Talk:Aluminium

Article changed over to new WikiProject Elements format by maveric149. Elementbox converted 10:17, 23 Jun 2005 by Femto (previous revision was that of 02:33, 20 Jun 2005).

Information Sources

Some of the text in this entry was rewritten from Los Alamos National Laboratory - Aluminum. Additional text was taken directly from USGS Aluminum Statistics and Information, USGS Periodic Table - Magnesium, from the Elements database 20001107 (via dict.org), Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) (via dict.org) and WordNet (r) 1.7 (via dict.org). Data for the table was obtained from the sources listed on the main page and WikiProject Elements but was reformatted and converted into SI units.

Talk

At the bottom of the article it mentions that Canadians call it aluminum (as opposed to aluminium). While this may be practically true due to the influence of our southern neighbors, the official spelling in Canada IS aluminium. Should the article reflect this? lommer 19:32, 5 Feb 2004 (UTC)

An official spelling? Under which minister is this Dep't of How to Spell Things? =) (Dang, can't find my The Canadian Style right now...) 142.177.124.178 19:22, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Article says:

Discovered by Humphrey Davy in 1812... In 1825 the Danish physicist and chemist Hans Christian Orsted produced aluminium for the first time.

How can Humphrey Davy have discovered it if it wasn't produced until later? Shouldn't we say Orsted discovered it? (Webelements lists Orsted as the discover; it has Davy as giving it a name before it was discovered.) -- Simon J Kissane

according to my research Davy discovered potasium and sodium but not alluminium. I have changed the article to reflect this. -- mike dill

Actually you can discover comething without being able to produce it, as Davy did with Aluminium, he realised that it existed but couldn't make any. Yet that didn't stop him from naming it, and "officially" discovering it. -- Sam Davyson see http://153rd.com/sam/as/physics/aluminium/normal/redirect.html for more.

For the love of Mike, please stop moving the page to a non-standard spelling. The word is "aluminium". Read the article for clear and explicit evidence of this. The variant usage "aluminum" should certainly be mentioned and a redirect from that page to the main page is appropriate. Constantly moving the page to the variant spelling is not appropriate. Tannin

Isis said: "we use the more common spelling, and on google that's aluminum, 2 to 1"

The official policy on British vs American spellings here in wikiland is to go with what the article was originally created at and mention and redirect the other spelling to it. The case for the British spelling here is even more concrete because IUPAC has standardized on the ium spelling. --mav

I notices that some of this article had the North American spelling, while the vast majority was had the International spelling. I have changed the 6 or so 'num's to 'nium's. I take it Wikipedia follows IUPAC conventions? - Mark Ryan 12:18, 16 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I do at least. But I'm also an American so I might slip-up once in a while and write -num. --mav

Since there is a standard and even historical reason, there should be no question at all about the preferred spelling in international text. --blades 01:02, May 16, 2004 (UTC)

the "historical reason" favors -num. i say the idea of ending it in -ium was always, well, worth its weight in platinium (hint: ideas lack significant mass, and "platinium" is not the name of an element) - what name was the article originally created with anyway? --Random|832 10:42, 12 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Neither Borg-Word nor m-w.com recognize "chlorure". Searching the Web for it doesn't generally produce English-language sites. My Longman Advanced English dict. doesn't have it either. Maybe it should be "chloride"? Er, Niteowlneils 17:00, 16 Apr 2004 (UTC)

There does not seem to be any mention about the effect that the rapid oxidation has on electrical conductors. Is this ever taken advantage of in practise? At least I believe it makes it very difficult to make good eletrical contact to aluminium conductors. That might deserve a note in the article. --blades 01:02, May 16, 2004 (UTC)

I've never understood why the "precedent set by potassium, sodium, magnesium, calcium, and strontium" is used as opposed to the standard set by platinum, molybdenum, lanthanum, and tantalum [not to mention the original latin aurum, argentum, cuprum, plumbum, etc, none of which end in "ium"] --Random|832 10:42, 12 Jul 2004 (UTC)

The first paragraph of the 'notable characteristics' section states that aluminium is both soft and strong. This seems unlikely to be the case. In the case of pure aluminium the yield strength is in the region of 10 MPa which certainly isn't strong as far as construction materials are concerned (Al alloys may have yield strengths in the region of 200-500 MPa). As a result I have removed the word strong (alloying is mentioned later anyway).

Surely aluminium is not resistent to magnetism but is simply non-magnetic? I have altered the 'applications' section to reflect this (and hopefully I'm right).

The term 'weak' is ambiguous (strength, stiffness, hardness, toughness, fatigue resistance?). I replaced it with a link to tensile strength as this is probably the most familar mechanical property.

Moving to "aluminum"

Latest comment: 20 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

The "use common names" policy applies to all articles. The most common name for this element is "aluminum": [1]. Blindly obeying IUPAC conventions is a violation of NPOV. Nohat 23:59, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Leave it, less for the anti-Americans to compalin about. Rick K 00:16, Oct 6, 2004 (UTC)

It doesn't seem that appeasing anti-Americans is a good reason to something, either. Nohat 00:27, 6 Oct 2004 (UTC)

US English is well known for spelling things how they are pronounced, because the stupid idiots can't understand anything el- I'm sorry. What I mean to say is, here in Britain I have said 'alumin-yum' many times, but that is merely a contraction. The proper way to pronounce it is 'alumin-ee-yum', and the spelling should reflect this.

Those darned Yankies just stole the contraction, nothing more. --195.92.67.68 18:48, 18 Oct 2004 (UTC)

It's nothing to do with contractions. There's just a correct spelling and an American variant. Chameleon 20:09, 18 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Never said it was anything to do with 'official' contractions. I meant a sort of invisible contraction, only present in the pronounciation, which- ach, what's the use explaining, it's not going to gain me anything. --AdamM 21:17, 18 Oct 2004 (UTC)

This proposal, I think, is without merit. The Google Test is simply not relevant in this case: all it establishes is that "aluminum" is more common on the Internet. It ignores the official usage endorsed by the IUPAC, as well as the International usage. Note that I do not have any objection to sulfur (though the International spelling is sulphur); to keep this at aluminium seems, at the very least, to be a reasonable compromise. -- Emsworth 13:35, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Agreed; it would be somewhat odd to label the IUPAC's decision as NPOV, certainly (I think that "sulfur" is a terribly shoddy compromise), but "aluminium" or a similar inflexion is used on every country on Earth (if only rarely in the US and Canada); "aluminum" is, well, not.

