[Foundation-l] Glycerol information

[John Vandenberg]

On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 8:35 PM, Nikola Smolenski <smolensk at eunet.rs> wrote:
> On 11/11/2010 08:50 AM, John Vandenberg wrote:
>> On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 6:47 PM, Nikola Smolenski<smolensk at eunet.rs>  wrote:
>>> On 11/11/2010 07:31 AM, Sue Gardner wrote:
>>>> * Ideally, they would be stories of people who
>>>> pre-exposure-to-Wikipedia would have had circumscribed access to
>>>> information. Because they grew up in a small town with no library,
>>>> because their school didn't stock certain kinds of books, because
>>>> materials in their language are of limited availability, because their
>>>> government limits access to certain types of information -- in
>>>> general, because their economic/political/socio-cultural circumstances
>>>> somehow impede(d) easy access to information.
>>>
>>> I have an anti-story, about a critically useful information that was
>>> available in a home library, yet would not be allowed on Wikipedia per
>>> its policies. Anyone interested?
>>
>> I am.
>
> Back when we were under sanctions, it was impossible to buy antifreeze
> (or it was prohibitively expensive). So, my father remembered that in
> one of the books in our home library he once read that it it is possible
> to make antifreeze by mixing glycerine, alcohol and water in appropriate
> amount. It took him weeks to search through the home library, but he
> eventually did find the book and made his own antifreeze.

What is the year of publications of this book in your library?
It might be out of copyright, or out of print and the author (or their
estate) willing to release it into the PD early.

> Now, I have actually found a bit of the needed information at
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycerol : "The minimum freezing point
> temperature is at about -36 °F / -37.8 °C corresponding to 60-70 %
> glycerol in water.[11]".

When was this first discovered?  Glycerol was well known before 1923,
so it is quite likely that there are PD sources which cover this in
detail, and they can be added to Wikisource.

> But the problem is, I would not feel
> comfortable with making my own antifreeze from a single sentence (for
> example, does it matter if you pour water in glycerine or glycerine in
> water?) but if more detailed instructions would be added to Wikipedia,
> they would be removed per WP:NOTHOWTO. The book also included a table
> with the freezing points of various ratios of glycerine, alcohol and
> water (the point was to make the cheapest mixture that would not freeze
> at the lowest temperature we could expect) and for this too I don't see
> where in Wikipedia it could be added.
>
>> It sounds like it would be allowed on Wikisource.
>
> It probably would be allowed on Wikibooks. But for one reason or
> another, people simply aren't interested enough in working on Wikibooks;
> Wikibooks don't show high enough in Google because the articles are not
> highly interlinked; and the Wikibooks howto in the opposite fashion
> could not have encyclopedic information in it (for example the very
> important section "Historical cases of contamination with diethylene
> glycol" that is present in the Wikipedia article and that would
> obviously be very important to someone who needs to make his own
> antifreeze).

Wikibooks is also an option.  I don't see why Wikibooks can not
include this historical information.  Once the Wikibook pages are
reasonable quality, you can add {{wikibooks}} to the Wikipedia page,
allowing readers to easily find this information.

--
John Vandenberg