Antony Williams reports that CAS has agreed to cooperate with Wikipedia Chemistry on the use of CAS numbers: A Message of Support and Public Service from the Chemical Abstracts Service
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This week conversations have been ongoing between WP:Chem and CAS. The conversations have been conducted by Martin Walker, a member of the WP:Chem team as well as the ChemSpider Advisory Group. Martin and I have similar opinions in regards to how to participate in the community and I honor his approach in working through this potentially difficult situation. The outcome of the discussions are declared here on Wikipedia.New announcement from CAS
CAS, a division of the American Chemical Society, is pleased to announce that it will contribute to the Wikipedia project. CAS will work with Wikipedia to help provide accurate CAS Registry Numbers� for current substances listed in Wikiprojects-Chemicals section of the Wikipedia Chemistry Portal that are of widespread general public interest.
The CAS Registry is the world�s most comprehensive collection of chemical substances and the CAS Registry Number is the recognized global standard for chemical substance identification.
CAS views Wikipedia as an important societal tool for the general public, and this collaboration with Wikipedia is in line with CAS� mission as a Division of the American Chemical Society.
We look forward to working with the Wikipedia volunteers over the next few weeks to make this happen.Eshively (talk) 13:40, 12 March 2008 (UTC)
[Chemspider] I think this is excellent. I implicitly agree with the statement “The CAS Registry is the world�s most comprehensive collection of chemical substances.” For CAS to offer support to the Wikipedia team for the curation project is, for me, an indication of commitment to public service and I am indebted to the participants in this decision. I’m excited to get back underway with the curation project and will start up my efforts again this weekend. This decision by CAS has invigorated me to keep eyeballing structures as fast (and carefully) as possible.
My sincere appreciation is extended to the CAS management team and decision-makers. My gratitude to WP:Chem for staying engaged in the conversation to get to this outcome. My encouragement to us all to get this project done and have a high quality validated dataset of chemicals available as a public resource. Onwards and upwards!
Although there are (I think) over 20 million chemicals with CAS numbers the vast majority are likely only to have been reported once or a very small number of times. It is the CAS numbers for the common compounds (perhaps 10,000) that are valuable. They are widely used and available in catalogs, safety data, etc. Most of these will find their way into Wikipedia where chemists and other scientists will add information and annotations. Note that there are no “right” or “wrong” assignments of structure and properties, but rather annotations with more or less authority – it is the authority that is critical. While Wikipedians can use the public literature to make assertions about the structure, properties and nomenclature of compounds, only CAS can act as the authority to link CAS numbers to names or structures.
“Although there are (I think) over 20 million chemicals with CAS numbers the vast majority are likely only to have been reported once or a very small number of times.”
The exact numbers can be found on http://www.cas.org/cgi-bin/cas/regreport.pl
On March 12th, 2008 / 8.33pm EST
34,177,079 (in)organics .gt. 20,000,000 —> TRUE
59,715,569 sequences .gt. 20,000,000 —> TRUE
1007457-12-6 –> 100,745,712 CAS-# .gt. 20,000,000 —> TRUE
(some CAS-# have been deleted – max a few %)
From http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/murrayrust/?p=1001 and
http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/murrayrust/?p=999
…. Wikipedia has between 1000 and 2000 chemical substances …. (later on corrected to 7000)
One nice feature of science is simply that it consists of FACTS which can be checked by experiments like ‘counting’ – the main problem of weblogs is the dilution of FACTS by FACTOIDS.
Do you know what is the CAS definition of “current substances of widespread general public interest” ? Is it likely to be narrower than Wikipedia would like?
(1) Noted
(2) A definition of this sort is bound to be fuzzy. I have been heartened by CAS’s response and I suspect that as we jointly discover the use of CAS identifiers in Web 2.0 they will find that they gain great value. So I would see it as an expanding concept that is probably limited by the human community’s desires and interests.