Talk:Isotopes of hydrogen

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Time unit abbreviation ys

Yostosecond (ys) will be an unfamiliar unit to most people and should have a verbose note to make clear the usage (especially as some people might mistake it to mean years). Can someone please add this since this is coming from a template? If this can be done in the template, it will fix the usage everywhere. Or at the very least point to Orders_of_magnitude_(time) Pmarshal (talk) 23:19, 15 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that this would be helpful, though only for very uncommon abbreviations (shorter than nanoseconds). The alternative would be to use the exponent parameter in {{val}}, a change that would need to be implemented in each article individually. DePiep, what do you think of this? ComplexRational (talk) 00:24, 16 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Pmarshal and ComplexRational: As CR suggested, I have applied {{val}} with |ul=ys unitlink set for each first appearance per section [1]. IMO this is the most appropriate way, and wiki-/web-common way, to clarify. Left the <math> decay list as is (do we link in a math line anyway?). -DePiep (talk) 06:30, 17 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, that ought to do it. And as for the math lines, there's already an explanatory note distinguishing y and ys. ComplexRational (talk) 14:22, 17 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you, the link to ys should be sufficiently explicit. I think this issue is closed. Pmarshal (talk) 08:55, 21 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I do not consider the issue closed at all, and I was very confused for a few moments there when I found the half-life of tritium given in "y" and those of the other isotopes in "ys". Even though the article from which the figures are taken uses the "y" abbreviation to mean "year," the Wikipedia article for "year" says "The symbol 'a' is more common in scientific literature". Given that, I would suggest never ever using the abbreviation "y" when talking about science matters, but especially not here, where "y" appears to mean "yocto" in the very next line. --178.202.159.215 (talk) 23:12, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

That's an important point, but "ys" is a metric-prefixed "s", not a variant of "y", in the same way that "as" is not a variant of "a" (annum). Unfortunately the metric-prefixes and unit-suffixes are not disjoint sets of letters. MOS:CHEM does not seem to discuss choice of units, but the examples in {{Infobox element}} and {{Infobox element isotopes}} all appear to use "y" for years in half-life units. WP:PHYSICS doesn't have its own sub-MOS. Site-wide Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers#Units of measurement says:

a	Use a only with an SI prefix multiplier (a rock formation 540 Ma old, not Life expectancy rose to 60 a).
y or yr	See § Long periods of time for all affected units.

So I think our isotopes tables should all be consistent with each other as a primary objective, and it seems like "y" is the current site-wide standard both in this specific use-case and per a MOS that has consensus well beyond just chemistry-article editors. DMacks (talk) 23:43, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

We could surely just solve this by using plain seconds and scientific notation rather than yoctoseconds, though. Double sharp (talk) 05:23, 20 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I tend to agree. There are many units of measurement which are obscure even to scientists and engineers. For clarity, perhaps only MKS units be used with exponential notation in preference to very obscure units, unless a specific discipline uses it as normal notation as a standard. These units add little to understanding and are more likely to obfuscation or misunderstanding. Pmarshal (talk) 11:35, 27 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Clarification of measurement uncertainty

In a similar vein as with Yostosecond/ys, I think it would be useful to have some sort of explanation for using a parenthetical for measurement uncertainty. I am unsure how best to do this; I suspect linking to Uncertainty#In_measurements would be sufficient. For reference, despite having a background in engineering, I don't recall ever seeing this notation before and had to dig around to figure out what it was. Perchy22 (talk) 03:27, 3 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Deuterium

The section, "Hydrogen-2 (deuterium)", doesn't cite any sources. Please add some sources. Solomonfromfinland (talk) 16:28, 13 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]