Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Congelation

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was no consensus. and I don't see one emerging with an additional relist as established editors provide good reasons for each take. Star Mississippi 16:56, 12 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Congelation

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Uncited, and is basically just a dictionary definition page. I also don't think this'd benefit from a redirect since its an unusual word. Thus, putting it up for AfD. Not doing it via PROD in the off-chance it might be an obscurely relevant term. --Tautomers_{(T C)} 05:13, 22 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Delete conditionally that another editor doesn't come along with a very compelling reason for this to be an independent article. This to me does seem very much like it should remain as a dictionary definition and given it's been an article for 16 years and practically unchanged, it doesn't seem likely to be expanded. I may be wrong though, so would withdraw if a valid reason for doing so is offered. Bungle ^{(talk • contribs)} 13:17, 22 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Delete agree that it's not notable per WP:NOTDICT, but I also want to point out the hilarious fact that in the Turkish Wikipedia (the only other one to include the term), it is listed with the category template, "Alchemy." PianoDan (talk) 17:49, 22 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per WP:NOTDICT. Caleb Stanford (talk) 06:08, 23 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Science-related deletion discussions. –LaundryPizza03 (d c̄) 00:03, 27 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Keep and expand by translating the French article It's not a rare term. I think this may have been nominated without checking Google. [1] which shows 24,000 references. It's used in English. French and Spanish, in physical chemistry, geology food science, sociology., including by Nobelist Peter Debye ( Debye P, Hückel E. De la theorie des electrolytes. I. abaissement du point de congelation et phenomenes associes. Physikalische Zeitschrift. 1923;24(9):185-206) . I'm not immediately clear about the exact difference in usage from near-synonyms, but there see to be a basis for an article here.

And looking further, I see there most certainly is basis for an article, and the usage can certainly be clarified. The French WP article [2] isn't listed in the language list, and in frWP the enWP equivalent is Frozen food, which is one of the many gross semantic errors deriving from Wikidata.[3] Congelation is not just the equivalent of freezing, as the use in soil science illustrates. DGG ( talk ) 07:16, 28 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@DGG: It's worth scrutinising that further to understand if there anything to it, as I noted in my !vote. I do however observe that the french wiki article you linked essentially translates to a page which discusses freezing and google translate directly translates the word to freezing (or deep freezing, to be precise), so of course there will be tens of thousands of literature on the topic of freezing, in any language. What confuses me with the French wiki setup is that the article Solidification is what seems to be the french-wiki equivalent to en-wiki's 'freezing' article. Neither seems particularly relatable to the en-wiki Congelation article in question. I also can't ascertain if 'congelation' is just a french word for 'freezing' by co-incidence or if it's a more specialist topic relatable to the subject of the afd. Bungle ^{(talk • contribs)} 19:51, 28 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Relisting comment: To discuss DGG's comments more.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Daniel (talk) 02:15, 29 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Reading the French source, it's an article on a phase change that is not necessarily freezing in the usual sense, but solidification or thickening-- such as the geochemical changes discussed in the article: they are sol-gel transitions, not freezing. The material in our freezing article is contained there, but so is much else. Theway to proceed will be I think to expand this article to match thefrWP, and then deal with duplications. DGG ( talk ) 03:58, 29 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I remain unconvinced in its credibility as an article, particularly as similar terms like congeal and congealment do not have articles (although the former redirects to this). There may have been a consideration to redirect to solidification if that were an independent article like on french wiki, but on en-wiki that just redirects to our freezing article. Reading your rationale DGG, i'd wonder if it would be more logical to create an article built around the broader term solidification (using fr-wiki as a basis) and then redirecting congelation to that. Bungle ^{(talk • contribs)} 12:19, 29 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

