Talk:Rzepa2011: Difference between revisions
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== The Percursors == | == The Percursors == | ||
# How did | # How did Rzepa get into Wiki(pedia)? | ||
#* In 1997, | #* In 1997, I decided to teach a course on how students might retrieve (chemical) information. | ||
#* The course was presented as conventional Web pages (they are [http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/local/it/ still up], as a historical document!) | #* The course was presented as conventional Web pages (they are [http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/local/it/ still up], as a historical document!)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 | #* And we got students to express what they had learnt by each writing a small project about an interesting molecule | ||
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# There is much current discussion on how to best incorporate this into Wikipedia itself | # There is much current discussion on how to best incorporate this into Wikipedia itself | ||
#* You can see for example that I am not able to install it on this Wiki! | #* You can see for example that I am not able to install it on this Wiki! | ||
== What else molecular or chemical is happening on Wikipedia itself? == | == What else molecular or chemical is happening on Wikipedia itself? == | ||
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Revision as of 13:01, 8 April 2011
WikiPedia and the Molecular Sciences
A talk given by Henry Rzepa, sharing his thoughts about Wikipedia and its use on the occasion of the London Wikipedia Academy launch
Molecules and WikiPedia
- Chemistry is mostly about molecules. Hence it is one of the molecular sciences
- As of today, there are 58,045,845 molecules known
- For each of which between 10 - 50 well-defined properties (sometimes more) are recorded (or calculated).
- Molecules map beautifully onto Wiki(pedia) pages!
- You will see from the above, that collecting and curating information about molecules has hitherto been done by just a small number of (commercial) organisations:
- CAS
- REAXYS
- CCDC
- etc. etc.
- These organisations harvest data from the original sources (just like Wikipedia) and assiduously cite the sources.
- 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)
- Nowadays, this information is Expensive and accessible only to rich(er) oorganisations.
- So, when Wikipedia started, people interested in molecules immediately started a Chemistry Project.
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The Percursors
- How did Rzepa get into Wiki(pedia)?
- In 1997, 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 2007, 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!
- A key feature of our Wiki is the molecule renderer (Jmol).
- Our department was the first to use 3D models of molecules (way back in 1860)
- Nowadays, we build them on computer
- which means anyone can play with them
- or look at how molecules vibrate
- and how the electrons are distributed around them
- There is much current discussion on how to best incorporate this into Wikipedia itself
- You can see for example that I am not able to install it on this Wiki!
What else molecular or chemical is happening on Wikipedia itself?
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