I am trying to get my past blog-stuff sorted out – some of my unpublishined snippets may appear in random order.
I had selected Chem-Bark’s post:
Chemical Citizen of 2006: Wikipedia User “V8rik”
where CB lauds the contributions from “V8rik”. It’s a typical example of how multi-faceted the world is. There are lots of different groups and people with different approaches to the opportunities of the Net. The WP group are fairly distinct from the Blue Obelisk, for example. But synergy is increasing.
I’ve contributed a modest amount of chemistry to WP – and interacted with some of the main practitioners. WP is great in that it is easy to get started, with an exciting social model. I have predicted that WP (or derivatives yet to come) will displace many chemistry reference works. Have a look at some of your favouraite compounds and see the WP entry. That’s all done by quite a small number of people. Imagine what it would be like if we all contributed just a little.
The main problem for me with WP (as with blogs, Wikis, etc.) is that they are syntactically and semantic broken. It’s very difficult to get chemistry into any of them. That may be gradually changing – Henry Rzepa has experimented with a semantic Wiki and reported this at the ACS. But generally if you try to get a usable chemical connection table into Wikis it’s a effort.
That’s starting to change. Martin Walker is one of the stalwarts of chemical WP and we met at the Blue Obelisk
dinner in Chicago. Yesterday he posted (I can’t get to the BO archive, so have copied the message)
=== Walkerma ==
There have been a lot of things going on at Wikipedia that will interest
this group.
Chemistry/Structure drawing workgroup#ACD ChemSketch – the company is
willing to make a Wikipedia Template on their Freeware
(Sorry about the long URL!)
We are working with Antony Williams, Product Manager for ChemSketch, to
add Wikipedia settings into ChemSketch. Simple drawing settings alone
would be trivial – we’ve already agreed to use ACS drawing settings – but
they are talking about adding in the image processing to make a PNG file
automatically (we asked for SVG, but we’d still be thrilled with PNG).
Williams is posting on the above talk page, and will provide a test
version soon, I think. I think this feature will make it easier for
people to post structures to their web pages, never mind Wikipedia.
I did my duty and requested that the software also generate an InChI.
Williams was open/supportive, but said it would take longer. I would like
to draw a molecule in ChemSketch, then have the magic “Wikipedia button”
generate a PNG or SVG file for me with the InChI attached as metadata, all
ready for uploading to the Wikimedia Commons. If we can do this in
ChemSketch, I’m sure we can pressurise ChemDraw to follow suit. I have a
feeling that the “Wikipedia button” (if properly designed) could in effect
become the standard “Upload my structure to my website button”, in which
case we would really like to get the metadata included. Does anyone here
have any comments or advice on how best to do this? Adding metadata to
image files in Wikimedia software is difficult, hence my post at the
Commons Village Pump:
Please help!
2. Someone from IUPAC Gold Book has approached us, “offering a
collaboration between IUPAC and Wikipedia and offering to make their data
available to us.”
Gold Book
Again, much discussion and many thoughtful responses. This really looks
like a good chance to add value to Wikipedia articles. Suggestions,
ideas?
As well as the above, we’ve also had heated debates about SVG vs PNG,
citation policies, an Endnote citation-generator for WP, harmonisation of
chemical structure drawing standards with the German Wikipedia, and much
more, all since I got back from Chicago. Jmol adoption even got a short
discussion, Bob. Phew!
I’d really appreciate some expert advice on how best to proceed. Many
thanks,
Martin
[…]
Martin A. Walker
Department of Chemistry
SUNY College at Potsdam
Potsdam, NY 13676 USA
+1 (315) 267-2271
=== Walkerma ==
(I think the IUPAC contact may be Alan McNaught, and the Gold Book has been impressively converted to a publicly available ontology by the ZVON group. )
Anyway it’s nice to see a chemical software company helping – in general they have been very slow to embrace the new world of collaboration.
Semantic Wikis and blogs are very primitive and anyone who has any ideas or experience would be welcome – suggest you post to the BO mailing list (http://hardly.cubic.uni-koeln.de/mailman/listinfo/blue-obelisk/).
When (not if) the worlds of chemical Wikipedia and Blue obelisk come together then the chemical world will not be able to ignore the power of Openness.