Talk:Grubbs' catalyst

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[edit] "Importance"

I would vote for that it was a importance=top. Grubb's won the Nobel Prize for it! ChristianB (talk) 16:56, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

Apart from that I'd say it's important in the field of N-heterocyclic carbenes because it is the one example of a commercially available NHC catalyst. --Rifleman 82 (talk) 17:02, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

I got carried away in my edit comment, I apologise for that, but I stand by my reassessment. I'm open to convincing otherwise, of course! Averages seen for such tags at Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Index indicate that Top-Class is used by most projects to indicate the top 1% or so in importance - which means the top 100 out of 10,000 articles (though only <2000 have been tagged so far). When I looked at Category:Top-importance_chemistry_articles this article looked really out of place, and as an organic chemist I'm naturally biased in its favour! I've listed below the G articles ranked top importance, and then the ones ranked high importance, and also shown "importance stats" i.e., "What links here" (WLI) and Interwikis (IW, no. of foreign languages with the page). Note that ruthenium is only ranked high importance!

• Grubbs' catalyst: WLI=20, IW=2

Top

• Gas: WLI=1230, IW=54.
• Gibbs free energy: WLI=143, IW=14
• Gold: WLI=4595 IW=96

High

• Gadolinium: WLI=143, IW=48
• Gallium: WLI=190, IW=61
• Gas laws: WLI=37, IW=9
• Gerhard Ertl: WLI=83 (mostly from a Nobel Prize template), IW=25
• Germanium: WLI=258, IW=63

(BTW, I'm studying such stats at the moment for WP:1.0, part of my interest in doing the numbers here). I would argue that if Grubbs' catalyst counts as a "must-have", a core topic for chemistry (the criterion for Top-Class), then why don't the Germans, the French, the Spanish, Italians, Japanese, etc have an article on this topic? Walkerma (talk) 05:40, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

I agree with Walkerma's assessment, and I think one could even make a case for "mid-importance". The Top-class contains very general articles or articles with a very wide appeal. This one is quite specialized, as we can see by how Rifleman describes it: "important in the field of N-heterocyclic carbenes". Look at it from a distance. Heterocyclic chemistry is a sort of "specialty" within chemistry. N-heterocycles are a subset of it. And N-heterocyclic carbenes are even more specific. Not everything that wins a Nobel Prize needs to be Top-importance in our assessment scheme, and in fact I would say it is quite the opposite for recent prizes. It is usually only after many decades that a prize-winning discovery becomes "Top importance", if at all. --Itub (talk) 07:50, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Fair enough, I agree with your points (Walkerma & itub). I also agree with Itub that "mid" is probably more appropriate. Perhaps we should use some sort of metrics to classify articles? Or at least, like in this case, to check the importance rating. --Rifleman 82 (talk) 11:48, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Regarding metrics, the hope (I'm now wearing my WP1.0 hat) is that chemists will simply judge what seems right for importance of chemistry articles, and in cases where there is disagreement a consensus will be reached. That introduces an important human element into the calculation - I'm a great believer in that. But overall importance at WP1.0 will be judged using various metrics - take a look at this brand new list showing exactly that. It's at an early stage, but I have high hopes! The idea is that anything with an additive score (which also includes a quality assessment score) of 1000 or greater would automatically go onto our next release. Feedback is very welcome here. Walkerma (talk) 06:13, 21 November 2007 (UTC)