Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Chemistry/Archive 12

message: Given Ben's comments above, I noticed that what we need to create a style guide for skeletal/structural formulae; this might be best as a general style guide for writing about chemical compounds.  It should be something we start out as a proposal, advertise in all of the right locations like Village Pump and Wikipedia:Community Portal and the like.  That way we can build a good guide through collaboration and consensus.  We could then have it added as a suplemental guide in WP:MOS, and would give us something to use when trying to solve, or better yet prevent, these problems in the future.  I propose: Wikipedia:Articles about chemical compounds.  Anyone else think this is a good idea?  --Jayron32|talk|contribs 18:19, 3 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Do you mean something like this style guide?  It's listed at the top of the WP:Chem page, it's also linked from WP:MOS, but maybe it needs to be more heavily publicised on this project as well?  Walkerma 18:47, 3 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Or rather Wikipedia:WikiProject Chemistry/Structure drawing? --Itub 19:01, 3 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: OK, I am a total idiot.  I could have looked first, eh?  Sorry all!  One thing we need to do, as I see it, is update the Structure drawing page.  What is really needed there is examples of good and bad drawings, like we are hashing out above.  If we have a clear exampel on what a good skeletal formula will look like, and have it in the guide, then when we make or request a change to an article, we have somewhere to point to if our changes are objected to or reverted.--Jayron32|talk|contribs 23:57, 3 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  I quite like the idea of good and bad examples, might help people key into the major dos and don'ts - or rather prefered and disliked -- Quantockgoblin 00:10, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Another thing we could do is to create a cleanup template (like  or such) that would tag the article as containing a non-standard chemical structure diagram, that would also add the article to a cleanup category like "Category:Articles with nonstandard chemical diagrams" or something like that.  It would help us tag articles in need of work, and give us a list of structures that we need to create using perhaps the ACD ChemSketch software as noted below.  I am terrible with template coding, but is this something we want to do?--Jayron32|talk|contribs 00:46, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

text: Can you tell I'm a bit new around this Project.  Sorry all and thanks for the help... I suppose every worthwhile idea HAS been thought of by someone else... --Jayron32|talk|contribs 03:45, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: No they haven't. I created the template, category etc. in response to your idea! For the record, I took a look at Wikipedia:Requested pictures and saw what was there. Your idea wasn't really covered, so I took one of the other templates () and changed it around a bit, created the category (again, by taking the text from the top of :Category:Wikipedia requested diagrams and editing it to fit) and added a link on the other picture request pages (which reminds me, there's one link I forgot to do...). See WP:BOLD for more details :) Physchim62 (talk) 03:57, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: You ROCK.  Well, maybe I am good for something around here :)! --Jayron32|talk|contribs 04:11, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

text: Well maybe someone else did think of this idea first... Thank-you Beetstra for , created on 2007-03-04 and which gives

without a parameter and

with "a parameter", and sends pages to :Category:Chemistry pages needing pictures. See also Wikipedia:WikiProject Chemistry/Image Request. Even admins (especially admins...) screw up sometimes! Physchim62 (talk) 04:15, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Proposal: Style guide for chemical compounds

message: I've been working on Francium, and I've requested for scientific peer review here, though as of yet, I have seen no comments. If y'all would like to add your thoughts, I'd greatly appreciate it. --Cryptic C62 · Talk 18:12, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Francium]] 

message: Dear all
This is message regarding the recent posts above concerning consistency in the drawing of chemical images and a style guide. In the above post I suggested that maybe we could recommend some chemical drawing freeware program. The problem still being how to tell people how to customise the freeware to our style guide. I took it upon myself to send an email to ACD who make a freeware program called ChemSketch (it's quite good) to see if they would make a Wikipeida template on their program. They said they would be willing in principle. For more on this see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Chemistry/Structure_drawing_workgroup#ACD_ChemSketch_-_the_company_is_willing_to_make_a_Wikipedia_Template_on_their_Freeware 
Please post your views on the page linked above.
-- Quantockgoblin 17:24, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Wow. I didn't even know Wikipedia:WikiProject Chemistry/Structure drawing workgroup existed. I put it on the front page. --HappyCamper 04:43, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  ACD ChemSketch - the company is willing to make a Wikipedia Template on their Freeware 

