Comments on: Feedback from C and E News http://www.chemspider.com/blog/c-and-e-news-feedback.html Building Community for Chemists Tue, 16 Mar 2010 21:05:32 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 hourly 1 By: Sargis Dallakyan http://www.chemspider.com/blog/c-and-e-news-feedback.html/comment-page-1#comment-171916 Sargis Dallakyan Thu, 21 May 2009 22:09:10 +0000 http://www.chemspider.com/blog/?p=1281#comment-171916 Enjoyed reading this post. I personally do not pay much attention to details when it comes to chemical structures; paraphrasing well know quote "all chemical drawings are wrong, but some are useful". I just wanted to let you know that apostrophes ( ’ or ' ) are not rendered correctly on my Firefox browser running on Linux (Fedora Core 10); I'm getting � , which seems to be a UTF and not ASCII. Thanks! Enjoyed reading this post. I personally do not pay much attention to details when it comes to chemical structures; paraphrasing well know quote “all chemical drawings are wrong, but some are useful”. I just wanted to let you know that apostrophes ( ’ or ‘ ) are not rendered correctly on my Firefox browser running on Linux (Fedora Core 10); I’m getting � , which seems to be a UTF and not ASCII. Thanks!

]]> By: Physchim62 http://www.chemspider.com/blog/c-and-e-news-feedback.html/comment-page-1#comment-154295 Physchim62 Fri, 17 Apr 2009 13:08:53 +0000 http://www.chemspider.com/blog/?p=1281#comment-154295 Indeed, a very helpful response. I interested in Dr Ritter's estimate of the error rate: five or so errors a year out of "several hundred structures" is about 1% (not point in trying to estimate it any more accurately). That is comparable to the error rate which we find on Wikipedia when we check carefully – the latest audit figures I've seen indicate an error rate of less than 2% for WP, although it can sometimes be difficult to decide what we count as an "error". C&EN is written by committed professionals, but they have to work to a journalistic timescale: Wikipedia is written by committable volunteers, but we have all the time in the world (it just doesn't feel like it!) Wikipedia certainly hopes to become a repository of well drawn structure images, although we cannot afford to pay professional artists as some publishers do! There are a number of problems which we are actively trying to address. Firstly, the structure has to be correct, as the domoic acid case shows! I would prefer a badly drawn structure which is correct than a well drawn structure which is wrong – I can always redraw the badly drawn structure but a false structure will just get perpetuated in the literature. Secondly, our users have to be able to find the structure – we have far more images than we actually use on our articles – and this requires some form of indexing. We're working on these problems with a number of external partners – including ChemSpider, thanks a million guys for all your help! – and we hope to make some more formal announcements in the next few weeks. Indeed, a very helpful response. I interested in Dr Ritter’s estimate of the error rate: five or so errors a year out of “several hundred structures” is about 1% (not point in trying to estimate it any more accurately). That is comparable to the error rate which we find on Wikipedia when we check carefully – the latest audit figures I’ve seen indicate an error rate of less than 2% for WP, although it can sometimes be difficult to decide what we count as an “error”. C&EN is written by committed professionals, but they have to work to a journalistic timescale: Wikipedia is written by committable volunteers, but we have all the time in the world (it just doesn’t feel like it!)

Wikipedia certainly hopes to become a repository of well drawn structure images, although we cannot afford to pay professional artists as some publishers do! There are a number of problems which we are actively trying to address. Firstly, the structure has to be correct, as the domoic acid case shows! I would prefer a badly drawn structure which is correct than a well drawn structure which is wrong – I can always redraw the badly drawn structure but a false structure will just get perpetuated in the literature. Secondly, our users have to be able to find the structure – we have far more images than we actually use on our articles – and this requires some form of indexing. We’re working on these problems with a number of external partners – including ChemSpider, thanks a million guys for all your help! – and we hope to make some more formal announcements in the next few weeks.

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