James F. (talk) 14:17, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Currently the Wikipedia:Manual of Style says:

In articles about chemicals and chemistry, use IUPAC names for chemicals wherever possible, except in article titles, where the common name should be used if different, followed by mention of the IUPAC name.

Unfortunately, what is meant by 'the common name' is undefined. Clearly both 'aluminum' and 'aluminium' are common names for the metal. If all else fails, consider following the spelling style preferred by the first major contributor (that is, not a stub) to the article who used a word with variant spellings in the article or the title. The Manual of Style does, however, offer the advice:

If all else fails, consider following the spelling style preferred by the first major contributor (that is, not a stub) to the article who used a word with variant spellings in the article or the title.

This way forward has proved to be the best approach for all areas where there are differences in spelling between U.S. and non-U.S. forms. There is no reason not to apply it here. It also allows the article to be consistent, as under the terms of existing policy, the IUPAC term 'aluminium' should be used in the body of the article itself. Leave the article where it is.

Also I deeply resent the suggestion that preferring non-U.S. terms over U.S. terms is anti-American. It's as ridiculous as suggesting that those preferring U.S. terms are trying to impose some linguistic hegemony over the rest of the English world. We all prefer reading English in a style we are used to, Americans and non-Americans are no different in this respect. We reach a reasonable compromise between the competing styles and move on. jguk 15:00, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I present a (biased) google test to counteract the one above: Aluminium (>2 million) vs. Aluminum (<300 thousand). Not that that influences anything, especially as the above arguments for keeping it where it is works for me. violet/riga (t) 13:02, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I'm not sure I see how a British English/North American English difference is a POV issue! By my understanding, aluminium is used in North America as well as the (more-common-there) aluminum, where as aluminium is used almost without exception elsewhere, and used to be used in the US:

"You probably noted that the title uses "aluminium" instead of the American "aluminum," which I did purely in futile protest. Until 1925, the word was "aluminium" even in the U.S., but in that year the American Chemical Society decided to change it. We also got "sulfur" in that same year, which still looks silly, and was not universally adopted by the engineering world. It's the Latin spelling, as is "sulpur." [sic] Fortunately, the urge for simplified spelling did not result in Fosforus or Thorum, or even Jermanum, combining both types of change. The -ia ending of a refractory oxide, such as alumina or thoria, usually named the metal with an -ium ending. Why aluminum had to be different, I do not know. A divergence in pronunciation also results, "alyouminium" versus "aloominum." The latter may have been a vulgar pronunciation. It is usually the English who have trouble pronouncing more than three syllables in a word, not the colonials."'

(James B. Calvert, an American chemist, from Elementymology)

I'm with just about everything jguk wrote. — OwenBlacker 18:33, Nov 16, 2004 (UTC)

On American English vs. Common English I say that if the article is America related the spellings should be in the American style and if related to a country which uses common English in that style. With neutral articles such as this I too would say it should be in common English due to this being en.wikipedia.org and not us.wikipedia.org. --Josquius 18:05, 13 Jan 2005 (UTC)

It is interesting, though, that the areas where the so-called "common" English usage "Aluminium" is preferred comprise less than 30% of native English speakers (less than 25% if you count Canada, which also has a preference for "Aluminum" [2]). Nohat 18:57, 13 Jan 2005 (UTC)

That pie chart has missed out India where English is spoken by about 200,000 million people (very conservative guess) and then the countless others who speak English as a second language --Josquius 19:17, 13 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I agree with Josquius, that it should be "aluminium". Not only is it the IUPAC endorsed convention, but also very common in other major languages like German, French and even in Japanese it's written "aluminium" in Katakana. --Iwaki 16:56, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)

"Aluminium" in China and Australia. Also regarding the comment by Iwaki above, taking into account that Japanese katakana borrowed words tend to use American pronunciations (such as "privacy"), I think it is quite significant that even Japanese uses "aluminium" in its katakana. KittySaturn 09:25, 2005 Feb 17 (UTC)

Why not just change the title to Aluminium/Aluminum, with both Aluminium and Aluminum redirecting, to reflect both common names?

"US English is well known for spelling things how they are pronounced, because the stupid idiots can't understand anything el- I'm sorry. What I mean to say is, here in Britain I have said 'alumin-yum' many times, but that is merely a contraction. The proper way to pronounce it is 'alumin-ee-yum', and the spelling should reflect this.

Those darned Yankies just stole the contraction, nothing more. --195.92.67.68 18:48"

We don't pronounce it "alumin-yum", we pronounce it "a-lu-min-um". But anyway, we didn't steal a contraction, it was originally aluminum, as you would know if you read the article..

If you spell aluminum backwards, it's Munimula, the name of the planet in the bad science fiction movie, whose name I thankfully forgot. You can't do that with aluminium. Gzuckier 02:43, 10 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

Please see Wikipedia:Lamest edit wars ever#Spelling.

Move to AL?

perhaps as a way to end all title wars we should consider moving it to its Atomic Symbol? then just have redirects from both Aluminum and Aluminium. Alkivar 02:21, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC)

No. Chameleon 08:51, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Definitely not; that's an everyone-loses solution, n'est-ce pas? — OwenBlacker 18:21, Nov 16, 2004 (UTC)

Check out Al, and then think again. And then, what would be do about Hahnium? --Elektron 22:40, 2004 Nov 16 (UTC)

you could move the content at Al to Al (disambiguation) and since Hahnium is not an "official" element name and does not have an article except a redirect to Element naming controversy that subject is moot. Alkivar 00:37, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I still think it would be odd to have only this element at its symbol name (especially given there are so many transuranics with disputed names held under their IUPAC names!). And, as Alkivar pointed out, Hahnium isn't a name used very widely any more, as IUPAC finally got (near-)agreement to rename it Dubnium in 1997. — OwenBlacker 03:31, Nov 17, 2004 (UTC)

