Chemistry references in the digital age
A little bit of time goes a long way when it comes to sharing chemical information on Wikipedia, says Martin Walker
In 2006, I gave a presentation at a conference on a new website called ‘Wikipedia’, which was just becoming popular. At lunch afterwards a journal editor asked one of my undergraduate students: “How do you look up chemical information?” The student replied, “I look it up on the web – my computer is closer than my bookshelf”. In 2006, this seemed like a radical new idea. Yet only eight years later, we take this for granted.
From reference books …
Ten years ago, I would usually look up routine information in places like the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, The Merck Index or the Sigma Aldrich catalogue. If I tried to look up information on, say, calcium chloride online, I was offered CaCl2 in 25 kg bags or presented with an obscure academic paper. When I read about Wikipedia, I realised that this was an information website that had tremendous potential. Even though much was still missing, here was a site that could give me the information I wanted in one place: solubility, melting point, basic properties and uses, and a few useful references. It could also provide encyclopaedic information on reactions, processes and even famous chemists. I immediately began to edit existing articles and to write new articles in my spare time. I took photographs of chemicals from our stockroom.
I was delighted to see the site become popular, with pages I had written or rewritten garnering millions of views. I used to joke about my article on gold(III)chloride, thinking that no one would read it. Yet within months it had been widely read and even translated into the Thai language! Academic chemistry publications do not usually have this sort of reach. So clearly Wikipedia seemed to tap into a tremendous information need that was not being met before.
… to an online information hub
Today, Wikipedia is a standard reference site for most people, including many chemists. Its unusual approach of using ‘crowdsourcing’ to create articles does not always engender trust, yet its convenience leads its site being used constantly. Most of the time, we find information to be correct, so we continue to use the site. But it’s not been easy to make Wikipedia information reliable.
Wikipedia is the encyclopedia that ‘anyone can edit’: you do not even need to open an account to open that ‘Edit’ tab. Most of the time that is good, as it means errors are quickly fixed by readers as they go. However, it does mean that an article is open to shameless vandalism, and if an article is not checked by the Wikipedia community, this vandalism may persist for a long time. In other cases, an article may be edited by someone trying to push a particular point of view. The Wikipedia chemistry community has worked hard to overcome these problems, both by vigilance and by new methods of quality improvement.
The chemists on Wikipedia (through the chemistry and chemicals WikiProjects) pioneered an assessment scheme for indicating which articles are good and which need improvement. As well as the day-to-day curation that corrects mistakes, there has been an ongoing effort to validate chemical identifiers through collaborations with the Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), ChemSpider and others. Original sources are linked so that information can be verified. Further vandalism protection is done through CheMoBot, an automatic editor (ie a script) that watches and flags up edits to validated fields, for example the CAS number for water. Meanwhile the WikiTrust Firefox extension allows any reader to see which words in an article come from trusted editors.
Make your own mark
By now, Wikipedia has amassed an enormous amount of scientific information and is used regularly by millions of scientists. Some excellent articles were written by one time contributors, but much of the chemical content was written and maintained by fewer than a hundred people. These people believe in sharing their expertise to make chemistry accessible to the public, and they see that millions of people appreciate their work.
But there are many of you who will have further knowledge and expertise that could likewise be shared with the world. So why not consider giving up a few hours of your time to produce a Wikipedia article? I, for one, would encourage anyone to get involved in writing and maintaining Wikipedia articles. You may be surprised at the impact you can have.