message: I recently asked someone on the French Wikipedia to prepare a collection of all chemistry pages (i.e., all pages found under the :Category:Chemistry umbrella), and he generated & sent me a file later that day!  The list contains 22795 pages. I can send it as a CSV file to anyone who would like it - but be warned, it's over 1 MB!  Just email me using my Wiki username and my institution, potsdamDOTedu. Walkerma 07:55, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: wow.  --Dirk Beetstra T C 08:17, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Database of chemistry pages 

message: I think all the existing concerns of alkane have been addressed. Is it ready for promotion to GA class? --Rifleman 82 17:43, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I think so -- Quantockgoblin 18:03, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: As a frequent GA reviewer, I am going to have to disagree with that.  I found some more issues that I cleaned up myself, but there are still some writing issues that may need clean-up for clarity.  Also WP:SCG aside, the article will not likely pass GA for its level of inline referencing.  I know what you are going to say, and I won't say that you aren't right, I am merely recognizing the fact that the Good Article project sets the bar higher than SCG does for requiring inline references, and reviewers tend to, in almost all cases, fail an article with the level of referencing this one shows.  Again, without assigning "rightness" or "wrongness" to the two guidelines in question (WP:WIAGA and WP:SCG), I can only note that this will probably not pass GA.  Does that mean it is not a great article? Nope, but it still won't pass GA. --Jayron32|talk|contribs 19:33, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Alkane]] 

message: I wrote a template for wikipedia for Endnote, to generate  templates. However, I've hit a snag - they use pipes as their delimiters, as do we, and so it's missing all the | in the output. Does anybody have any idea how else to fix it? Is anyone willing to help me fix it, and share with the group? --Rifleman 82 20:00, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: This would be a very valuable tool - if you can get it working, please let me know! Walkerma 01:02, 7 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: As it stands, it ALMOST works now. This is the output generated:
cite journal  author = A. d. Meijere and F. E. Meyer title = Fine Feathers Make Fine Birds: The Heck Reaction in Modern Garb  year = 1995  journal = Angewandte Chemie International Edition in English  volume = 33  issue = 23-24  pages = 2379-2411  url = http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/anie.199423791 
What I do is that I copy it into notepad, and replace all double spaces with "_|_", fix the url --> doi (because the DOI is stored as a URL in EndNote), then paste it wherever necessary. But it's not elegant, which irritates me greatly! 
To get this template you can email me. Or, you can wait til its really fixed, though I don't know when that might be. --Rifleman 82 05:49, 7 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: References and [[EndNote]]

message: Has anyone else noticed that there are two categories - :Category:WikiProject Chemistry members and :Category:WikiProject Chemistry participants. The former has more entries, but the latter come from using the Template:Participant on the user page. Should we have just one category. There is a related discussion at Wikipedia talk:User categories for discussion#Category:Wikipedians by WikiProject. --Bduke 07:14, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Project member/participant categories