No way, the title is fine as it is. 202.32.53.44 16:15, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Spelling

Can anyone confirm the edits by User:The Noodle Incident (12:07, 2004 Oct 29 and 12:08, 2004 Oct 29) ([3])? Surprisingly, all these were marked as minor. I'm adding the missing bit about "alumium", anyway. --Elektron 22:35, 2004 Nov 16 (UTC)

Perhaps I should preview; diff --Elektron 22:42, 2004 Nov 16 (UTC)

Those edits look quite similar to the content at the Elementymology link I posted earlier today. I haven't scrutinised them in depth, but they look ok to me. — OwenBlacker 23:45, Nov 16, 2004 (UTC)

I've just cleaned up the spelling history, but removed the alternative theory

Another theory on the difference in the spelling of the word is that the first shipment of aluminium to go to the US came from the UK, but the clerk spelled it 'aluminum' on the manifest, and that spelling has stuck ever since.

until we can find a reference for it. -- Solipsist 14:19, 21 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Incidentally, whilst checking references, I came across a prediction on a discussion forum that America will finally conform to the IUPAC spelling sometime around 2050, at which point the argument will move on to sorting out Platinum :-) -- Solipsist 14:26, 21 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Other Uses

Powdered alumin(i)um is commonly used for silvering in paint. Mention that, and this could get a Category:Pigments link. But I don't see a good place to just stick it in. --Elijah 01:17, 2004 Dec 11 (UTC)

I took the liberty of sticking it in with the other examples of usage. --Deelkar (talk) 05:21, 11 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Link suggestions

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Could anyone confirm?

Could anyone confirm the change [4] (made by anonymous user 80.5.160.8 with history of vandalism). Pavel Vozenilek 02:32, 10 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Looks OK to me. 80.5.160.8 seems to be an ISP cache server, not an individual user.

Darrien 08:46, 2005 Apr 10 (UTC)

It looks more or less OK. The abstract of the original paper [5] (requires sub) doesn't actually discuss isolated clusters of Aluminium atoms (these may not be stable), but does discuss the iodine salts written as Al₁₃I^–_x where x is an even number. -- Solipsist 08:49, 10 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Perhaps you should click on the link that Mr. Vozenilek provided.

Darrien 09:46, 2005 Apr 10 (UTC)

Ah - I thought I did, but you are right - looks like I'm out by one on the edit under discussion. -- Solipsist 09:53, 10 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Confusion over oxidation/passivation/inertness

The introductory section says that aluminium is "remarkable for its resistance to oxidation ". This is incorrect. Aluminium metal is readily oxidised. Water will do it rapidly with the evolution of hydrogen gas and considerable heat. What prevents this is that the oxide is insoluble except in alkali conditions. This is the "passivation" to which the next sentence refers. This needs to be reworded to illustrate that under normal conditions aluminium is inert due to the oxide coating, without saying that aluminium metal itself is resistant to oxidation.

General spelling

Latest comment: 20 years ago17 comments5 people in discussion

Over the past few of days there have been a couple of edit and reverts changing the general spelling throughout the article between British English and U.S. English.

I hope this isn't going to continue — its enough trouble keeping a lid on the choice of IUPAC spelling of the article title. The Manual of Style at WP:MoS#Usage_and_spelling is quite clear on these issues. As far as I'm concerned, this is an international article with no prior preference for one version of English over another. As such the spelling should conform to whichever version of English was used when the article was created (I haven't checked but I would imagine that was U.S. English in this case). The choice of IUPAC spelling for the word 'aluminium' itself, is an independent decision and shouldn't be taken as an endorsement to convert to British English spelling for the rest of the article. -- Solipsist 17:33, 13 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

The article was inconsistent in spelling, as the title of the article uses British English ()and indeed was begun using the British spelling the article should be consistent and follow with British English spelling. Jooler 22:06, 13 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

Asserting that title of the article is British English is misleading. It was chosen because it is the IUPAC preferred spelling, as otherwise discussed on this page. Use of the IUPAC spelling does not equate the article being written in British English. Your changes in spelling are not warranted. Dforest 00:51, 14 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

It is not the strongest proof, but the original revision as of 15:09, 30 October 2001 uses the phrase 'silver-gray appearance', which if anything would be American English. -- Solipsist 05:42, 14 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

Since the original author of the article (User:Sodium) was an English medical student, I think it's unlikely that the first version[6] of the article was intended to be written in American English. Really not worth getting exercised about though, as the spelling of "aluminium" used throughout the article is the correct one. --Andrew Norman 07:35, 14 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

I agree strongly with Dforest that if the spelling used in the title is bases on IUPAC recommended spelling, then it cannot determine whether the article should use British or U.S. or some other national variant of spelling. Furthermore, who the first contributor was is immaterial; it is the first use by a significant contributor (not a stub) that matters, and the "gray" spelling is as good a clue as any for determining this.

Check the link above - User:Sodium's initial article (which uses the spelling "gray" for some reason despite his being English) was not a stub. Regarding the variant spelling of the element name itself, it's a mistake to see "-ium" as the British form, it's the international form and historically the most common form (as the article explains). "-um" is parochial to North America in the last hundred years. The IUPAC recognises "aluminum" and "cesium" as optional alternative spellings, and I can't find either being used in a modern IUPAC document on their own, as opposed to in brackets after the preferred spelling. --Andrew Norman 13:31, 14 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

Google "aluminum" 15,200,000 hits; "aluminium" 6,420,000 hits. It's not just "parochial to North America"; if it were, you'd have more than a 1.7:1 ratio for aluminium to aluminum when you limit it to site:.uk (e.g., litre:liter is more than 12:1 on site:.uk). Some of that, of course, is North American usage, but you will also find lots of examples of native usage of "aluminum" there and around the world, Australia, New Zealand, wherever. Gene Nygaard 14:06, 14 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

Absolute Rubbish - No-one in Britain pronounces the word as "aluminum" let alone spells it that way. This is where the Internet throws things skew-whiff. A lot of pages that have a .uk suffix are simply cut and pasted by large American organisations from their international corporate site to the sites they use for marketing their products in the UK. This is why Google is a complete waste of time for making these kinds of decisions. Jooler 15:56, 14 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

