Talk:Fluorine

Fluorine for Dental Care?

Section 7.1 (Medical applications - Dental care) discusses "Fluoride" and not "Fluorine". I'm no chemist, but I think this information would be better suited on the Fluoride page? CanucksGirl (talk) 22:40, 18 November 2020 (UTC)

Three years later ... FWIW, no one has addressed this one way or the other yet, so I'll remove the tag. The article makes the point that one place that non-chemists are likely to have heard of fluorine (as the fluoride ion) is in dental care, so I can't see how it's not relevant in a general-purpose encyclopedia like Wikipedia. - Dank (push to talk) 18:17, 26 November 2023 (UTC)

That's how a lot these types of talk pages tend to go, in my experience as a regular contributor over the last year. There are exceptions, of course. Especially for more popular/culturally relevant (to the west) topics. For the most part, though, I see people trying to drum up discusion about a change in the talk pages, only for the topic to languish without reply for years. And have had my own pleas for discussions on changes to pages falling on deaf ears.

Part of the problem is, according to the Wikipedians page, there are only about 100-150k users who have contributed ANYTHING in the last 30 days. Whether it's a simple typo correction, responding to a talk page, or revamping an entire article.

Considering a lot of those users aren't regular contributors, that leaves a lot less than 100,000 people to manage the roughly 7 million English pages. Never mind contribute on the talk pages as well, which many people don't even seem to know exists. Personally, I didn't even know they existed until I became a regular contributor a year ago.

It's easy to point fingers, but I think it's nobody's fault. I could speculate forever about potential causes, but it wouldn't help anything. It is what it is, and we just have to make due with it. As unfortunate as it is. Ideally, the community would discuss these things and come to conclusion as a group as to what changes to make. But, life is far from ideal.

I'm just glad Wikipedia is still as trustworthy as it is, and still existing after surviving on donations for so long without a hint of ad revenue. That in itself is pretty extradorinary, I think.

Thank you for contributing, regardless of whether you write entire articles or just fix a typo here and there, every bit is greatly appreciated by me, and I want to personally, and genuinely thank you for that. Every little bit helps. VoidHalo (talk) 17:03, 8 February 2024 (UTC)

Natural source of fluorine-18?

The radioactive isotope fluorine-18 is listed as having a natural abundance of "trace", implying that it does indeed have some natural occurrence. But what would be the natural source of it? The fluorine-18 article doesn't talk about any natural sources. It has a short half-life, suggesting it would be generated by radioactive decay, but I couldn't find any natural decay chains it's apart of. Saucy^{[talk – contribs]} 10:13, 19 November 2022 (UTC)

Neither can I find evidence in reliable sources of natural occurrence outside of the CNO cycle. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 23:33, 19 November 2022 (UTC)

Cosmogenic nuclide lists ¹⁸F, as both a result of cosmic ray spallation on atmospheric argon, and a product of the ¹⁸O(p,n)¹⁸F reaction. A source is given: it's in Table 1.9 here. Double sharp (talk) 00:35, 20 November 2022 (UTC)

@Saucy and LaundryPizza03: I added the cosmogenic natural occurrence of ¹⁸F (with the source) to the articles fluorine and fluorine-18. So this should be resolved now.

P.S. John Emsley's Nature's Building Blocks (2011 edition, on p. 183) notes that ²³F is a natural product of cluster decay of natural ²³¹Pa. But given the extremely low branching ratio, this is probably not important enough to include (I can't find any other source). Double sharp (talk) 19:35, 20 November 2022 (UTC)

Thanks! I wouldn‘t have been able to understand that source well enough to add it myself. Saucy^{[talk – contribs]} 21:08, 20 November 2022 (UTC)

global revenues

the figure mentioned in lead appears to be a result of vandalism, as seen in this edit. dying (talk) 22:59, 23 January 2024 (UTC)

Agree. I put in an edit to correct it. Dreamyshade (talk) 05:47, 24 January 2024 (UTC)

thanks, Dreamyshade. dying (talk) 07:59, 24 January 2024 (UTC)

Fluorine in one animal

The article says that fluorine is not found in organic compounds in animals. This one paper from Science in 1979 (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.206.4422.1108) says one specific sponge was 10% fluorine by mass, which honestly I find impossible to believe. I don't currently have access to a university library to do a reverse citation search. IAmNitpicking (talk) 02:27, 24 January 2024 (UTC)