message: I would like to introduce myself. I am Gabriel Tojo, a professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain, Northwest) and one of the founders of two small chemical companies (www.galchimia.com; www.greensolutions.es). Furthermore, I am the editor-in-chief of a new series from Springer entitled "Basic Reactions in Organic Synthesis." At the moment, we have published two books from the series: "Oxidation of Alcohols to Aldehydes and Ketones" and "Oxidation of Primary Alcohols to Carboxylic Acids." You may download a sample article from http://www.springer.com/west/home/chemistry/organic?SGWID=4-142-22-55007504-detailsPage=ppmmedia|samplePages
I think that I could distill both books to the bare essentials and write several articles in Wikipedia. In the future, as more books are published, I could write more articles.
By the way, I am looking for prospective authors for more books in this series.
Regards
Gabriel Tojo
* Hi Gabriel, Welcome to the Wikiproject Chemistry!. If you are looking for inspiration: the List of organic reactions still contains over 300 reactions for which no article currently exists  V8rik 20:52, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: This sounds great, Gabriel.  When my final exams are over (late May), I'd love to work with you on this sort of thing, which I think it is currently a weak area on Wikipedia.  I think that "unnamed reactions" often get less treatment than named reactions, if only because no one quite knows what to call the article!  I've been meaning to write an article on Oxidation of alcohols for about a year now - I already have notes and references, just no time to sit down and write it.  Please go ahead and get started, we'd really appreciate your contributions. Walkerma 17:52, 10 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Gabriel Tojo, presentation 

message: Please can we have a new proposal that rather than dumping a formula and a small line of text that, if not already done, either:
# Link it properly to the text
# Explain the process literally before illustrating with a formula
# Not blindly copy formulae out of textbooks
# If possible, reference everything added?
  ♥♥ ΜÏΠЄSΓRΘΠ€ ♥♥ slurp me! 17:51, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Would you like to give an example (i.e. a specific article) so that we understand your point better? --Rifleman 82 17:54, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  Well, for instance -- it seems in a lot of cases, people tend to just say things like "In the case of..." and then whack in a formula that vaguely describes the point they are trying to make -- rather than doing this, it'd be easier to explain the derivation or "how you get to" the point.   ♥♥ ΜÏΠЄSΓRΘΠ€ ♥♥ slurp me! 16:04, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

text: It sounds like what you are proposing already represents Wikipedia policy.  To make a difference, the proposal would have to provide tools that would help people contribute more effectively (for example m:Wikicat).  Do you have something specific in mind?  If not, then at least a list of problem articles would help, as Rifleman82 suggests. Walkerma 17:47, 10 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Nevermind, it was just a suggestion -- i didn't know if it was policy. Any problems i see i'll just clean them up myself.   ♥♥ ΜÏΠЄSΓRΘΠ€ ♥♥ slurp me! 20:36, 10 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  New proposal. 

message: In a discussion over on project math we've discovered that a recent change to the version of Tidy used to clean up the HTML coding of WP pages has exposed problems in some articles in which authors wrote  ...  ... where they should have written  ... , etc. That is, the slash in the close subscript tag is missing. Previously, the software would catch and automatically repair those errors but now it does not. The result is that a lot of pages are now malformatted, not just in math but also in chemistry (where subscripts are frequent for obvious reasons). If you want to help, there's a list of problem pages at User:Mets501/Pages that need to be fixed. —David Eppstein 20:21, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm not certain, but the WT:WPM discussion seems to have concluded that the errors have been there all along, but have been masked by the Tidy software and are only appearing now. Certainly, the pages used to look ok, now don't, and viewing the edit history as it appears now seems to show that the errors have been present for a long time. Also, Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Tidy upgraded discusses a change to Tidy that could have caused this behavior. So while we initially thought that some rogue process had somehow changed the pages while falsifying the histories, we eventually settled on the explanation above. —David Eppstein 21:12, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I am blasting all 816 through AWB, hope to have them finished soon.  --Dirk Beetstra T C 21:38, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Subscripts in chemical formulae 

message: Currently there are two user categories for this WikiProject: :Category:WikiProject Chemistry members & :Category:WikiProject Chemistry participants.  It is requested that you choose one or the other and request a merge of these categories.  --NThurston 21:15, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: See above, where I raised this question yesterday and gave a reference to a related debate. --Bduke 22:36, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

text: I have added a template - Template:User Chemistry Project. --Bduke 02:14, 10 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  User Category 

