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A Request from Martin Walker at Wikipedia
Posted by: Antony Williams in Community BuildingCopyright©2008 Antony Williams
Martin Walker from Wikipedia Chemistry has posted a request on CHMINF for feedback regarding how Wikipedia might be used by chemists. I’ve posted it here for those of you who don’t read CHMINF but might be interested in providing feedback. Feedback to these types of questions are very important right now as decisions are being made about what ChemBox fields to expose/hide. Please give your feedback if interested.
“Thanks to work by Antony Williams, we (the chemists on Wikipedia) are currently validating the structural data on Wikipedia, and we are discussing the best way to present the information such as SMILES, InChIs, InChIKeys. To that end, I’d like to ask group members who use Wikipedia to reply to me (no need to clutter up the listserve) with their thoughts on the following:
1. Do you ever search Wikipedia, or the Internet in general, for a structure using SMILES, InChI or InChIKey?
2. Do you ever copy/paste such identifiers FROM Wikipedia into Google, etc, in order to do a search?
(I am well aware of the reliability question with Wikipedia, but let’s not open up Pandora’s box with that issue!)
We mainly want to find out if people need to SEE such identifiers in the article - bearing in mind they are designed for machines. We could hide them so a machine would see them but a casual reader would not, or “semi-hide” them (reader clicks to see). We could also place them on data pages such as this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol_%28data_page%29
We are discussing this issue in our next IRC meeting - please join us if this is of special interest to you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Chemistry/IRC_discussions
Thanks for your time,
Martin A. Walker
Department of Chemistry
SUNY College at Potsdam
Potsdam, NY 13676 USA
+1 (315) 267-2271
walkerma@potsdam.edu
“
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January 28th, 2008 at 2:34 pm
The only time I’ve searched Google for an InChI was to test whether it had spidered the tags I’d included in a blog post about a particular substance and that was a few years back when Alan Mc first alerted me to the whole concept of InChi when it was still IChI. But, then again, I’m not a practicing chemist looking for molecules on a daily basis, so my input on this is probably not entirely pertinent.
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