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== Section on toxicity is inadequate ==
== Section on toxicity is inadequate ==


The section on toxicity should tell us -- in more detail than is currectly provided -- how much pure ethanol is dangerous. Acute toxicity should be mentioned -- it can kill you too. How much will lead to hospitalization or death), and whether the fumes are harmful -- just like with any other chemical. "General knowledge" because of the familiar cultural role of alcohol is not enough. [[Special:Contributions/84.226.214.17|84.226.214.17]] ([[User talk:84.226.214.17|talk]]) 17:00, 28 September 2019 (UTC)
The section on toxicity should tell us -- in more detail than is currently provided -- how much pure ethanol is dangerous. Acute toxicity should be mentioned -- it can kill you too. How much will lead to hospitalization or death), and whether the fumes are harmful -- just like with any other chemical. "General knowledge" because of the familiar cultural role of alcohol is not enough. [[Special:Contributions/84.226.214.17|84.226.214.17]] ([[User talk:84.226.214.17|talk]]) 17:00, 28 September 2019 (UTC)

Revision as of 17:04, 28 September 2019

Former good articleEthanol was one of the Natural sciences good articles, but it has been removed from the list. There are suggestions below for improving the article to meet the good article criteria. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.
Article milestones
DateProcessResult
December 8, 2005Good article nomineeListed
September 15, 2007Good article reassessmentDelisted
October 9, 2007Good article nomineeListed
November 11, 2013Good article reassessmentDelisted
Current status: Delisted good article

Template:Vital article

MJ/kg for Gasohol

This looks incorrect. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2602:30A:C089:C340:85A6:F8DE:1D93:1E4B (talk) 20:35, 7 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Orphaned references in Ethanol

I check pages listed in Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting to try to fix reference errors. One of the things I do is look for content for orphaned references in wikilinked articles. I have found content for some of Ethanol's orphans, the problem is that I found more than one version. I can't determine which (if any) is correct for this article, so I am asking for a sentient editor to look it over and copy the correct ref content into this article.

Reference named "PGCH":

I apologize if any of the above are effectively identical; I am just a simple computer program, so I can't determine whether minor differences are significant or not. AnomieBOT⚡ 05:05, 25 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Merger proposal

Ethanol research has hardly any content. It can easily be covered within Ethanol and Ethanol fuel. Sizeofint (talk) 18:14, 20 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Agree. Ethanol fuel. Sandcherry (talk) 00:56, 22 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Absorbents vs Adsorbents

Molecular sieves and desiccants mentions "Absorbents" twice, and I (layman) simply don't know if this is correct, but have a feeling it might not be. Perhaps anyone who actually knows could do what needs to be done (if anything)? fredgandt 22:18, 5 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Ethanol is a drug?

The assertion in this article that alcohol is a drug is at odds with Wikipedia's definition of drug:

"A drug is any substance other than food, that when inhaled, injected, smoked, consumed, absorbed via a patch on the skin or dissolved under the tongue causes a physiological change in the body."

Ethanol is food (with 7 food calories per gram). --MaximRecoil (talk) 23:32, 30 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Doesn't seem to match our definition of food since most people don't consume it for nutrition. Regardless, we go by what the reliable sources say. Also, alcohol is a depressant. Depressants are drugs. Hence alcohol is a drug. QED. Sizeofint (talk) 00:17, 1 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
It doesn't matter what most people consume it for; it is food regardless. For example, a communion wafer doesn't cease to be food simply because it is usually consumed for purposes other than nutrition. Food isn't defined by the intent of the eater/drinker; it is defined by the substance's nutritional content. Not only is ethanol food, but it is a macronutrient, which places it in a rather exclusive group along with protein, carbohydrates, and fat, i.e., there are only four substances which can prevent starvation, and ethanol is one of them:
"The four principal classes of macronutrients providing food energy to humans are: carbohydrate, fat, protein and alcohol" - link
As for reliable sources, there are reliable sources saying that food is specifically excluded from being a drug (which negates your "alcohol is a depressant. Depressants are drugs. Hence alcohol is a drug." reasoning), and there are countless reliable sources which define food as being anything people consume which provides nutrition/nourishment. From the OED:
"Food: Any nutritious substance that people or animals eat or drink, or that plants absorb, in order to maintain life and growth:"
You can also find countless reliable sources stating that ethanol has 7 food calories per gram (which means it provides more energy than protein and carbohydrates, and a little less energy than fat). --MaximRecoil (talk) 01:23, 1 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Okay, but there are hordes of research papers that refer to "alcohol and other drugs" implying that alcohol is a drug. The World Health Organization calls alcohol a "psychoactive substance" [1] which it further states is identical in meaning to psychotropic drug [2]. Our article on psychoactive substances redirects to "psychoactive drug". Ethanol may also be used as a medication (cough medicine), our article for which redirects to "pharmaceutical drug". Perhaps ethanol is also a food. What this means is not that ethanol isn't a drug but that our definition of "drug" needs to be refined. Sizeofint (talk) 02:14, 1 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Well, the Wikipedia definition for drug has reliable sources too, i.e., two dictionaries are cited, both of which exempt food from being a drug. So with the "reliable sources" out there being at odds with each other, I suppose Wikipedia is bound to be at odds with itself as well. --MaximRecoil (talk) 02:42, 1 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Beer and wine are food beverages, ethanol is a drug (there's no nutrition in anhydrous ethanol); lot's of foods have drugs in them, that if extracted solely from the food would be, plainly, a drug; e.g. & for instance: eating poppy seed muffins will test you positive for morphine, the main metabolite of heroin. Nagelfar (talk) 20:08, 21 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
In the United States, alcohol is not regulated as a food under the FDA, it is regulated under the ATF, which is why alcoholic beverages don't have to carry the same label with calorie and nutrition information that all other pre-packaged food products sold in the U.S. do. Rreagan007 (talk) 14:21, 11 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

