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 of the debate was No Consensus Karmafist 21:32, 19 October 2005 (UTC) Explanation on Talk Page [reply]

Ceraphite[edit]

This sounds bogus to me. If anyone can provide solid evidence that this material actually exists, then by all means keep it, but a Google search yields very little except Wikipedia mirrors, so I'm doubtful. —Keenan Pepper 01:15, 8 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

• Also, the content is barely paraphrased from http://www.radiochemistry.org/periodictable/elements/6.html. —Keenan Pepper 01:21, 8 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • It is parphrased enough not to be a copyvio, IMO, but that site does not use this name Ceraphite

• Comment Found on usenet:

Newsgroups: sci.chem.electrochem From: rek...@gmail.com - Date: 30 Sep 2005 08:09:10 -0700 Local: Fri, Sep 30 2005 11:09 am Subject: Re: Looking for more info on Ceraphite "aka white carbon" tia sal

Searching the Science Citation Index brings up exactly 1 result for 'ceraphite' from a 1977 meeting abstract in the obscure journal 'Carbon'. The title of the abstract is "Ceraphite, a hard and high-strength new carbon material". The abstract is cited all of zero times. Unless it has another common name, sounds like a case of wikipedia syndrome to me.

• • This makes me suspicious. The radiochemistry.org cite seems good evidence that there is such a materiel, but not that Ceraphite is the proper name for that substance. DES ^(talk) 01:35, 8 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment: the material seems to originate from the Los Alamos National Laboratory. I suspect that this is just a misspelling of "graphite" (which is, indeed, a very soft substance) that has propagated due to other sites copying the LANL page. Kirill Lokshin 01:43, 8 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

• • No I think not. The following sites all list it as a separate form of carbon, and do not seem to be wikipedia mirrors or derived from wikipedia: [1], [2], [3], and [4]. However none of them discuss its properties or confirm the description in the current article in any way. The only site i could find that does, other than obvious wikipedia mirors, is [5] but this may still be dereived from wikipedia info. By the way, mirrors are everywhere. After excluding from a google search "wqikipedia" "GFDL" "GNU" "stub" and a phrase from the current article, there are nearly 400 hits, the vast majority of which are derived from the wikipedia article or the usenet post that questions the wikipedia article. DES ^(talk) 02:06, 8 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment: DOE laboratories are managed by contractors and the source may be copyrighted. -- Kjkolb 03:12, 8 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep. Although there doesn't seem to be much information on ceraphite, Carbon and several external sites on carbon allotropes list it. Andrew pmk | Talk 17:40, 8 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • Did you hear that anyone can edit Wikipedia? Pilatus 18:37, 8 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete unless supported by primary literature. Please note that some phases of carbon are formed only under extreme conditions, and that is why not all reports are trustworthy. I don't particularly feel like scouring Gmelin's Handbook for a reliable reference. Pilatus 18:37, 8 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment: No hits on PubMed or sciencedirect.com (sources of primary literature), however one seemingly authoritative hit from Google Scholar [6] (Hazardous Materials Chemistry for Emergency Responders , p. 52). The above comment was made by Btm.
  • That Hazmat book is a secondary reference. The Scientific Citation Index lists the substance just once, in a 1977 conference abstract, as the usenet posting quoted above says. It was never followed up with a full paper as far as I can tell. Pilatus 21:11, 8 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]
    • Comment Wikipedia is suppsoed to be a tertiary reference. Secondary sources are perfectly acceptable to support articles here, indeed there is some suspicion of an article with only primary sources. A demand for primary refernces is not acceptable. DES ^(talk) 17:34, 9 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]
    • Comment That Hazmat entry look like the probable source for the current version of the entry -- indeed the wrding is clsoe enough for one paragehp to be almost a copyvio. DES ^(talk) 17:34, 9 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]
    • Comment: I'm not sure if this is the same article as the 1977 conference—it was presented at a conference in 1979 and published in the journal Wear in 1980 (I wish I could provide a link instead of quoting the abstract here; unfortunately I cannot). Btm 05:58, 9 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Surface wear characteristics of some hard carbons*1

H. M. Hawthorne

National Research Council of Canada, Mechanical Engineering Division, Western Laboratory, Vancouver, B.C., Canada

Received 15 October 1979. Available online 10 February 2003.