message: Following the discussion of a few weeks ago (quickly archived), I created a barnstar template for chemistry and chemicals wikiprojects,  with an optional personal message:
Comments? Support? Shall we use it? Wim van Dorst (Talk) 21:26, 10 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Looks good to me -- Quantockgoblin 21:42, 10 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Awarding chemistry barnstars 

message: I wrote the latter article without checking if anything similar existed (stupid me). Seems to have a large degree of overlap with the former. Should we merge? --Rifleman 82 16:24, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Support merge, you also forgot that you can have stereocenters at atoms other than carbon :P Physchim62 (talk) 17:24, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

text: I agree that merging with stereocenter and/or chirality (chemistry) would be best.  Sorry that it means extra work for you. :/  --Ed (Edgar181) 17:29, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: It's okay. I've done the merge. Would you please help me check two things:
# 2^n or 2^n - 1? I've always remembered it as 2^n -1 because (if i remember correctly), if you reverse every single stereocenter, you *should* come back to the identity.
# Chiral center versus stereogenic center - the article states a distinction. I must admit to playing fast and loose with these terms; is the article correct now?
# More discussion on the difference is probably in order. Also, the discussion of cis/trans and Δ/Λ chirality needs to be written? 
--Rifleman 82 18:04, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Stereocenter]] and [[chiral carbon]] 

message: I think Martin is really looking forward to getting his hands on my protypical endnote settings.
Here they are:
Since I cannot get it to output pipes (|), it output two spaces between each field instead. I copy into notepad, find and replace a double space with a pipe. I also fix the url into doi (Endnote doesn't handle DOIs natively). Then, I copy it into wikipedia. It'll be great if anyone can solve this problem.
An alternate idea I have is for someone to write a program which can read RIS files and output the text in the proper format. You can download the RIS file from most journals at their websites, and open with that little program. Hope this helps! --Rifleman 82 09:28, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: There already exist a small easy-to-use program to properly reference articles : User:Dmoss/Wikicite.  JoJan 18:00, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, but the point is that many practicing chemists already have Endnote libraries, or can export the citations to Endnote easily from CAS or ISI without having to type in the details, which is the main hassle. --Itub 18:38, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Thank you!  Both of these tools will find a place in my work here!  I really find the formatting of cites on WP very tedious, this will simplify things considerably - and encourage people to add a useful example to an article, know they can pop in the reference easily.  We should have a collection of such useful tools somewhere, I think.  Thanks to you both, Walkerma 02:00, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Endnote settings 

message: Many thanks to Itub and Sadi Carnot, as well as anyone else that contributed, to the list Timeline of chemistry.  It was promoted as a Featured List this week.--Jayron32|talk|contribs 01:34, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Congratulations and thanks to all concerned! This is a nice overview of the history of chemistry, and gives us a different kind of chemistry article from the usual.  Thanks, Walkerma 03:03, 15 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Timeline of Chemistry - Featured! 

message: I was looking at Wikiversity and Wikibooks... seems like a lot of duplicated time and effort... to what end? I doubt that the other two projects have the breadth and depth of editors and expertise which we have here, because of the lesser exposure. Would it be better to concentrate our efforts here and have redirects from there to prevent content forking? --Rifleman 82 21:59, 18 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: No, Wikiversity and Wikibooks have different objectives and it is not our business to tell editors there what they should do. --Bduke 22:46, 18 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Forking? 

message: I was trying to create articles on the higher number elements... and they all are redirects. How much information should I have until I can recreate the article? W1k13rh3nry 21:46, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: IMO, there's no reason to create articles about elements that don't exist. --Itub 05:41, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