Furthermore, IUPAC often uses both spellings, and sometimes only aluminum. Can anybody actually point us to a specific IUPAC rule actually prescribing a certain spelling? Is it like caesium/cesium, where the alternative spelling is officially recognized as well? Gene Nygaard 12:30, 14 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

That latter question was answered in the article itself, with the 1993 official recognition of "aluminum" as a variant spelling by IUPAC. So it isn't quite true that IUPAC prescribes the "aluminium" spelling as is sometimes argued, nor as Andrew Norman claimed that it is the "correct" one in any absolute sense, though if we read his comment as "the correct choice for use in the Wikipedia article" it makes sense as a validly held opinion shared by others including some who'd spell it aluminum themselves. Note that a Google search for aluminum and not aluminium on site:iupac.org gets 171 hits. Gene Nygaard 12:37, 14 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

The article title used British English, the reason, which is entreily irrelevant. The article itself contained inconsistent BE/AE usage. like the word "labourer" and the word "favor". I made it consistent with the BE used in the article title. Jooler 15:56, 14 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

The title was not chosen because it is "British English", but because it was considered the dominant IUPAC spelling. You may not think it is relevant, but it does not make this a British English article nor justify your changes in spelling. The word labourer was perhaps the only CwE spelling in the article prior to your edits. Nowhere in the style guide does it state that the title should be the deciding factor in spelling disputes. Dforest 04:03, 15 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

For Nth time spellings should be consistent that IS MoS policy. Jooler 08:11, 15 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

Yes, but what they should be consistent with is debatable. (And technically it's a guideline, not policy.) Better to stick with neutral English. Dforest 02:44, 16 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

Thanks Dforest. I think going with neutral English is probably the best compromise, and those wording changes look quite successful. -- Solipsist 06:15, 16 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

Dforest - please stop changing the the spelling of the only remaining word on this page which has a different spelling in BE and AE. The choice of spelling of the words within the article should be consistent with the article title -as per MoS. The reason for the choice of one spelling over the can be for numerous reasons. In this case it has been decided to use the BE spelling and therefore the choice of spelling and idiom within the article should reflect BE usage - You and others (to the detriment of the value of the article itself) - ) have taken it upon yourselves to rid this article of words which have different spellings in BE and AE. Please stop disrupting this page. Jooler 22:05, 20 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

Jooler, you took it upon yourself to change all the so-called AE spellings to BE. Others agreed that the choice of IUPAC spelling does not mean the article is British English. Following Darrien's lead, I tried to compromise by rewriting the contentious words in neutral English. Anyway, the spelling you edited is irrelevant as Kaopectate does not contain Al. [7]. Dforest 01:26, 21 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

The Google Test

Latest comment: 20 years ago15 comments7 people in discussion

A few days ago I added this comment to the spelling section of the article:

"As of 2005, a Google search on the words shows a popular preference for the aluminum spelling, more than twice that of aluminium. However, such a test may be considered biased. See Google test."

Vsmith quickly reverted this, claiming it is irrelevant. Yet it keeps coming up on the talk page... I'd like to hear what other WPs think. Dforest 15:25, 14 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

It's irrelevant to an encyclopaedia article on Aluminium. It is relvant to the naming of an article on Wikuipedia. so it should not be in the article, and it is no suprise that it comes up on the talk page. Jooler 15:48, 14 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

IMO, a mention of the Google test is relevant as a footnote in the section of an article specifically concerning the spelling of "aluminium" vs. "aluminum". Dforest 02:36, 16 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

As far as I can see, the only point in mentioning it is to establish the relative frequency of use of each spelling. In the past I've worked with someone developing word counting/indexing software for use by dictionary editors (I can't now remember whether it was the OED or Collins). They pay careful attention to source of text that would be considered relevant and I doubt Google would pass muster (for example you don't include data from the language used in the 1911EB to determine current usage). They were actually using vast collections of electronic texts - I have a vague impression that collections of newspapers were considered particularly fruitful, but I can't remember the reasoning - possibly because their daily timestamp was useful for tracking the historical variations in word usage.

So if we don't completely understand the biases of Google, it shouldn't be presented as fact in the article. However, I saw a news story suggesting that Google had started a project to put a large number of books online, so that might produce a dataset that could be used. -- Solipsist 05:40, 16 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

Actually, use of Google hits counts is a fast-growing area of real (albeit informal, but done by professionals, not just amateurs) linguistic research. Second, I don't see anything wrong with including the fact that Google has more hits for aluminum than aluminium. It's a verifiable fact, something that is perfectly acceptable for inclusion on Wikipedia. It would be a step too far to say that the Google results necessarily mean that aluminum is more common than aluminium in English usage overall, but there is nothing wrong with saying that Google has more hits for aluminum than aluminium, and in a section describing contention over the spelling of the word, such a fact is perfectly relevant and demonstrative. Nohat 06:37, 16 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

Google means nothing in terms of usage. Absolutely nothing. Usage on the Internet is dominated by American usage because American companies cut and past their pages to UK sites as described above. For example Look at http://www.pricerunner.co.uk/ a supposed UK site but on the front page we find "Find the best price on your favorite music". Google also provides very many false positives. For exampe go to Google and type in 'aluminum site:uk' look at the first site "Aluminum Packaging Recycling Organization" - alupro.co.uk if you click on the cached version, what do you find? "These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: aluminum" -the google test is bollox. Jooler 09:57, 16 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

The points you bring up have no bearing in aggregate. Google indexes over 8 billion pages. The relative distribution of spellings may be biased;however, they make up for it in volume: the sheer vastness of the quantity of matches makes the results necessarily relevant. It is a fact that Google reports that more pages have the aluminum spelling. What purpose is there in suppressing the presentation of actual, verifiable facts on Wikipedia articles other than to further some hidden agenda? Since it's disputed, why don't we let the readers decide how to interpret the facts concerning the spelling of aluminum? Nohat 05:04, 19 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

