Talk:Valency

Valency is a rather outdated term that chemical education has been trying to get rid of for some time. Shouldn't we rewrite this page in terms of oxidation numbers? The two terms are not equivalent, if only because oxidation numbers can also be negative.

• I don't have any problem with linking these topics and in fact developing valency with an eye to proving there is a better way (i.e. oxidation number) to handle this information. But I'd hate to abandon the term altogether, even if deprecated, because some elementary school kid is going to wander onto the Wikipedia and try to bootstrap himself into an understanding of chemistry. The first bonding concept that he understands might be the valence concept. Dwmyers 18:43 Feb 18, 2003 (UTC)