1. You still haven't answered why other more authorative sites such as ChemSpider also display ball-and-stick as per the later Wiki version. (If more than one authorative site does so then there must be some reason for it - for this common consistency.)
2. You have failed to realize the significance of being consistent in presentation especially when stuff is presented in encyclopedic form. To do so in any other way is misleading.
That means that the skeletal and ball-and-stick depictions should be consistent with each other (otherwise it's confusingly - except for geniuses such as yourself of course).
Can't you understand that many people compare both models and that they expect them to match? (It's common practice to count the hydrogens on both to cross reference the chemical formula, etc., etc. - that's a common teaching practice where I come from.)
3. I never said that I disagreed with your assessment of the chemistry and I still don't. In fact, I do understand what you are talking about but (a) it's irrelevant if I do or don't in this instance and (b) expressing the more 'complex' state of molecules isn't normal practice in encyclopedic references. Yes, I'd agree that in textbooks such detail is normal but not here.
If you want to be precise to the nth degree and grind things superfine AND also be consistent across chemistry (i.e.: have common and consistant [standard] nomenclature to describe things) then you could not describe water as just 'H2O'.
OK: now where do we start for a proper formulaic description of water?
We would have to add in hydronium - or should that be hydroxonium (I learned the latter but I'm happy with both). Or should we refer to that as 'oxonium' only? Or should we start the description with something as confusing as:
Water = H20+H3O+ +... . ('water'
+ oxonium-type ion and then some extras)
How do we describe the protonation in its fullest form (as a formula)?
As you ought to know, this gets even more complicated, should we add in all known cations (Zundel, etc.) for a basic description of water just to ensure the formula is complete in all circumstances (cover all states/conditions)? (And then add a footnote that we may still not have them all as others may still be there - yet to be discovered).
Of course not. It's ridiculous.
Any chemist who works at that level already knows this stuff so it's unnecessary to describe the 'basic' molecule - dare I say it - in anything other than in its simplest (basic) form.