"It is a fact that Google reports that more pages have the aluminum spelling.' - No it is not. The very top hit for 'aluminum site:uk' does NOT contain the word 'aluminum'. In any case "pages cached by google" does not reflect International usage, it merely reflects the american domination of the Internet. how many exammples of American corporations using sites with a .uk suffix and cutting and pasting content from pages written with american English do you want me to provide? Jooler 08:01, 19 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

I agree with Nohat's comment. Jooler, you write "It is relvant to the naming of an article on Wikuipedia" but "Google means nothing in terms of usage." There appears to be a contradiction here. Google is not perfect as a method of determining popular usage, but it is a good rule of thumb, and often used as such. Note that Google News, which indexes many newspapers around the world, has a ratio of 4:1 of aluminum:aluminium. I suggest that if you have objections to Google's results, find a more accurate source of usage statistics and add it to the article as a rebuttal. Dforest 04:31, 19 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

I have just demonstrated that the very first hit on google for 'aluminum site:uk' does not even contain the word 'aluminum'. What more evidence do you need to prove that Google provides false positives? Jooler 08:01, 19 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

Sorry, but your attacks against Google's relevance just don't hold up. If you search using "allintext: " at the beginning of the Google query, it ensures that the pages include the search terms. The results are unstartlingly parallel to the searches without "allintext". Nobody is claiming that Google is an exact mirror of all usage, but it does provide some data, and your minor complaints about possible problems do not stand up against the vast weight of millions of real examples of usage that it provides. Nohat 08:20, 19 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

The Google comment amounts to original research in addition to being irrelevant and biased. It does not belong in the article. Vsmith 12:05, 19 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

Hear hear. I fail to see the relevance of this original research. — OwenBlacker 12:24, July 19, 2005 (UTC)

Agreed. James F. (talk) 15:07, 19 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

It is not original research, in fact it is mentioned on the Google test page. (see: Idiosyncratic usage). A link back to that page is perfectly reasonable. --Dforest 00:40, 20 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

It is original research, and that page is not an article, it's in the wikipedia namespace. We should not use an article in the wikipedia namespace as a reference, nor should we link to articles in the Wikipedia namespace from the main namespace. -- Joolz 02:38, 20 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

Merging Super-Purity Aluminium

Super_Purity_Aluminium is a different beast than the run-of the mill stuff produced in the current Hall-Héroult process. Of course, I still haven't been able to figure out how they make it. (I have an email addy for a producer in the industry, but haven't had time to monkey with that...)

I guess it could be merged, but I was hoping that as a seperate article it might get worked on more, since it's not being worked on within the Aluminium article....

~ender 2005-07-22 15:53:MST

Put down the I, and step away from the word

Latest comment: 19 years ago47 comments9 people in discussion

The extra I fails the Google test and the population test. Let's please just be reasonable, and move this to 'aluminum'. -Litefantastic 17:07, 24 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

Yawn. Do we have to keep putting up with ignorant comments like this? Jooler 21:07, 24 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

I've taken it up with the manual of style. I'm not trying to give you a hard time (I briefed myself on some previous complains akin to my own for reference), but the fact remains that the manual of style disagrees with popular opinion... Aside from the fact that you're sick of hearing dissenters, what are your thoughts? -Litefantastic 23:59, 24 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

What are you claiming to be popular opinion? The spelling of aluminium? For the love of Mike, that spelling is almost exclusively used by Americans. It is popular in America. The Internet is mostly American. The world mostly isn't. Jooler 00:04, 25 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

Yes. If the Internet is mostly American, it will be mostly Americans viewing the 'Aluminium' page. Correct me if I'm wrong - please - but I think I'm just reconfirming what you said. On a side note, I'd like to apollogise for the hubris I took when I started this thread; it was the wrong way to approach this. -Litefantastic 00:10, 25 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

Well. No I think most American internet users are too busy downloading porn. The IUPAC use Aluminium, so that is why this page is at Aluminium. That is an end of it. But I imagine you would want to use US spelling throughout Wikipedia for the reasons you state. Using your argument we should only use Chinese. The fact that most of the Internet is written by American speakers is because America is rich and rich American corporations and rich American universatives put together most of the content. Most readers are not American. This has been argued countless times. See http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Guerilla_UK_spelling_campaign for a lighter take on it. Jooler 00:30, 25 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

OK. I'm an American and I teach chemistry in the good old USA. My textbooks spell it aluminum and with my students I use it as aluminum (although I point out the IUPAC spelling). Aluminium is the IUPAC reccommended spelling just as sulfur is - and wikipedia chemistry project made the decision to go with IUPAC. It's been bashed about too many times, give it up - on wikipedia it is spelled aluminium. When I find aluminum on wiki, I change it to aluminium - just as I change sulphur to sulfur (Historical/archaic usage and place names aside). So cut the google/American snobism and accept it. And note, please refrain from using the stupid porn slur. Thanks, Vsmith 01:15, 25 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

Nonsense. Total, utter nonsense. Wikipedia has no "official spellings". Each article is spelled according to the national spelling style used for that article. If an article otherwise uses American spellings, then there is no reason why it should use the non-American spelling aluminum. AFAIK there is no policy which supports changing all instances of the word aluminum to aluminium, so I suggest you stop that. Furthermore, the fact that IUPAC chooses some particular spelling should have no bearing at all on how Wikipedia chooses to spell an ordinary word like aluminum. I accept that community consensus supports spelling it aluminium at the moment, but I definitely do not support Wikipedia's acceding to some foreign spelling authority. We decide our own spellings around here based on our own policies which are decided using the NPOV. To do otherwise would be a flagrant violation of NPOV. Nohat 02:35, 25 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

"Foreign" to whom exactly? Bad attitude. "We" do not decide our own spellings - that's nonsense. This is an encyclopedia and it is supposed to reflect the world, not shape it. In this case the article explains the etymology and adequately covers the fact that in the American branch of English sub-dialects there is a slight deviation from the normal spelling. The view of the international body simply reflects the status quo. Wiki-Ed 12:32, 29 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

