Talk:Ice

Merge all the ice sub-types into Phases of ice?
Currently, Phases of ice redirects to Ice here. This section is disproportionately large and hard to read, in large part due to the table that is simply too specific for a high-level article like this, as it describes phases that often do not exist in nature and which >99% of readers will never come into contact with.

Further, some of those are clearly just tiny stubs (Ice V and Ice X are basically two sentences each, while Ice III, Ice VI,Ice IX and Ice XVI are basically a single paragraph), and even the larger pages contain a lot of condensable material. Merging this material into a single mid-sized article shouldn't be very difficult and it will allow readers to see which phases might be important (i.e. Ice XVII's potential relevance for hydrogen storage) at a glance, rather than having to click through the entire table/infobox to find out.

Finally, condensing the Phases section here should make it a lot easier to nominate this article for GA. In fact, Phases of ice page would itself have GA potential, which currently appears practically impossible for basically all of the individual sub-pages. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 16:46, 10 April 2024 (UTC)


 * First I'm unclear on your proposal. I could take it as:
 * Create a new page called "Phases of ice", replace the current section Ice with a summary pointing to the new page as Main, redirect all of the "Ice *" pages to "Phase of ice", or
 * Redirect all of the "Ice *" pages to Ice with new content replacing the existing content.
 * IMO the first version would be much easier to achieve. It would make discussing special cases like Ice XVII relatively easy since an entire section of "Phases of Ice" for that phase would not be undue.
 * Second, is there a secondary reference that can be used to justify the relative space given to each phase? So for example you might like to say "naturally occurring phases of ice", or "commonly studied" or so on but these can be disputed unless you have a overview ref. Johnjbarton (talk) 17:23, 10 April 2024 (UTC)
 * I would Support Johnjbarton's proposal 1, since it is helpful to our readers to understand all of the phases of water ice together, rather than in separate articles. — hike395 (talk) 18:28, 10 April 2024 (UTC)
 * @Johnjbarton Yes, I most definitely mean the first option. The "Phases" section here is already by far the largest of all, and if every ice sub-page were to be merged there, it would probably take up half the article! I would much rather reduce this section to a summary that's 2-4 paragraphs at most - similar to how I have seen the other GA-tier articles summarize important subsections.
 * As far as an overview reference goes, would this Nature article work? After a brief search, I found it, and also this TWN article. Perhaps something else can be found as well, but I was too preoccupied with cleaning up the other parts of this article ahead of GAN to look any deeper. I added 31 reference today (from 117 to 148; luckily, a good number could simply be moved from the linked pages, but too many had to be found anew), and I still missed a couple of uncited paragraphs! InformationToKnowledge (talk) 14:59, 11 April 2024 (UTC)
 * It's been a week with no objections, so I am guessing I can proceed with this now? InformationToKnowledge (talk) 06:25, 18 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Yes! Johnjbarton (talk) 15:06, 18 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Well, it is done! That is, Phases of ice exists as a separate article, the table from here has been moved over there, and then I merged all of those sub-articles over there, and expanded the table with columns for basic numerical data, as opposed to the previous, two-column "name - written description" format. The phases section here can probably still be adjusted/trimmed even now, and the new article certainly has some way to go.
 * In particular, I effectively had to combine a lot of material on the ordinary ice and on amorphous ice (and some facts about the less-common phases) into several introductory section that would made sense in a fairly short period of time, and I am sure it could be made much better. "History of research" is also mostly a compromise solution to store away the content from the few of the more-detailed articles on crystalline phases. Some of it can likely be condensed, or even dismissed as non-notable, but I didn't have time for that right now.
 * Either way, I think this article is definitely looking much cleaner now. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 22:20, 24 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Wow, that's a lot of work, thanks so much for this! I find that sometimes the high level article lead a surprisingly poor existence on Wikipedia (like water cycle) as a lot of people prefer to work on the more specialised articles. So I really appreciate that you took on this high level article on "ice", and made sure there is relevant, up to date climate change content in it as well! EMsmile (talk) 10:30, 26 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Thank you! I am hoping that this article will have a quick GA review for once, and then we'll see a little more attention to the rest of the cryosphere in general. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 20:13, 26 April 2024 (UTC)
 * @Johnjbarton So, with the merge concluded, what should be done about all the remaining links to individual phases in the template at the bottom (all the Roman numerals + "amorphous solid" and "superionic" links)? I guess they all need to go, but I am not sure of where exactly to place Phases of ice link in that template. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 20:16, 26 April 2024 (UTC)
 * My suggestion: change the first row to "States" and include "amorphous solid" "crystalline phases" and " "superionic"(?). Or "States and phenomena", so the second row is only "formations". The links can point it sections (or better WP:anchor in phases of ice. To be clear, the template won't have the roman numerals. Johnjbarton (talk) 02:46, 27 April 2024 (UTC)
 * @Johnjbarton How does it look now? I also removed the image of an ice block from the template, since it was simply stuck on the right side and didn't really appear to be helping with anything. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 17:38, 6 May 2024 (UTC)
 * That's great improvement, thanks!
 * Did you consider linking "Major phases" to Phases of ice similar to how Ice ages is linked in that column? Johnjbarton (talk) 17:46, 6 May 2024 (UTC)
 * I felt that would be excessive, because it would just link to the same article as the other three links. Only difference is that it would go to the beginning (which is not great anyway: need to figure out how to make that lead consist of 3-4 paragraphs) rather than to a section. "Ice ages" link actually goes to a separate article from anything in that row, so it's rather different. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 18:57, 6 May 2024 (UTC)