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Uranium

Leave further comments at Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Uranium

I've put about 40 hours work into trying to get this to FA quality. What else needs to be done to get this to a point where it could easily pass FAC? At the very least, should the article be upgraded to A-class or GA? --mav 00:59, 19 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

It looks pretty good as an article and is nicely cited. However might I suggest taking a look at the organizational order of the FA'd Hydrogen article? This article does not cover the topic of the origin of Uranium in supernovae explosions. The Applications section mentions the use of depleted uranium, but it does not mention thermonuclear weapons as a military application. Is this because uranium-based warheads have since been supplanted by plutonium? If so could this be clarified? Thanks. — RJH (talk) 18:59, 19 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Good idea - add more info about stuff that explodes. That always is a wikicrowd pleaser. :) I will dig up some citable info on that. -- mav
Done. --mav

Awadewit

As an avid reader of popular science books, I found this page informative and easy to follow (a real achievement). I cannot comment on the page's comprehensiveness or accuracy, but here are my suggestions.

  • "silvery metallic in color" sounded a little odd to me, but if that is the way uranium is usually described, so be it
  • "Along with thorium and plutonium, it is one of the three fissile elements; uranium-235 and to a lesser degree uranium-233 are used as the fuel for nuclear reactors and the explosive material for nuclear weapons." - perhaps you could connect these two clauses together to make it explicit what "fissile" means - it is not a very common word and this sentence is in the lead
  • "The 1789 discovery of uranium in the mineral pitchblende is credited to Martin Heinrich Klaproth, who named the new element after Uranus (itself only discovered eight years earlier)." - is it essential to tell us in the lead when Uranus was discovered? Since the lead is already long, I would delete this parenthetical.
  • "Starting in the late Middle Ages, pitchblende was extracted from the Habsburg silver mines in Joachimsthal, Bohemia (now in the Czech Republic) and was secretly used as a coloring agent in the local glassmaking industry." - why was it secret? a sort of trade secret perhaps?
  • "The discovery of the element is credited to the German pharmacist Martin Heinrich Klaproth while he was working in his experimental laboratory in Berlin. In 1789 Klaproth was able to precipitate a yellow compound (likely sodium diuranate) by dissolving pitchblende in nitric acid and neutralizing the solution with sodium hydroxide." Perhaps this could read "The discovery of the element is credited to the German pharmacist Martin Heinrich Klaproth. While working in his experimental laboratory in Berlin, Klaproth was able..." - It sounds a little awkward the other way.
  • "Antoine Becquerel found uranium to be radioactive in 1896 and in the process discovered the concept of radioactivity itself." - This sentence sounds as if uranium itself suddenly became radioactive in 1896. Perhaps you could rework it?
  • "the first nuclear weapon used in anger" - this sounds a bit odd - perhaps "used in war"?
  • "Nuclear power was used for the first time in propulsion by the USS Nautilus, which is a submarine that was set to sea in 1954." - awkwardly worded sentence; perhaps "Nuclear power was used for the first time for propulsion by a submarine, the USS Nautilus, in 1954." - something along those liens
  • Several semicolons should be replaced by colons. Any clause that is essentially a list should be preceded by a colon.
  • "that is fissile, that is, fissionable by thermal neutrons" - too technical for a non-specialist, but I don't know if one needs to consider them in the "Isotopes" section
  • The entire page has a lot of unnecessary passive constructions. Ex: "Enrichment of uranium ore to concentrate the fissionable uranium-235 is needed for use in nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons."
  • I don't think you need to mention in the "References" section that the authors of the books you consulted are Ph.D.'s.
  • As a non-specialist, I cannot really comment on the quality of the sources that you used, but I assume that one of these is something akin to those huge reference books that list all of the properties of various elements, etc.?
  • I wonder also about reordering the sections. Would someone coming to the uranium page be most interested in its history or its properties? I would think that all of the properties should go first, then the applications and finally the history (or maybe the history and then the applications). But this is debatable. I do not know how other "element pages" are structured. Perhaps there is an agreed-upon format. Awadewit 21:28, 20 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
    • There's a fair amount of precedent for the history section to be placed first in many of the scientific articles, and it has been raised as an issue in past reviews when it was not first. But it's not a universal standard AFAIK. — RJH (talk) 19:57, 21 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Wow - lots of great feedback! I'll be going over all that during the next couple days. --mav 22:27, 20 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
    • Everything but the suggestion to reorg the section (per RJH's comments above) have been addressed. --mav 23:01, 25 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Looks more or less FA quality to me. I thought of a couple of suggestions, but on closer inspection they were already included. Oldelpaso 21:11, 21 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
    • Thanks! -- mav
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Chemistry/Peer_review/Uranium