IUPAC is foreign to Wikipedia and they have no authority to legislate how we use the English language, nor is there any policy that says we should obey IUPAC's preferences. A majority of native English speakers are speakers of American English. Calling American English a "branch of sub-dialects" makes it seem at though American English is some uninfluential minority dialect. It is not. And furthermore, if you want to accurately "reflect the world", the reality is that a giant fraction of English speakers, if not a majority, spell and pronounce this word "aluminum", and I see no Wikipedia policy that says valid American spellings should be dispreferred. Nohat 06:00, 2 September 2005 (UTC)Reply

I am American, but let me share a small anecdote. One time on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire", the questions was "What is the capital of Australia?" The choices were Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne, and some other city. The contestant decided to use his ask-the-audience lifeline and I knew immediately he would lose. Sure enough, they picked Syndey and he went with them. The moral is: the majority is not always right ~~and Americans are bad in geogrpahy~~. Nelson Ricardo 03:18, September 2, 2005 (UTC) (edited: Nelson Ricardo 11:34, September 2, 2005 (UTC))

Sophistry. The point of this anecdote is to impeach Americans' intelligence, and then by implication impeach their authority to decide how to spell words. Spellings of words are not "facts"; they are conventions. Conventions are established by usage or custom. If a large fraction (or even a majority) of users of a word spell it a particular way, then that spelling is by definition conventional. This story has nothing to support the theory that "aluminium" is somehow "more correct" than "aluminum". Nohat 06:00, 2 September 2005 (UTC)Reply

I agree with Nohat; Vsmith's comments are nonsense. Note that even the French Wikipedia featured article (see notice at top of page) sometimes uses "aluminum" spelling, as do several other French Wikipedia articles, mixed in with aluminium spellings.

IUPAC accepts both spellings; their choice of one of them in their "house rules" for in-house publications isn't particularly relevant to anything, and even the IUPAC website has a great many articles using the "aluminum" spelling. Gene Nygaard 06:16, 2 September 2005 (UTC)Reply

Probably wirtten by French Canadians - put "aluminum site:fr" into Google. How many pages do you have to go through till you find an article written in French? What does the point about French Wikipedia prove anyway? Jooler 06:41, 2 September 2005 (UTC)Reply

It is worth noting some usage statistics in the article. I added a mention of the Google test. If others find this biased, I suggest you find another source and add it as a rebuttal. --Dforest 06:49, 2 September 2005 (UTC)Reply

The Internet is inherently biased as I have pointed out before and Google reflects that as well as emphasizing it. Saying that aluminum is more popular on the Internet is like saying aluminum is more popular in the New York Times. Jooler 06:52, 2 September 2005 (UTC)Reply

The internet may be inherently biased, but it is sophistry to compare the results from an unregulated global medium to a heavily regulated and nationally-oriented newspaper whose style is mandated from above. The two are not comparable at all, and the suggestion that statistical results on usage of the two are in any way comparable is symptomatic of what I perceive to be a desperate attempt to cover up interesting facts. Indeed, I'd say that the fact that IUPAC's official style guide prefers aluminium is less relevant to the topic of aluminum in general than the results from Google. The statistical results from the web's largest search are perfectly reasonable to mention on this page. Nohat 07:26, 2 September 2005 (UTC)Reply

Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees!? The NYT is an American newspaper, butI would imagine, like all newspapers around the world it carries syndicated stories written by international news organizations like AFP and Reuters. Likewise the Internet is predominantly an American entity, the rest follows. Statistics without context are meaningless. The context is that Google both reflects and and enhances the American English bias of the Internet (which is a no-brainer). With this in mind the fact that Google prefers aluminum over aluminium is no more interesting or relevant to this page than the fact that Google prefers humor to humour. Jooler 08:07, 2 September 2005 (UTC)Reply

Newspaper that carry stories from international news organizations copyedit them to adhere to their house styles. All articles published in the NYT follow NYT house style rules. If you didn't know that, fine, but the analogy remains totally inept and unapt. Second, it does not go without saying that the internet is inherently biased in favor of the U.S. It has been a long time now that the U.S. does not constitute a majority of the internet. Information about relative sizes of usage groups is not necessarily a given, and we mustn't lose sight of Wikipedia:State the obvious. It may be obvious to you that a Google search will show more hits for aluminum than for aluminium, but that's not true of everyone else. I don't have any problem with tempering the information with caveats about potential biases and so forth, but I don't really see a reasonable argument for completely suppressing it. Furthermore, the interesting fact is that even though "aluminium" is the "official" spelling of IUPAC and is the supposed "international standard", Google still has more hits for aluminum than aluminium, but that the number of Google hits for aluminum is about 13.5 million and the number of Google hits for aluminium is about 5 million; that ratio on the internet is about 2.7 to 1 in favor of "aluminum", which indicates that yes, "aluminum" has a majority of usage on the internet, but that "aluminium" also constitutes a significant minority usage, not a marginal spelling. The statistics serve as a counterbalance to the other descriptions of usage, which seem to "favor" the spelling "aluminium". Nohat 08:33, 2 September 2005 (UTC)Reply

I want to add that the comparison with "humour" is also an incredibly unapt analogy. That spelling is simply a regular difference in spelling only between the BrE and AmE. Aluminum/Aluminium, on the other hand, is a completely unpredictable and idiosyncratic difference that is represented in both spelling and pronunciation. The two are not even remotely comparable. Nohat 08:58, 2 September 2005 (UTC)Reply

The Internet is not "predominantly an American entity"; read this excerpt from the Internet article. Note "a majority of the population".

