Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/Electron shells

Electron shells

Uranium (chosen arbitrarily) has a high number of electrons; this diagram shows how they are arranged. :b

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An electron shell is a group of atomic orbitals with the same value of the principal quantum number n. Electron shells are made up of one or more electron subshells, or sublevels, which have two or more orbitals with the same angular momentum quantum number l. Electron shells make up the electron configuration of an atom. It can be shown that the number of electrons that can reside in a shell is equal to $2n^{2}$.

This image combines all the diagrams into one SVG image, at the nominator's request.

Reason

This nomination is for a set of images (think Mandelbrot), the entirety of which can be found here. While any one alone is obviously unworthy of featured status, together, the clarity that they demonstrate the concept of the electron shell (stemming from simplicity) may be worth "featured set" status. The set is comprehensive and uniform, released under an acceptable license, and every image is an SVG. It received support at picture peer review.

From the creator: My intention in creating this set was to produce a coherent set of images that demonstrated the electron shells (with the main audience being school students), they were produced to with a colour scheme to match the work already on Wikipedia so that any separate elements included on pages would not look out of place. Greg Robson 21:46, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

Articles this image appears in

I didn't check every image, so this may be incomplete, but but the sodium image appears in electron shell and neon appears in noble gas.

Creator

Pumbaa (original work by Greg Robson)

• Support as nominator — HereToHelp 15:51, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
• Strong Support Wow! Very cool. Although perhaps not one of the most attractive image sets on Wikipedia, it is certainly one of the most illustrative. Jellocube27 16:42, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
• Support Cool. ^8thstar 18:49, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
• Support by creator Although not the most glamourous, they might go some way to helping some GCSE or A-level student grasp the concept in chemistry! A lot of time and effort was taken to create the different rings and get the spacings right in order to make what is an A0 (twice your standard flipchart) landscape poster! Greg Robson 21:36, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
• Strong Support Full Table Version - incredibly well done, and in SVG to boot. --Uberlemur 23:09, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
• Strong Support table version per Uberlemur — Jack · talk · 10:59, Monday, 2 April 2007
• Support either with preference to full table version, both are great and encyclopedic--User:Ahadland1234 23:13, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
• Oppose Useful for high-schoolers only if high schoolers can find them. Convince me that the set as a whole is useful and linked in the encyclopedia in a useful way, and I'll support. Otherwise, these diagrams at lots of different articles might confuse people as to what electron shells actually are. It'll be even easier to convince me to support the periodic table version, but where would that version be in the encyclopedia? At the moment, it's linked no-where. Enuja 02:07, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

• Well, for one thing, it's too big to put much of anywhere unless would prefer a fullscreen scrolling mechanism.--HereToHelp 03:03, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

• Oppose per below. Comment leaning oppose, but I'd first like to see how this is solved: 1. Neither of the two images here is in an article (a criterion). 2. Even if the table is put in an article, it's unrecognizable at thumbnail size, barely recognizable at image page size (1024px in my setup), and browsers aren't automatically equiped to handle svg's (at least mine, IE6, isn't). So there needs to be a way to display the image(s) in a recognizable form, or it (they) shouldn't be promoted. ~ trialsanderrors 21:51, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

Perhaps Periodic table (electron configurations)?--HereToHelp 23:16, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

OK I added it to the article, let's see how it gets accepted there. The second point is still unsolved though. ~ trialsanderrors 23:22, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

Whoops I should have been clearer: I meant to get rid of the old table altogether and make the new image gigantic. I did so, but in the preview at 2k px, the SVG looked blurry, while the PNG is sized at several times that, and looks fine at the size I added it in as. Go figure. (If the PNG renders better than the SVG, promote it instead — but there's probably some other reason that I don't know about.)--HereToHelp 23:39, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

The table was removed from the article as "obsolete and misleading", so I requested expert opinions from WikiProject Elements. ~ trialsanderrors 19:57, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

• Strong support either - Very informative, and goes a long way towards making Wikipedia an encyclopedia. Mrug² 14:51, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

• Weak Oppose Although I think that creator of these is very well intentioned and I applaud the effort, I do not see that these images are particularly encyclopedicly useful or informative. The only thing that can be extracted from these can be more easily stated in words or shorthand notation. It is in the present day very non-standard to routinely present this information in a graphical form and this particular graphical form is ripe for gross misinterpretation and is difficult to extract information from. For example you have to count the number of electrons in a given shell whereas the short gives you the number. There is almost no relationship between these diagrams and reality. Although there is historical precedence for these types of diagrams, they have long since been abandoned as anything but an elementary teaching tool. Some old periodic tables had these sort of diagrams but modern ones of the same detail have shorthand electron shell configurations. I believe that these have a place in wikipedia, but do not think they should be featured in their current state. I would suggest that the creator write a more detailed article about these types of diagrams, including the history of their use and why they are misleading and outdated. If they are to be featured they need more disclaimer and context than they currently do and should be presented as historical artifact and elementary teaching tool. They absolutely must not be presented as a standard modern chemistry tool. I understand the author to be a teacher and that is where these are most often encountered but usually just one or two diagrams are used to get the point across, usually following the discussion of the Bohr model, before switching to the much less cumbersome and more useful representations. I must agree that it is *cool* to have a complete set of these obscure representations. Keep up the good work.--Nick Y. 21:21, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
  • Just to clarify: I am not a teacher. I see your point, and most people would only deal with the first 30ish elements when looking at Alkane molecules and how the atoms bind and such. I think I got carried away to be honest! The later elements don't really exist long enough for practical purposes but were made as a matter of completeness. Greg Robson 22:01, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
    • The numbers are given in the right-hand corner.--HereToHelp 00:01, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
• Oppose, in the name of science. What Nick Y. said. From a technical view these images are very nicely done, but from a scientific view they're next to useless, if not downright misleading. It shows an atomic model that is outdated for half a century. There's no distinction between subshells, and it even gives a wrong idea about bonds and angles. What's left is eye-candy that conveys no real information beyond what a simple enumeration would. This type of diagrams should not be perpetuated. See also Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Elements/Archive 5#Electron Shell Diagrams and Talk:Ununoctium#Bohr for earlier opinions. Femto 22:20, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
• Oppose. Agree with Femto. --Dschwen 06:51, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
• Oppose - For reasons already stated by Femto and Nick Y. --Paul 20:08, 5 April 2007

(UTC)

• User:Steptrip/Votes  ~Steptrip 17:26, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
• Weak support, Nick makes a great point... and this shouldn't be the lead image but I still think it is very well done and has its place in an article and can therefore be used. gren グレン 18:19, 7 April 2007 (UTC)

Not promoted . Unfortunately, the accuracy concerns are what ruins these excellent technical images, as the Bohr model only works for atoms with one electron. We simply can't pretend otherwise. MER-C 03:58, 8 April 2007 (UTC)