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Alcohol (medical use)

Is this new content fork really necessary? There isn't a whole lot of content in the medical use section here as it stands. Content on ethanol is already strewn throughout a half-dozen or so articles. In my mind we should be trying to consolidate rather than fork at this point. Sizeofint (talk) 10:50, 11 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Reviewed this and realized it is discussing a non-specific type of alcohol. If any merge is to take place it would probably be to alcohol rather than here. Sizeofint (talk) 21:25, 21 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

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Within-Article Announcement of Major Changes to Popular Articles like this

The entire Pharmacology section was removed and placed in the "Alcohol (drug)" article. I think there should at least be some redundancy and then a link to the article instead of what we see right now. Also, a page header stub or some kind of announcement within the article would be advisable for significant and dramatic changes such as this. Just a day ago I was researching the Pharmacology of Ethanol and was using this article to do it. When I came back I almost abandoned this article completely trying to figure out where the stuff I was looking for went but I stopped and decided to click "View history", thankfully. Even in the History section of this article it doesn't really explained what happened very clearly. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mbman8 (talk • contribs) 03:42, 10 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Not only should this have been discussed, but this is nearly identical to edits previously pushed through without discussion, rejected by consensus, and rolled back. Those edits were by now-indeffed David Hedlund, whose choice of title, link replacement and other aspects were word-for-word the same, and deemed POV-pushing. I am very suspicious of these changes. oknazevad (talk) 10:12, 15 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Splitting off medical/pharmacological content has become somewhat standard practice (e.g. Cannabis, Epinephrine, Dopamine). I am not opposed; the pharmacological information was starting to overwhelm the industrial content. We should expand the blurb here a bit, however. Another change we might consider is moving the fuel content to Ethanol fuel and presenting it here summary style. Sizeofint (talk) 15:25, 15 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
While I can definitely see the split on WP:Summary grounds, I agree that the blurb here is too short. And some movement of material regarding fuel use to ethanol fuel also makes sense. I do question the title of the spilt off article; it seems kinda wp:pointy, as it was the last time this happened. And many of the new links are questionable; some have changed more appropriately specific links to ones pointing to the new article, such as changing ones specifically about the chemical reactions of fermentation to not point to this article, which covers the general chemistry. I guess that's why it's a questionable split to me; the name and placement almost treats it as a separate substance, instead of just being coverage of the effects of ethyl alcohol, for which we already have short-term effects of alcohol and long-term effects of alcohol. And there's also the article alcohol (medicine) created early this year just for the medical uses. I wonder if we now have too many redundant articles, one of which has a very questionable title and questionably placed links. oknazevad (talk) 02:24, 16 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
The alcohol (medicine) article is about the broader use of alcohols in medicine, not just ethanol (although the infobox apparently needs fixing to reflect this). It is more of a fork from alcohol.
I don't watch too many articles in the chemicals space. When discussing ethanol in an industrial context the wikilinks should definitely point here.
The articles on the effects of alcohol (whoops, there's another one) can cover content on the health and psychological effects of ethanol. Content on pharmocokinetics, pharmocodynamics, society and culture is mostly out of their scope though. I do agree we probably can merge some of the alcohol related articles. I also believe an alcohol related article we should keep is one with scope similar to alcohol (drug). I'm not stuck on that name but I can't think of a better one. We're currently discussing a similar issue at Talk:Cannabis (drug). Sizeofint (talk) 04:41, 16 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I believe, with good evidence, that their is no connection between David and MedGirl. The split that was made is very reasonable. Ethanol has a lot of non drug uses. Having an article on the drug uses of ethanol is a reasonable split. Medical uses of alcohol are very different from drug uses (no overlap really). Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 21:39, 17 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

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pKb

I have deleted claimed pKb value, because it has just been changed from −1.9 to 19, both values just plain without any reference or explanation. I'd get the former value as correct basicity constant of ethanol's cunjugated base, ethoxide anion, EtO−. However, since this value can be easily obtained as pKb = 14 − pKa, such value would be somewhat redundant. One would expect pKb to be basicity constant of ethanol itself, i.e. of a different equilibrium reaction, between EtOH and EtOH+
2 (in water). Some sources state oxonium H3O+ pKa = −1.7 and (some others) ethyloxonium EtOH+
2 = −2 (which is close, as should be), so the expected pKb would be around 16. If i'm not blatantly wrong somewhere. —Mykhal (talk) 20:50, 17 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

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Recreational drug?

I read the discussion above, and don't have a problem with ethanol being considered a drug by at least some definitions, and personally don't have any difficulties in accepting that some foods contain drugs. However, the bare statement in the lead that ethanol "is most commonly consumed as a popular recreational drug" is not supported by the article itself which reads just "As a central nervous system depressant, ethanol is one of the most commonly consumed psychoactive drugs." Recreational drug use is defined as "the use of a psychoactive drug to induce an altered state of consciousness for pleasure". In other words, it introduces a motivational element, and while it is undoubtedly true that that is the motivation for some drinkers of alcohol, no source is given to justify "most commonly consumed..." Are there reliable sources that address this issue? Davidships (talk) 23:24, 4 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Section on toxicity is inadequate

The section on toxicity should tell us -- in more detail than is currently provided -- how much pure ethanol is dangerous. Acute toxicity should be mentioned -- it can kill you too. How much will lead to hospitalization or death), and whether the fumes are harmful -- just like with any other chemical. "General knowledge" because of the familiar cultural role of alcohol is not enough. 84.226.214.17 (talk) 17:00, 28 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

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