"Countries where Internet access is a commodity used by a majority of the population include Germany, Iceland, Finland, Sweden, Australia, Denmark, the United States, Canada, the UK, The Netherlands, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea and Norway." Dforest 08:29, 2 September 2005 (UTC)Reply

Re NYT - try looking at [8] - what happened there!? - did the spellchecker break, or was the copyeditor having a coffee break!? - But this, along with the pointless bashing of the humor/humour analogy, (unapt?) is irrelevant. The notable thing about a commodity' is that there are producers and there are consumers. The majority of producers of websites on the Internet and the software products that are used to produce them are American. In this sense it IS without question a predominantly American entity (certainly from the perspective of the English language). The reason for this imbalance is primarily the economic power of American IT corporations. If you load up Microsoft Word using the default installation for English, what do you get? You get English (U.S.), how many non-native English speakers in Germany, Iceland, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, The Netherlands, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea and Norway change this to English (British)? No-one - that is no-one - in the UK pronounces the word as aluminum, and consequently no-one - that is - no-one - in the UK spells it as aluminum, and yet we find that a huge number of web-pages sited within the .uk ___domain use the American spelling!? What is your explanation for this ? Is it that suddenly we have decided to adopt the US spelling? No. The reason is that these web-pages are almost mostly written by Americans and have been cut/and pasted to .uk sites. It is thus a prime example of the pro-American bias of the Internet and displays that Google hit-counts are entirely meaningless in the real world. Jooler 13:50, 2 September 2005 (UTC)Reply

All of those .uk websites are not written by Americans or copied from them.

Of people whose mother tongue is English, 69% are in the United States and 5% in Canada;[9] North Americans outnumber the rest of the world by 3 to 1 when looked at this way. Gene Nygaard 14:22, 2 September 2005 (UTC)Reply

That's funny. The Wikipedia article on English language says there might be up to 2000m people speaking English worldwide. I make the total population of the US and Canada to be about 330m (according to Wikipedia) which equates to about 16.5% of people speaking English. Of course I don't think any of those articles are completely accurate, nor do I think that all the other English speakers would necessarily use the non-American spelling, but hey, statistics are fun right? Wiki-Ed 18:42, 2 September 2005 (UTC)Reply

And yet again we have the same rubbish trotted out. Is Wikipedia for native speakers only!? The majority rules and damn the rest? Is this what Wikipedia is about? 300 million people on the Indian sub-continent say no. You say "All of those .uk websites are not written by Americans or copied from them" - what percentage then? - I can tell you for sure that Britons do not pronounce or spell the word as aluminum - so why the hell would we write it? Jooler 16:54, 2 September 2005 (UTC)Reply

Regarding English speakers on the Indian sub-continent, if you include 'English as a lingua franca' in the above statistics, counting India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, you get 48.4 million, a far cry from the 300 million you state. Dforest 19:07, 2 September 2005 (UTC)Reply

American English *is* a branch of English. It may not be uninflential but it is certainly a minority as the majority of people speaking English do not reside in the US (nor do they spell aluminium without an 'i'). Fact checking needs to be done... and not through use of American internet sources like Google. This is a fundamental stumbling point. I believe the point of Nelson Ricardo's anecdote was not to impugn the intelligence of Americans, but to illustrate that just because one group sets a convention does not mean that it is correct, either in absolute terms or in relation to the rest of the world. When perception is coloured then facts will be confused. This topic is a case in point. Wiki-Ed 09:45, 2 September 2005 (UTC)Reply

If you disagree, then cite some counter-evidence. But you can't just delete valid information just because you think it may be biased. Show us some evidence. The Google results are a fact, and they have a caveat. Both the fact and the caveat are on the page. There is no valid reason to remove them. Nohat 17:36, 2 September 2005 (UTC)Reply

The "evidence" is extraneous when the article already explains the etymology quite thoroughly. Google results are not factual because there is no way of telling whether they are accurate or representative. Also, you can tailor them to suit your argument. For example if I remove all US-sourced domains from the search criteria I end up with "aluminium" outnumbering "aluminum" 2:1. Bit contrived, but it seems to support Jooler's hypothesis. Try it. That's "counter-evidence" isn't it? Wiki-Ed 18:42, 2 September 2005 (UTC)Reply

So, information on how a word is spelled on 18.5 million web pages is completely irrelevant to a discussion of how a word is spelled. Nohat 18:02, 2 September 2005 (UTC)Reply

It is relevant to this discussion on this talk page, but it is not relevant to the encyclopaedia article, and frankly I'm staggered that you still think it is relevant. BTW I strongly object to the accusation of vandalism that you have used on the edit summary. The Google results are a 'fact and they do have a caveat, the caveat is that it is and entirely bogus statistic that proves precisely nothing. Jooler 18:16, 2 September 2005 (UTC)Reply

Why is it entirely bogus? Is how people spell things on the internet not relevant to the topic of spelling? What exactly is the harm in including this information? Are people in some way misled or lied to if they are informed about the Google results? I understand that you think that it's entirely bogus and that it proves nothing, but others here, including me, disagree that it's completley bogus and think it's informative and relevant. 18.5 million web pages is a significant data point, whether you like it or not.

What happened to the spirit of NPOV? We're perfectly willing to explain that the information comes with a caveat, but you appear to be totally unwilling to budge on the point that it be included in any form at all whatsoever. There is a disagreement; Wikipedia policy when there is a disagreement is to compromise by contextualizing disputed points, not to completely remove them. Where's your spirit of compromise? How can you completely discount 18.5 million web pages as not being relevant? That's approximately 18,499,999 more opinions than yours, and yet you would silence them. For shame. Nohat 18:36, 2 September 2005 (UTC)Reply

BTW, when you remove information from an article when there is no consensus to do so, especially where there are a number of people on the talk page who disagree with that removal, then that's vandalism in my book. There is no consensus that this information should not be included, so removing it constitutes vandalism. If you don't want your actions described as vandalism, then I suggest you not vandalize articles. Nohat 18:41, 2 September 2005 (UTC)Reply

I think the best way to solve this is to follow the relevant authority where there is one. In the case of chemical names, go with the IUPAC primary spelling, as we have for the elements Caesium and Sulfur. I am from the United States, so that will mean using something other than what I was taught in grade school for this article, but so be it. Jonathunder 18:18, 2005 September 2 (UTC)

The information about the official IUPAC spelling is already included in the article. The question now appears to be whether information about the number of Google results for the different spellings can be included in the article at all. Nohat 18:36, 2 September 2005 (UTC)Reply

If I went out and wrote a virus which changed the spelling on all those pages would the "results" still be relevant? No. Are they now? No. Above you claim that IUPAC is a "foreign" entity which we should ignore because it has no authority over Wikipedia. However, it seems to me that instead you are trying to use the authority of a tiny number (relatively speaking) of non-recognised "foreign" website authors to justify how a word is spelt. Hypocrisy? Yes. Wiki-Ed 18:42, 2 September 2005 (UTC)Reply

