User:Walkerma

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Martin Walker
This user contributes to the Chemicals Wikiproject
This user is a member of the Good Article Wikiproject.
This user is a member of the Wikipedia 1.0 Editorial Team
The WikiProject Council logo This user is a participant of the WikiProject Council.
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 This user uses the editing tool wikEd

I'm currently busy, I'm back from my trip but still trying to catch up.

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The rest of my user page is horribly outdated, please forgive me!

Contents

[edit] Chemistry

[edit] 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.


[edit] Some useful chemistry pages

Here are some of the useful pages on chemistry topics:

[edit] 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 0.5 (Talk): A test CD release version, around 2000 articles and due to be published during the first week in April.

[edit] Other work

[edit] 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 50,000 articles assessed from almost 100 WikiProjects as of August 2006 (over 400,000 articles assessed in 480 projects per April 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.

[edit] 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. Are the data correct? Is the reference given correct, and do our data match the cited article? We currently have no validation method beyond any informal work done during peer review. Although I disagree with some details, I really like TidyCat's proposal for validation. See abstract.

[edit] 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. I recently attended the following:

  • May/June, Fredonia, NY: SUNY CIT conference, including a panel with User:Sj and librarian Dawn Eckenrode, discussing wikis in education.
  • August, Cambridge, MA: (Preaching to the converted?) Besides things on Wikipedia 1.0 and validation, I really enjoyed meeting other Wikipedians face-to-face. Particularly exciting was getting to know Wikipedians from Poland, France, etc.
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