Should we use Dispersity instead of Polydispersity/Monodispersity?

[smk78]

pkienzle has discovered that IUPAC formally deprecated use of the terms polydispersity and monodispersity as long ago as 2009! They advocate the use of dispersity. See:

​http://www.freepatentsonline.com/article/Pure-Applied-Chemistry/195013012.html

​https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polydispersity

They further advocate the use of a 'stroke-D' symbol (Ð, unicode U+0110) for dispersity (​https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/85546/why-cant-i-get-a-d-with-stroke)

The question for us, therefore, is whether we should update all our documentation (and, in some cases, model parameters and GUIs)?

Discuss!

[butler]

Discussion:

I think most users still think in terms of poly and mono dispersity, so a change would mainly be for the purpose of helping disseminate/enforce a new standard. I would argue that if that is the case, we have way too much more important work that needs to get done with our very small resources to make this a priority?

As for the symbol I suspect 90+% of our users would have NO idea what that meant so as a symbol it is not very helpful, where I measure a symbol's utility in its ability to provide a recognizable short hand for the concept.

[smk78]

There are (at the time of writing) 1608 instances of words containing the root "dispersity" across SasView and SasModels. Whilst a global search and replace could be employed, the view at Code Camp IX is that would not be a professional approach. The decision therefore is that we will not address this ticket.