Talk:Atmosphere of Earth

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 7 January 2019 and 9 April 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Peer reviewers: GERVAIM.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 14:56, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 19 February 2022

Citation needed requires source addition for the main section: https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/atmosphere/. 2001:4452:490:6900:15FD:E0D6:766:B51B (talk) 00:00, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

 Not done: it's not clear what changes you want to be made. Please mention the specific changes in a "change X to Y" format and provide a reliable source if appropriate. Dawnseeker2000 00:47, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

Mass percentages

Recently I wanted the mass of nitrogen in a certain mass of air, so I went to Air, which redirects to this article, to get the answer. But the article doesn't have it. It gives the molar percentages: 78.08% N₂, 20.95% O₂, 0.93% A, and 0.04% CO₂. That means, multiplying by the molecular or atomic weights, that in 100 moles of air, there is:

78.08×28.014=2187  g N2
20.95×31.998=670.4 g O2
 0.93×39.95 = 37   g A
 0.04×44.009=  1.8 g CO2

for a total of 2897 g. This gives

2187 /2897 = 75.51% N2
670.4/2897 = 23.14% O2
   37/2897 = 1.28% A
  1.8/2897 = 0.06% CO2

Is that a routine calculation so that we can put those mass percentages into the article? That would help people like me who need the mass fraction. Or is it "original research"? I think any chemical engineer would agree that this is not research, let alone original, but rather a trivial routine calculation. Eric Kvaalen (talk) 18:25, 15 October 2022 (UTC)

I'm the one who reverted the edit. The general principle in Wikipedia is that everything in the articles must come from a citation. If the article doesn't say what you write, you cannot include it. He's taking a source with one piece of information, coupling it with information from somewhere else unspecified, doing calculations on it, and putting numbers into the article which ARE NOT given in the source cited. That's WP:OR or WP:SYNTH. There is a policy WP:CALC which allows making routine calculations. It specifies: Basic arithmetic, such as adding numbers, converting units, or calculating a person's age, is almost always permissible.. That's different than merging multiple sources, none of which specify the numbers he enters into the article. As an engineer, I can probably reverse-engineer his calculations to verify their accuracy, but the point is policy prohibits this. This is a long-term conflict I have with this editor - it seems that's most of what he does, fiddle with numbers and come up with conclusions which are not present in the cited material. He has made arithmetic errors in the past, producing numbers which are garbage - not only is it a waste of time to be checking them and trying to figure out where his errors are introduced, they are (again) prohibited by policy. Tarl N. (discuss) 22:49, 17 October 2022 (UTC)

It's true that Tarl has reverted many of my edits over the past five years. The other day on my talk page I said that I think he's persecuting me, and he replied "Yes, indeed" and gave the same sort of justification as he has here. I do remember making a sign error once on a Talk page when I was in a hurry, but I don't think I made any other mistakes. Our disagreements concern what constitutes routine math and whether one can put obviously true statements into an article without an explicit reference. This article, on air, is a case in point. I would still like the opinion of others on this question of whether we can calculate the mass percentages of the components of air and put them into this article. Eric Kvaalen (talk) 05:12, 19 October 2022 (UTC)

For the record, my Yes, indeed was intended to mean "Yes, indeed, I assume you think I'm persecuting you."

• For this particular issue, there are a variety of dispute resolution mechanisms, which you should already know about given how long you have been doing this (see WP:DR). The main ones are WP:DRN and WP:3O, the former being a formal noticeboard and will get higher visibility.
• If you think my conduct is unacceptable, the proper venue is WP:ANI (sometimes known as dramaboard). Discussion in that venue is directed at getting editors banned. If you think that's the appropriate remedy, go there. Just read WP:BOOMERANG first.

For other editors, allow me to amplify my comments on making calculations and putting results into a Wikipedia article:

• Every change made is reviewed by other editors. Often by many other editors.
• If you make changes which are not easily traceable to specific text in a cited reference, that makes life difficult for reviewers. IT WASTES THEIR TIME.
• The policy in WP:CALC is very simple, only three lines long, and not particularly ambiguous.
• When making such calculations, to be able to verify them, the reviewer must know the source of ALL numbers, AND the precision of each, to determine whether the precision provided is meaningful (see MOS:UNCERTAINTY). The numbers were given to four decimals - is the result really precise to one part in 10,000? That level of complication is why WP:OR and WP:SYNTH essentially prohibit making complicated calculations and stuffing them into articles.
• The change above referred to by the OP suffered from not only these problems, but also didn't even make a pretence of providing a citation - it simply dumped raw numbers into the text without any citation. Such text is subject to being deleted without question, since it doesn't meet WP:V.

Regards, Tarl N. (discuss) 21:07, 19 October 2022 (UTC)