You misunderstand. There are two different issues here. The first is how Wikipedia articles in general should spell the word "aluminum". The second is whether or not the article about aluminum should include information from Google about the number of pages that use different results. Furthermore, there is a qualitative difference between making linguistic arguments based on some what self-appointed authority says is correct and making linguistic arguments based on preponderances of usage. The former is called "prescriptivism" and the latter is called "descriptivism". The former is not really accepted by professional linguists as a valid argument for pretty much anything, but the latter forms the basis for how all scientific study of language is undertaken. Nohat 19:15, 2 September 2005 (UTC)Reply

So is that what you kept adding to the article--a "scientific study" of spelling? Looks like original research to me. By the way, you clearly broke the three revert rule in adding it back over and over. You can be blocked for that. CDThieme 20:13, 2 September 2005 (UTC)Reply

The ban on original research does not mean that one can't present simple facts gleaned from a pair of Google searches. Trying to apply that policy here smacks of desperation. Saying that you can't include results from Google searches would mean that almost everything on Wikipedia would be "original research". As for the 3RR, it doesn't apply to vandalism, which is exactly what continually removing valid information from an article despite a lack of consensus is. Nohat 20:52, 2 September 2005 (UTC)Reply

Lol. I was just about to say that! I understood there are two elements to this, but the threads are a little confused. On the first point, as I have said, I think the article covers the fact that there are two spellings adequately. It even gives quite a detailed history. The second points seems like primary research to me too. I suspect you may disagree, but I haven't been able to find a policy line on the use of Google. Wiki-Ed 20:20, 2 September 2005 (UTC)Reply

The article doesn't given any statistical information on distribution of usage, which, if you ask any linguist, is absolutely the most important information in any kind of linguistic analysis. Nohat 20:52, 2 September 2005 (UTC)Reply

Get over it you guys! The non-US contributors to Wikipedia have to put up with an enormous amount of US linguistic imperialism. Let's go with the internationally recognised standard and go on to something useful. DJ Clayworth 21:00, 2 September 2005 (UTC)Reply

I'm sorry, what? What does American linguistic imperialism have to do with presenting some simple facts about usage in the article? Are you suggesting that the fact that according to Google "aluminum" is 2.7 times more common on the internet than "aluminium" should be suppressed as some kind of "compensation" for alleged American linguistic imperialism? Nohat 21:13, 2 September 2005 (UTC)Reply

I don't think this is a U.S. versus anyone else issue: opinions from American editors above have been on both sides. I really don't think the charge of "imperialism" is helpful in finding a solution. Please withdraw it. (This request is from an American who probably agrees with you otherwise.) Jonathunder 21:08, 2005 September 2 (UTC)

Nohat. I was in fact following the consensus that the Google statistics were not relevant and should not be included on this page that had been established quite some time ago, when Dforest last went about trying to include them back in July. So your alleged vandalism charge is unwarranted and disengenous. You were the one making continuous reversions against that consensus. Jooler 21:57, 2 September 2005 (UTC)Reply

What consensus? I don't see any consensus. All I see is acrimonious debate, with one side logrolling their POV through without any attempt to compromise. Nohat 22:09, 2 September 2005 (UTC)Reply

You say "what consensus?" - bnack in july along with myself, we had

"Hear hear. I fail to see the relevance of this original research." — OwenBlacker
"Agreed." James F.
It is original research -- Joolz

And the debate ended there until DForest re-ignited it, and you fanned the flames. Jooler 22:26, 2 September 2005 (UTC)Reply

Dforest. Those figures are well known to be hugely inaccurate for several reasons and were in fact the subject of some debate on the talk:English language page. See [Talk:English_language#Pie_Chart] and then see [Talk:English_language#Indian_English_Speakers] which states "a 1997 'India Today' survey suggested that about a third of the population has the ability to carry on a conversation in English you end up with around 350 million English language speakers in India" - I was being conservative. Jooler 21:57, 2 September 2005 (UTC)Reply

This still doesn't address the issue of how statistics of usage on the internet are invalid. They don't represent all written English, sure, but the internet is a large and important subset of written usage, and has the added benefit of being measurable. Imperfect data shouldn't be suppressed; it should simply be presented with its imperfections. With the exception of cold, hard, data that directly contradicts the Google data, there is nothing you can say or do to convince me that it's invalid.

However, given that, I disagree that the data is as useless as you claim, and until anyone provides any kind of data or evidence; anything at all whatsoever that directly contradicts the Google data, I don't see any reason to discount it. All these theories and arguments about how Google may potentially be biased or unreliable are just that: theories and arguments. Unless hard facts can be shown that directly contradict the data, the data cannot be denied. Nohat 22:09, 2 September 2005 (UTC)Reply

Ok try to convince me - what exactly' do 18.5 million Google hits actually tell us? (BTW I get 13.5). What do 389,000 "aluminum site:uk" hits tells us? That's the clincher isn't it? 18.5 million hits for aluminum proves that a whole bunch of people wrote the word aluminum on the Internet, and Google counted 'em and added a whole bunch of other false positives (see above) and came out with a figure of 18.5 million. Nothing more nothing less. What do 822,000 hits for "Guiness"(sic) tell us?, What do 2,960,000 hits for "seperate" tells us? what do 4,910,000 hits for "millennium" tell us? It tells us that a lot of people don't use a spellchecker when they write stuff on the Internet (myself included, but my main problem is my inability to touch type). Jooler 22:20, 2 September 2005 (UTC)Reply

What is going on in this picture?

Latest comment: 19 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Aluminium metal with an American penny for size comparison

Alright, exactly why is there a size comparison for an arbitrarily-sized chunk of aluminium? Is this the standard size that the metal forms in? Maybe I'm missing something, but the picture and caption seem unintentionally humorous. --Poiuyt Man ^talk 14:00, 30 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

I agree. The caption is odd, and the penny doesn't add much to the reader's understanding of the subject (other than showing the scale is not microscopic, I suppose). Jonathunder 19:07, 2005 September 2 (UTC)