why should similar forms of the word have articles also, like congeal and congealment? We're not a dictionary. congeall is a verb, and we do not usually make articles for verbs , and whether it should be the spelling 'congealment" or "Congelation" depends on what the more common form is in English. "Solidification" certainly is a possibility, but we need to look if it's a true synonym and covers all the cases. But I agree that "Congelation" sounds awkward in English. DGG ( talk ) 14:50, 29 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry about my poor phrasing, I just meant the other terms are also in wiki dictionary only because, like congelation, they're a definition too. If I thought congelation could redirect anywhere, i'd have suggested that but replicating the french wiki in this instance (and redirecting to freezing) would seem inappropriate. I still consider deleting this article is probably the best approach and then if someone thinks a standalone article for solidification could be made, that can be done irrespective. It just seems congelation and it's variants appears too narrow a subject. Bungle ^{(talk • contribs)} 18:07, 29 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Delete per WP:DICDEF. Chiswick Chap (talk) 17:07, 29 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Keep it's an operation in alchemy listed and linked in Alchemical symbols, not explained elsewhere on Wikipedia or even mentioned in Alchemy. Yes, the article needs to be more than a dicdef, but its a needed article and shouldn't be deleted. Skyerise (talk) 15:38, 31 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Keep though the article contains very little information, the topic has been much studied. Most of us know it as congealing, and congeal is a redirect to it. Wikipedia has an article about how blood congeals, called coagulation. If your blood does not congeal properly, you have a disease called haemophilia. Blancmange and porridge congeal during cooking. I once attended a one hour lecture by a doctor of chemistry from I.C.I. about how cement particles behave as cement congeals, and how by modifying their behaviour during this process, his team at I.C.I. had produced a new inorganic material he called N.I.M. (New Inorganic Material) that was basically cement, but behaved very differently from cement (you could make spoons and window-frames from it for example).-- Toddy1 (talk) 20:11, 31 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Comment - I have no idea whether the English term is used anywhere in modern science, but Holmyard 1957, pp. 150, 271 uses the term as the name of an alchemical process which is apparently synonymous to crystallization. Perhaps the use of the term in alchemy derives from the De congelatione et conglutinatione lapidum, an extract from Avicenna's Kitab al-Shifa which was for a long time thought to form the last three chapters of the fourth book of Aristotle's Meteorology (see Linden 2003, p. 95), in which Aristotle described physical and chemical processes like solidification, evaporation, combustion, etc. However that may be, Linden 2003, p. 17 attributes the term to Sir George Ripley in his Compound of Alchymy, which seems to establish that the English term was in use among alchemists in 15th-century England. Searching Google scholar for "congelation" alchemy also reveals that the term is at least mentioned here and there by historians of alchemy.

However, I doubt that this will ever be much more than a mini-stub. Surely, it would be better to treat the topic within the framework of an article like Philosophers' stone or Magnum opus (alchemy), where all of the 'stages' or 'operations' involved could be explained in their proper context. Then again, these articles need a lot of work and do not seem ready to just merge in the material from our article. I will not !vote since I've been summoned here, but other !voters may want to take a second look after today's updates of the article by Skyerise and me. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 01:33, 1 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Pinging those who already !voted for review: Tautomers Bungle PianoDan Caleb Stanford DGG Chiswick Chap Skyerise Toddy1 ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 15:29, 2 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: Thanks for the work on this! I'm a bit confused by the current draft: is this article solely about the alchemical usage? If so, the first sentence could be improved by adding a scope ("In alchemy, ...") But the article is also suggestive that this word has a modern scientific meaning. The draft is much better but I'm still not convinced of the scope or notability, and it hasn't moved too far beyond WP:DICDEF. Caleb Stanford (talk) 19:14, 2 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Further comment: I asked an inorganic chemist about the word, they said they have never heard of it used in a chemistry context. That seems problematic. Polymerization is used instead and related. A Google Scholar search reveals many papers (particularly on oil congelation?) but not much WP:SIGCOV material. Difficult ask for a keep vote on present evidence. Caleb Stanford (talk) 19:26, 2 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