text: I'll elaborate now that I have more time. Look at the articles for the heaviest discovered elements. They are all about the history of their discovery, the etymology, and well as a little bit of data about the known isotopes. Elements after 118 don't have this information for obvious reasons. They have practically nothing. The existing pages for elements for elements 117 and 119-124 only have uncited speculative statements and a cookie-cutter paragraph about the systematic name. In some cases it is conceivable that, with enough references to reliable theoretical publication, one could construct a meaningful article about some of these elements. But the existing versions of the articles for elements 117 and 119-124 are worthy candidates for deletion or merging IMO. See WP:CRYSTAL. --Itub 07:56, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Unquadnilium is a perfect example what these articles are good for. All of them should be a redirect to a yet unknown elements with a strong emphasis on the island of stability and the faster than light electrons of some of the never coming elements.--Stone 09:41, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Umm... interesting. Looking at the AFD log for element 125, I see the same cookie cutter paragraph about element names, etc.  The element that was linked by stone (140?) has the same paragraph and not much else. Why does that stay when 125 and a ton of other elements have to go? And off subject kind of... redirect to systematic element name? A more sensible redirect would be to Extended periodic table. W1k13rh3nry 10:56, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I beg to differ. The peridoic table is just a tool for visualizing relationships between properities and has nothing to do with nomenclature. --Belg4mit 20:50, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

text: The Afd results for elements 132 and 122 both show a general consensus against having seperate articles for undiscovered elements. They should all redirect to systematic element name, as this was the best redirect target at the time. If someone would like to expand and/or rename this article, they should feel free, but there should not be seperate articles for each undiscovered element (except, I would say, element 117 which was at one point claimed). The redirects can be protected if necessary. Physchim62 (talk) 15:19, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: elements past 124

message: Should a section be added to the Wikipedia:Scientific citation guidelines to address the use of such tags within scientific aritcles? I can understand how it can someone without much scientific experience might honestly add these tags.  It would be nice to have an explanation to direct them to that has been discussed and addresses the reason why such tags are not helpful and can be disruptive. M stone 07:47, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't know if that's the best place, but I agree that we should have a guideline somewhere explaining clearly that it is impossible for articles on many scientific topics to be "self-contained" and addressed to the mythical "average reader". An yes, also explaining why slapping on those silly templates causes more disruption and ill-will than anything else. --Itub 09:43, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

text: I really like your statement.  Could something like this be placed somewhere so that it can be referenced in the future?  I am not sure where is appropriate, but sometimes it would be nice to have something to point to during a discussion if this type of issue arises. M stone 18:04, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Put it in here: /editorial wisdom from the WikiChemists :-). I think part of this tagging problem comes from the push to edit so we have more featured articles - very often, the standards for featured articles are not necessarily the best for the subject at hand. --HappyCamper 19:33, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

text: I like it! I tweaked it a bit to clarify the distinction between target technical audience (for whom "normal" standards still apply) and lay audience...previous could be read to mean that articles needn't even be comprehensible to experts in the field:) DMacks 07:49, 27 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I think I would still like to see us attempt to introduce the topic in simple terms - and the editorial wisdom should reflect that.  I didn't edit it - I want to see what others think.  If I were to tell my mother (someone who's never taken a chemistry class, I suspect) "I'm working on the XXXX" she could perhaps gather some meaning from the Wikipedia article like, "Oh, this is used to make the pharmaceutical YYY" or "It connects a carbon to another carbon."  I agree that we can't avoid being technical, and we do have wikilinks to explain the terminology, but we should definitely do our absolute best to make it as accessible as possible, at least in the intro.  Having said that, I think the aldol condensation article does try to do that. Walkerma 05:52, 2 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, that's more or less just wikipedia policy; if we ensure that the "ramp" into the topic is sufficiently gradual, then we can ensure that the user/reader develops understanding as they read the topic. That is how we can allow non-chemists to read chemistry articles; it's my opinion that if you tag an article, you may as well TELL the user personally they can't understand it, or on a lesser term it'll be a cue for someone to move away from something which may otherwise be quite readable. If non chemists want to learn chemistry, then i suggest they do exactly that and not waste time tagging things; leave that to Jet Set Radio ;-)   ♥♥ ΜÏΠЄSΓRΘΠ€ ♥♥ slurp me! 19:17, 2 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: References