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
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).
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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How did I 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- The course was presented as conventional Web pages (they are still up, as a historical document!)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!