19
05
2009
A New Blog : Phosphorus Carbide
Posted by: Antony Williams in UncategorizedCopyright©2009 Antony Williams
PhysChim62 (PC) is someone I meet with regularly on the Wikipedia Chemistry IRC chats. We’ve never met but I judge we have mutual respect, earned through many hours of working to improve the chemistry on Wikipedia. PC has been at it for a long time and has a broad reach in the WP community…I’m focused primarily on structure validation and delivering tools which can be of value to Wikipedians. If you have an interest in Chemistry on Wikipedia it’s one to add to your blogroll/reader as PC will likely touch on this quite regularly, as well as other things of interest. The blog is at http://phoscarb.blogspot.com/.
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May 20th, 2009 at 7:10 am
Thanks for the plug, Antony!
Whenever I get the chance to talk to people about Wikipedia Chemistry, the reaction is always “Wow, we never realised you were doing THAT!” Even when I talk to people within Wikipedia; even, sometimes, when I talk to people within the WP:CHEM project itself… We do actually take our role within the chemical information community seriously: that means taking a wider view than just the articles on our website, asking ourselves how we can ensure that our information is within spitting distance of being accurate, asking ourselves what information people actually want (as opposed to the information which it’s convenient for us to supply), and in what format.
WP:CHEM could be compared to a work team in a large organisation, a couple of dozen workers scurrying away very competently at the tasks they’ve been assigned (in WP, it would be the tasks they’ve assigned themselves, but the general framework is still the same). From time to time, you have to step back and look at the bigger picture: “why am I actually doing this?” “How does my work fit in with what other people are doing?” That is the aim of my new blog, to provide a space for discussion of topics in chemical information without necessarily focussing on the immediate problems of broken links and dodgy CAS numbers!
As a final plug, if you’re interested in what WP:CHEM is doing, I’ve just published an article in the Wikipedia house newsletter on that very subject: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-05-18/Chemistry_data