User:Walkerma.html



Martin Walker This user contributes to the Chemicals Wikiproject This user is a member of the Good Article WikiProject. (report) This user is a member of the Wikipedia 1.0 Editorial Team. This editor is a member of the WikiProject Council. This user is a member of the Uncategorized Good articles task force. This user uses the editing tool wikEd

I am Martin Walker from Newcastle, UK, and I teach organic chemistry at the State University of New York at Potsdam. My interests include green chemistry using lanthanide salts, as well as organofluorine chemistry using fluorous biphasic systems. I am also interested in exochemistry, or performing chemical reactions in space.

The rest of my user page is horribly outdated, please forgive me!

Chemistry

My work

I am mainly working on improving existing chemistry articles rather than starting new ones- we have a lot of important compounds with sub-standard articles.

I am currently working on adding to the chemical compound pages on Wikipedia, and I am a participant in the Chemicals and Chemistry WikiProjects. I am also aware that we need to improve some of our general articles on chemistry. Unfortunately my teaching load at work keeps me from contributing as much as I would like!

Much of my work is coordinated with others through the Chemicals Wikiproject worklist and the Chemistry Wikiproject worklist page.

A priority over the next few months will be getting A or B-Class articles on some of the major chemistry topics, and I would like to see some more of the chemicals pages reach A-Class. Also important is updating compound articles so they have active supplementary data pages.

Some useful chemistry pages

Here are some of the useful pages on chemistry topics:

• Portal:Chemistry A great place to get started.
• Wikipedia:WikiProject_Chemistry
• Wikipedia:WikiProject_Chemicals
• List_of_chemistry_topics
• List_of_reactions
• List of organic compounds, List of inorganic compounds and List of biomolecules. If you write a new page on a compound be sure to add it to the list.
• Category:Chemistry (work your way down through the hierarchy to find other categories).
• Category:Chemical_compounds_by_element is one of the most useful category lists.
• WP:Chem style guide (draft) and naming conventions.

Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team

This group is trying to find articles suitable for distribution on a CD, DVD or paper version of Wikipedia. I think it would be great to identify the "quality article" subset of Wikipedia, particularly on the more important topics. There are various subprojects at the moment, and these are the ones I'm most involved with:

1. CORE TOPICS (Talk) (COTF): This is assessing & improving the core subjects.
2. WORK VIA WIKIPROJECTS (talk). Contacting all the WikiProjects, and encouraging use of the bot for article assessment.
3. VERSION 0.7 (Talk): A DVD release version of around 20,000-30,000 (hopefully) articles, to be published in 2008.

Other work

Other assessment activities

Besides my work at WP1.0, I am interested in assessment issues generally. I'm excited to see the bot take off, with over 800,000 articles assessed from hundreds of WikiProjects as of August 2007. I also like the Good Articles (talk) initiative, and the related WikiProject. I think all of these things, along with the more established WP:FA, will help editors focus on raising quality levels.

Flagged revisions/stable versions

At last, it sounds like Wikipedia:Flagged revisions may finally be coming to a Wikipedia near you. The German Wikimedia chapter is developing this, and it should be tested on the German Wikipedia within the foreseeable future. This would allow us to tag specific versions of articles as free of (obvious) vandalism. If that comes, then perhaps we can then aim to get....

Fact-checking/validation

Although the terms validation and assessment are often confused on Wikipedia, I prefer to keep the narrower meaning for validation, i.e., checking for accuracy; much of this is also referred to as fact-checking. Are the data correct? Is the reference given correct, and do our data match the cited article? We currently have no fact-checking method beyond any informal work done during peer review. I think Wikipedia:Pushing to validation shows the direction things could go in, and this possibility is currently being considered for the flagged revisions proposal (see above). Also see this Wikimania abstract.

Spreading the word/meeting Wikipedians

Besides spreading the more traditional gospel, I also want to tell others about the exciting things going on at Wikipedia, as well as some of the problems.