/biz/ - Business & Finance

Stumbled upon something odd, frens...
Was looking after elements' abundance in the earth crust, and i've noticed they completely messed up the numbers for gold lately. And it's truly all over the place.
From what i remember, silver always was at 0.07ppm, and gold at around 0.004. So basically 15x rarer, which was the commonly accepted ratio used by countries for the conversion rate for so long while both still were monetary metals. Which is logical.

The first link you'll find if you type "elements abundance on earth" is literally a WEF link lol. Which is displaying pic related, coming from Visual Capitalist (the irony...). If you look there, they missed a 0 for gold, putting it at 0.04ppm instead of 0.004, which is a pretty big mistake, it implies silver and gold are equally rare in the earth's crust... Doesn't look very serious from the WEF to check on this.

But anyway. That's where it become confusing, the 2nd link on google : the wiki page, here they changed the earth's crust abundance of gold for one of their source, but not the other.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth%27s_crust#cite_note-4

Both sources are dated from April 2007 (probably when the wiki entry was created) : it's Barbalance and WebElement. They tend to have pretty similar results for all the elements, but JUST for gold, Barbalance cite 0.001ppm, while WebElement says 0.003ppm.
Which is an abberation. Never i've witnessed this 0.001 figure before, and iirc the commonly accepted figure always have been 0.004... Even on this very wiki page.

So why did they shadow-edit this page? I could swear it was marked 0.004 for both sources not long ago, but i don't have any snapshot to prove it..
And how do they end up with this x4 rarer figure than the commonly accepted sources?

It doesn't look very serious that for the first google links (WEF and wiki), you end up with 3 results for gold's abundance, and all three are widly differents (and wrong) : 0.04, 0.001 and 0.003...