It seems that this article at its first creation in 2005 was intended as an article about the alchemical operation, and it has stayed that way until last year when I –somewhat infelicitously– removed the bit about alchemy because it was unsourced. But here's an idea: we could turn Congelation into a disambiguation page briefly explaining that Congelation (alchemy) is an archaic term for various forms of solidification such as Freezing, Crystallization, or Coagulation (another word with a background in alchemy, see [4]) with perhaps 'see also' links to Congelation ice and Congelatio (though the latter term is not mentioned in its target article). Then again, it may even be better yet to simply remove all references to modern physico-chemical processes and just turn this into an alchemy stub, as it was probably originally intended (as I said above, it should definitely be merged into another article at some point, but the other articles are not ready for that). ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 20:12, 2 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Apaugasma: If that's a potential direction of travel, why not just make solidification a DAB linking to the articles you already mentioned, with a reference to congelation linking to the dicdef? I still don't feel overly convinced in congelation as a standalone article. Maybe congelation could then redirect to solidification at a push. Although my delete !vote wasn't with much conviction, I remain steadfast in my general opinion. Bungle ^{(talk • contribs)} 20:20, 2 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Bungle: I understand why you hold on to your previous opinion, which I do not consider by any means invalid. Just to be clear: yes, Solidification may be a better candidate for DAB, but what do you mean with linking to the dicdef? A link to a standalone stub on congelation in alchemy, or to the Wiktionary entry? Because the latter does not contain any info (as our stub does) on the term's historical background in alchemy, on its being one of the principal operations in the works of pseudo-Khalid ibn Yazid, Sir George Ripley, etc. I agree that congelation in alchemy is barely notable as an independent subject, but it is more than a WP:DICDEF now, if only ever so slightly. If the term 'congelation' as used in alchemy is not found to meet (a lenient interpretation of) WP:SIGCOV (it is often mentioned, but apparently not in-depth), there should not be an article on it, and in that case I don't see a need to disambiguate it at all. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 21:17, 2 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

In a scenario whereby congelation is present on a hypothetical solidification DAB, i'd have suggested maybe linking to the dicdef page, unless there is another existing article which could suitably house the minimal stub info regarding congelation as an alchemy term (and in that instance, then to a sub-section of that parent article). The issue now may be that the viability of the article rests somewhere between being perhaps slightly more than just a dicdef, yet not quite significant enough for an independent article. Bungle ^{(talk • contribs)} 10:08, 3 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Caleb Stanford: Polymerisation is a different thing. With polymerisation, lots of small identical molecules daisychain to make big molecules. It is of course true that polymerisation may make liquids get thicker or it may cause them to precipitate (i.e. for solid particles to appear in the liquid).-- Toddy1 (talk) 12:38, 3 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Comment If the term (or process) is notable withins alchemy, I thik it woul be less confusing to have a separate article for that. But as for the comment not knowing whether the term is still used in modern science, seeGoogleScholar ,limited to English and since 2018 --1530 hits (tho about half arenon-english articles, that happen to have an English language title. The current use is apparently mainly in geology and food science, not chemistry. DGG ( talk ) 22:14, 2 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Many of the scholar results, despite the English search, are actually in French, or are dual language English/French with the term only appearing in the French text. We need to be careful not to cover French meanings of the word on the English Wikipedia. I am particular dubious about extending its meaning to freezing. Not sure that that occurs in English. For instance this one translates French congelation to freexing in the English version. In any case, grouping crystallisation, congealing, and freexing in one article is getting into dictionary territory. These are not the same thing to modern science, although I'd be fine with an article on congealing proper. If alchemy made such a grouping as a single phenomena, then this should be an exclusively alchemic article. If they didn't, and its just the same word being used in different contexts there is no justification for it at all. SpinningSpark 19:30, 9 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. Im saying keep because seems like a word that people want to learn and what better place is there to learn then here? HelpingWorld (talk) 05:06, 4 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Delete The correct place for material like this is on Wiktionary, not Wikipedia.Iskandar323 (talk) 16:01, 6 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.