplicate refs at that time. It is fixed now. Nucleus hydro elemon (talk) 09:42, 27 April 2025 (UTC)

Thanks. For the record, this was Nucleus's new change, which makes the box emit refs named "CIAAW[element-name]", so they are unique per element. I have followed their lead and updated a few element pages to use those now. DMacks (talk) 15:19, 27 April 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for the fix! That's marked progress, but it looks like there's still several doc pages with problems, surrounding a different repeatedly-defined reference, though. For example, {{Isotopes table/header}} and {{Isotopes table/ref group}} show errors for references named "NUBASE2026" and "AME2016 II". -- mikeblas (talk) 07:47, 2 May 2025 (UTC)