Talk:Acid strength

Merger discussion leading to creation of this article

I believe Strong acid should be merged into Acid. Not only does this make logical sense, as strong acids are a sub-category of acids, but it matches the format taken by bases and strong bases (strong base is a section of Base). If the consensus is that they should not be merged, I suggest moving strong base to its own article. Neonfuzz (talk) 18:37, 27 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

One problem is that this Acid article is already very long (41K). Instead I would suggest merging the three articles Strong acid (7K), Weak acid (7.5K) and Superacid (5.6K) into one new article on Acid strength, initially with three sections. And yes, for consistency we could also merge the strong base section of Base (13K) with Weak base (7.5K) and Superbase (5K) into one new article on Base strength. Dirac66 (talk) 22:31, 27 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

This is a great idea! I can probably get to work on it within the next few weeks. Neonfuzz (talk) 15:37, 29 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed! Having separate (much smaller) articles makes less sense than one longer article, as readers will gain more insight into the context rather than as a stand-alone topic.--Gilderien Talk|Contribs 20:08, 17 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I definitely think this is a good idea, but who is going to do it? I'm not sure how, and I don't want to attampt for fear of doing something wrong. I don't see why anyone hasn't done this, yet. — Preceding unsigned comment added by W192 (talk • contribs) 18:28, 27 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

OK, thanks for the reminder. It is complicated to decide what to do exactly, but I have now started. First I created a new article Acid strength by copy-pasting the former Acid strength section of this Acid article, and deleted its subsections from this new article. Then I copy-pasted the entire content of the former Strong acid article into Acid strength, and replaced Strong acid by a redirect. For these two actions I consider that adequate notice was given, since the Merger proposal was on both the Acid and Strong acid article for several months.

Next proposed step is to copy-paste the contents of Weak acid and Superacid into Acid strength. However since the merger proposal was not previously on these two articles, I will post one now and wait 14 days for comments before proceeding. And after the acid merger is finished, I will think about bases.

And finally I will copy this discussion to Talk:Acid strength which seems the best place for further discussion. Dirac66 (talk) 03:09, 2 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

comment I definitely do not think superacid should be merged into acid strength. They are quite different topics. The natural focus in an article titled superacid is on the acids (and acid systems) themselves, whereas the natural focus of an article titled acid strength is on the concept of the strength of an acid, how such strength is defined and measured. I don't see any natural fit for combining those two topics. --Trovatore (talk) 04:47, 2 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Conclusion There has been no objection to the consensus to merge the content of Weak acid into Acid strength, so I will do that today. There has been one objection with some merit to merging Superacid, so I will leave that article alone. The Acid strength article does have a mention of Superacids at the end of the intro, with a link to the separate article where more details are available.Dirac66 (talk) 21:27, 17 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Corrosivity

There is a claim that the hydrofluoric acid dissolves all metals except iridium. In my experience HF doesn't attack gold and the Handbook of Corrosion Data, Craig & Anderson (1995), p. 439 back this up. (see http://books.google.ca/books?id=KXwgAZJBWb0C&pg=RA1-PT392&lpg=RA1-PT392&dq=gold+hydrofluoric+acid&source=bl&ots=RfISDrEr2f&sig=StzO_JVWvu9OkyCwiYiJcfaWGiY&hl=en&sa=X&ei=iFxiT82CMoiD0QGEloWBCA&ved=0CEEQ6AEwBDgK#v=onepage&q=gold%20hydrofluoric%20acid&f=false). The corrosion claim has been reduced to "most metals" rather than all but iridium

Plain English?

"...one mole of a strong acid HA dissolves in water yielding one mole of H+ and one mole of the conjugate base, A−, and essentially none of the protonated acid HA. In contrast a weak acid only partially dissociates and at equilibrium both the acid and the conjugate base are in solution." As of 7/12/2012 the above is from the third sentence of the article. That does not seem like plain English. I do not know how to re-write it. (Nor do I know what it means.)