Talk:List of interstellar and circumstellar molecules

Diatomic and Triatomic are also taken from greek. It makes absolutely no sense to keep those but call all the ones 4+ Four atoms, Five atoms, Six atoms etc. instead of Tetratomic/Quadratomic, Pentatomic, Hexatomic, etc. Can someone tell me why? It makes no sense to stop at triatomic and not continue the pattern. 24.150.136.68 (talk) 00:06, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

Diatomic and triatomic are in common use. Those others are not, and I suspect a writer here is using Wikipedia to promote their use. The point is not whether the terms are from Greek, but that they are not used as such in English much. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 00:56, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

 Done - FWIW - yes - agreed - common use is preferred - hope this helps - Enjoy! :) Drbogdan (talk) 02:26, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

We certainly shouldn't use the Greek forms for four or more atoms, which very few readers would understand. Diatomic and triatomic are sufficiently common that it seems fine to use them, but I'm not opposed to 'two atoms' and 'three atoms' either. Modest Genius ^talk 20:26, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

Papers can also contain errors - linear C3H can be called propynylidyne, but in chemical nomenclature simply adding cyclo in the begining to name a cyclic isomer and calling it a deal is not OK. If authors of a paper made an arbitrary name like "housane" then OK, but making a misleading name - cyclopropynylidyne would be correct for C3 molecule - is not acceptable. It could be mentioned in the table as a name which is used, but should be highlighted as incorrect. In general, this practice with adding just the names from papers is unacceptable, especially in a featured article. There is something called IUPAC, isn't there? All names should be checked and the ones like "heptatrienyl radical" for C7H (this one is much worse) either eliminated altogether, or marked as wrong if they are in actual use (not just used in single paper). Mithoron (talk) 21:03, 29 October 2020 (UTC)

This is an encyclopaedia, not a chemistry textbook. We report what reliable sources are saying, we don't correct them just because we think they made a mistake (see WP:VNT). If reliable astrochemistry sources are using name X, then name X is what we should report in this article, regardless of whether it meets IUPAC rules. This article has followed the original detection paper for convenience and ease of verification; if there are specific examples where the astrochemistry literature has switched to a more standard name in subsequent papers I agree it should be changed (and an additional reference added for the new name). We shouldn't rename entries just because you dislike the one used in the discovery paper. Modest Genius ^talk 11:31, 2 November 2020 (UTC)