Talk:C3H4O

WTF?

   I've disabled this:

{{DisambigProject}}

The accompanying main-namespace page is not a compliant Dab. Nor does it even approach or try to approach that needed function. I've used some of its content to write a compliant Dab (which is at C₃H₄O (disambiguation)), which for now links to the non-Dab, but i'm also proposing both renaming the non-Dab and deleting it.
   The name i have in mind for it, if it is not deleted, is Survey of the C₃H₄O compounds. It could perhaps become a WP:SIA instead, but I doubt it is worth retention if that is all it can achieve. On the other hand, i'm not at all clear that would be worthy of an article. (I'd say "I doubt very much that is appropriate", which is true, but just saying that would suggest i know more about what is useful to chemists than i actually know.)
--Jerzy•t 20:24, 24 July 2011 (UTC)

Move, if not deleted

The following discussion is an archived discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

No consensus to move. Vegaswikian (talk) 02:25, 2 August 2011 (UTC)

C3H4O → Table of the C₃H₄O compounds –     I am still not completely sure that the content has an appropriate place in WP, but if it does, i have several reasons for preferring a move, which will permit reuse of "C₃H₄O" as the title of the Dab (currently at "C₃H₄O (disambiguation)") that i've created:

1. The table/list's purpose ought to be subordinated to that of the disambiguation of the title "C₃H₄O", quick access to which (and lack of clutter within which) is more valuable to users, who are probably using the title in trying to find the name of a more-than-theoretical compound whose article they want to read.
2. Suppose the 4-compound Dab proves inadequate for the decision by any user in need for one of its 4 target articles, and the 11-compound table's structural formulas and CAS numbers would suffice to make the difference. That should be a rare case, but the time lost following the Dab's See-also to that table should be less than that lost to distraction if the table were kept as the primary topic.
3. The invitation to assume that "C₃H₄O" is a substance (as H₂O is), or even a cohesive group of substances in anything but the most abstract sense, is also worth avoiding. The lesson "don't make the mistake of inferring that the page title tells you that it that title unambiguously names the topic" is learned early at WP, and one recalls it immediately starting with the 3rd or 4th time that a link leads to a Dab. (That is one reason why we can prefer the bare titleas the disambiguation page when feasible (e.g. with Battery, where Battery (disambiguation) is the Rdr pointing to it) -- and why we never do the reverse.)
4. In contrast, a non-Dab entitled "C₃H₄O" invites the impression that the sense in which "C₃H₄O" is the proper name of any one thing, when that is the case only in the most abstract sense, and compared to the Dab titling situation, the page faces a serious uphill battle against misleading its users.

   (Hmm, i got that far, and thot "how about editing it to make the tabular nature more obvious." Then i began to realize that there were more diagrams in the graphic than were explained in the text, and that the user got no help making the diagrams useful, and as i worked to remedy that the tabular nature become more obscured. I still think that a decent organic chemist could do a better job than i; it would include specifying 9 or 12 or whatever individual structure diagrams -- each fitting into a table cell! -- and repairing the errors that probably led some earlier colleague to do a halfway job of cleaning up, that left structure diagrams that just don't belong in the article. And I think it would work to have a table structure presenting most of the corrected data.)
--Jerzy•t 06:06, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

Other pages in Category:Molecular formula disambiguation pages just use the formula. Biscuittin (talk) 18:54, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

Confusing organization

The table seems to be poorly organized, in that it has some relationships horizontally (first two rows are linear, bottom two are cyclic) but not consistently so (why are acrolein and and hydroxyallene not side-by-side, like cyclopropenone and hydroxycyclopropene?). Then the three alkynes are not grouped together. Then the carbonyl compounds are dispersed. The text equivocates on basic science (proposing possible name/number consistencies for structures? No, compounds have names and numbers, and they either do or don't agree, period). The article already uses two different names for the compound cyclo -O-C=C-C- in the lede vs the later prose, and the lede states that the later prose is other compounds, as if using different names has confused the editors into thinking they are different! I already removed one badly incorrect name: "propylene oxide" sure seems like it would be "an oxygen attached around propene", but we even have a propylene oxide article to disprove that. The overall text appears to be trying to rationalize and cluster a not-entirely rational or organized diagram, rather than having the information itself be organized with a diagram to support it.

This whole thing might be better as a table in-wiki rather than a monolithic image and then an outline trying to describe it. That would let us include image/name/CAS/link (if available) all together. For example, see how Hexose has a gallery of the various specific compounds and a note and link about each. DMacks (talk) 12:52, 29 February 2012 (UTC)