WikiChem:Mission statement

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Vision

The vision of ChemWiki is to be a compendium of all chemistry knowledge, applicable to learners, chemistry students, and professional chemists.

Mission

The mission of ChemWiki is:

1. Collate information (properties, uses, laboratory synthesis and industrial production, analytical data) on all chemicals, commercially available or not. Actual detailed synthetic procedures performed by contributors, with experimentally obtained properties and analytical data are particularly welcome.
2. Continually review topics of interest:
   1. Practical importance (alkylation, nucleophilic aromatic substition)
   2. On-going research (e.g. N-heterocyclic carbenes, asymmetric synthesis, alkyne metathesis)
   3. Topics of historic (structure of benzene) or pedagogical value (Haber process).
   4. Laboratory technique (air-free technique)
3. Serve as a resource for chemistry educators at all levels, discussing pedagogical tools and methods
4. Feed useful and appropriate content back into Wikipedia

Focus

The initial focus on Wikichem should be to showcase the possibilities of this collaboration model. A range of articles, from well-established to the state-of-the-art knowledge, is desirable. To jump-start the project, articles form Wikipedia which are already appropriately licensed can serve as the base on which to grow.

Roadmap

1. Transfer ~ 200 appropriate articles from Wikipedia, falling into the categories outlined in Mission.
2. Expand and rewrite them to reflect the emphasis at ChemWiki, in order to serve as models for future articles.
3. Review and troubleshoot.
4. Add in the other Wikipedia chemistry articles (~22000) as protected pages to serve as a local resource.
5. Launch the site onto the WWW.
6. Expand membership, participation by professional chemists.

Anticipated issues

1. Licensing of contributions (GFDL?)
2. Checking of contributed syntheses.
3. Curation of data

To be discussed

The following content might be considered, and included if there is consensus support:

• Advice and assistance with career planning, interview training, job hunting.
• Current chemistry conferences, etc.
• Chemistry dictionary
• Chemistry news
• Chemistry in the world
• Research groups - grad students share/discuss results within a research group - requires a password protected area.
• Pharmaceuticals
• Journal club - highlighting and summarising any interesting new articles
• Open notebook science
• Chemistry related puzzles, mechanism problems, chemistry-related "fun".
• Chemical industry information - Information about chemical companies, takeovers, new plants, etc.
• Sourcing of chemicals (Where can I buy this from?) This would need to be comprehensive, to be NPOV; or could it be considered as a possible revenue source?

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