Talk:Rzepa2011

WikiPedia and the Molecular Sciences

A talk given by Henry Rzepa, sharing his thoughts about Wikipedia and its use.

1. Chemistry is mostly about molecules. Hence it is one of the molecular sciences
   1. As of today, there are 58,045,845 molecules known
   2. For each of which between 10 - 50 well-defined properties (sometimes more) are recorded (or calculated).
2. Molecules map beautifully onto Wiki(pedia) pages!
3. You will see from the above, that collecting information about these molecules has been done by small number of (commercial) organisations
   • CAS
   • REAXYS
   • CCDC
   • etc.
4. The process started around 1881 by Friedrich Konrad Beilstein.
   • His handbook was the (molecular) Wikipedia of his day!
   • And it introduced many modern concepts, such as the information triple (Molecule|Property|Citation)
5. Nowadays, this information is Expensive and not accessible to everyone.
6. So, when Wikipedia started, people interested in molecules immediately started a Project.
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8. How have I used Wiki(pedia) in my teaching?
   • In 1996, i decided to teach a course on how students might retrieve (chemical) information.
   • The course was presented as conventional Web pages (they are still up, as a historical document!)
   • And we got students to express what they had learnt by each writing a small project about an interesting molecule
     • Some of the best can still be seen here
   • In those days, students were keen to learn how to write HTML
   • But as the years went by, they started to query the usefulness of this skill!
   • So in 2008, I decided to move everything to our Wiki
     • A Modelling course now expresses the Molecule Project
     • and the students describe their project using (Media)Wiki markup instead of HTML.
     • this is much more to their liking!