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Commons:WikiProject Chemistry/Structure validation

< Commons:WikiProject Chemistry

The chemical structure validation project has grown out of work on English Wikipedia to verify the chemical data in infoboxes against original sources. In this case, the original source is data provided by the Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), relating structural data and CAS registry numbers for more than 6000 elements, compounds and ions. CAS is hoping to make this data available to the general public during the first half of 2009.

The validation on English Wikipedia aims to ensure that the CAS registry number in the infobox matches the structure(s) shown, and that both match the title of the infobox (and of the article itself!). Once a version of the article has been marked as validated, further changes to the data in the infobox are monitored by en:User:CheMoBot. CheMoBot has a growing database which links (among other things) the image filenames used in infoboxes on English Wikipedia to CAS registry numbers.

At present (as of February 2009), chemical structures on Commons are not being systematically validated. However, some "hard cases" are being marked with {{Chemical structure verified}} as a test, and to prevent any duplication of work. These "hard cases" are ones where verifiers have had to redraw the structure to check the configuration of chiral carbon atoms, or where structures have been specifically drawn from CAS data for articles on enwiki.

Instructions for verification edit

  • Please only verify structures if you have access to the CAS dataset. WikiProject Chemicals on enwiki hopes to be able to distribute the dataset further in the next few weeks. Please do not attempt to verify structures (at least, not using the template) directly using SciFinder or similar CAS access: CAS considers this to be a breach of your license to access its databases.
  • Once you are certain that the structure shown matches the structure in the dataset, add the template {{Chemical structure verified}} to the image description page on Commons, filling in the CAS parameter with the relevant CAS registry number.
  • If you are able to generate an InChI for the structure, please fill in the InChI parameter as well.
  • Hopefully we will be able to fill in the other parameters (version and InChIkey) automagically. We also hope to automate the process for 'simple' structures, working from the validated revIDs on English Wikipedia, but we're still working on that!

For further information edit

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