Dave,

While writing a response in the “lead” thread, I went looking for the entry on neodymium, and I noticed that there is no link to it under N in the alphabetized set of links to Big List entries, because the entry is titled “praseodymium, neodymium (and didymium)” and alphabetized under P.  I’d like to suggest that you add a “neodymium” link under N (and possibly a “didymium” link under D).  Not new articles, mind you, just additional links to the same article, sorted under the other names, so that a person could actually find them by looking for those names.  Likewise for “quicksilver”, there should be a link filed under Q and not just under M for “mercury”. Maybe also for wolfram and any others where you’ve done two names in one entry.

I’ll look into it, but it’s not as easy as just adding a link. The alphabetical lists are automatically generated based on the title of of the article. I’m not sure I can create cross-links without duplicating the articles with different titles. There may be a way to do it, though.

Well, I suppose one could just create an article tiled “neodymium” that says only “See praseodymium.” That seems trivially easy, and reputable reference works use that dodge all the time.

Yes, that’s an excellent idea.  One should be able to look up any element name in the list.

That’s the ticket. And if I date the cross reference to the original article, it won’t even clutter up the main page.

I’m starting to add the cross references. If you subscribe to the RSS feed, you’ll see a lot of new postings--despite my backdating them. So I apologize for any inconvenience.