Abstract: The surface resistance to damage of homogeneous hard carbons such as glassy low temperature isotropic pyrolytic (LTI) and Ceraphite carbons have been determined by the falling abrasive particle test using SiC grit. Surfaces prepared from within the bulk of the glassy carbon specimens exhibit wear resistance proportional to their microindentation hardness but material near their virgin surfaces shows a lower resistance to this low velocity impact wear. Both pure and silicon-alloyed LTI carbons and Ceraphite material show considerably greater wear than the bulk glassy carbons of the same hardness. However, all of the hard carbons exhibit much greater surface damage resistance than other materials of comparable hardness such as mild steel or soda-lime glass. Microscopic surface examination indicates that brittle fracture is the main wear mode of the hard carbons in this test and the results are interpreted in terms of the microstructural features and characteristic elasticity properties of these solids.

*1 Paper presented at the International Conference on Wear of Materials 1979, Dearborn, Michigan, April 1979.

Surface wear characteristics of some hard carbons

Wear, Volume 60, Issue 1, April 1980, Pages 167-182

H. M. Hawthorne

• Delete. Um, nn allotrope? No, I suppose that won't do. How's this - the article is doomed to remain non-encyclopedic, because all sources repeat the same few short sentences about it. My fear is that it is bogus, and the wikipedia syndrome is just spreading it far and wide. Bunchofgrapes (talk) 23:28, 8 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment The above does not sound like a description of the "supersoft" substance described in the current article. DES ^(talk) 17:34, 9 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep. The article was started in Dec. 2004, so it seems pretty clear (at least to me) that the Wikipedia article was derived from one of these sources and not vice versa. It also seems pretty clear that this is not a hoax, as the Los Alamos National Laboratory uses the term here (pdf) and UC Berkeley does so here (giving the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics and the American Chemical Society as the sources for the page). I agree that there is little in the primary literature, but we must remember that most of the databases of scientific articles only include articles dating back to the early '90s and there is no quick way to do thorough search on such an obscure topic. So, I vote to keep, because although obscure, an allotrope of carbon is quite notable and encyclopedic. Btm 05:42, 9 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • Both Carbon and Wear are awfully obscure Elsevier journals. Also note that the papers that go into Wear don't deal with the difficult subject of metastable phases in the phase diagram of carbon. The word isn't mentioned once in an ACS journal. As the editor who put the article up still hasn't put a source to back up his claim the entry ought to go; too many people have already wasted their time with it. Pilatus 14:11, 9 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • I have done some more digging, which should settle the question. Annu. Rev. Mater. Sci. 1973, 3, 195 mentions the mineral chaoite as a recently discovered carbon allotrope. The article then continues to say claims were made than an identical material is prepared by subliming graphite at high temperature and low pressure. "In spite of these seemingly definitive reports ... several other groups have tried unsuccessfully to reproduce these experiments. Independent confirmatory work is obviously needed in this area, and at the present time white graphite appears to be the carbon analog of polywater. Delete and redirect to chaoite, or get rid of the spurious phase altogether. Pilatus 14:31, 9 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete or redir to Chaoite w/ mention of possible alt. name in chaoite. Vsmith 15:20, 9 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep, but rewrite to cite the sources listed above, and document the confused nature of the primary literature, adn the absence of a clear source for the current description. DES ^(talk) 17:34, 9 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep, definately. This was the article that lead me to learning of Ceraphite and if we delete this page we may as well remove it completely from the Carbon page as well. Also, with advancing scientific research we should soon be able identify a mollecular structure for it and maybe even get some pictures of it. Also there is no proof that ceraphite is chaoite. It says chaoite is grey or white whereas ceraphite is white, no mention of gray. User:Rickem
  • There is no proof that ceraphite even exists. It is mentioned in two conference abstracts, and the review cited in the chaoite entry cautions that those reports were not reproducible at all. IIRC, chaoite is a carbyne phase. Pilatus 00:21, 14 October 2005 (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.