Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Chemicals/Chembox validation/Archive 1

Some thoughts

Should we switch from {{chembox new}} to the swank new {{chembox}} while we're making these edits?
Should we tag the data values to indicate that CAS500 as the source? I think we talked about this on IRC a few weeks ago, but it would be nice to have WP:CITE/WP:RS so our readers know how authentic the data is. Maybe <ref name=CAS500>[[Wikipedia:WikiProject Chemicals/Chembox validation]]</ref> (or spin off that page's compound list onto a separate one that talks about the file rather than a "whiteboard" page about our work with it). Or else (another IRC-spawned idea) would be to wrap the values in a {{cas500|value'}} so we could figure out how to mark or cite it later (similar to {{GR}}). That would also allow us to do formatting of the value itself (bold if good, or colored green if good, yellow if unverified, red if...something bad?) to indicate that it's "known good" (with note added to chembox standard footer).

DMacks (talk) 16:22, 7 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thinking further, not sure if parser functions in the chembox templates do calculations and would be unable to read the "value" nested among formatting characters. Hopefully (but again I don't know if) they ignore <ref> and other trailing characters. Guess we better solve that before adding things that break the whole template. DMacks (talk) 19:49, 7 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I'm now convinced that we need to cite these things...an editor noticed that the infobox systematic (IUPAC) name for Dihydrotestosterone does not match the name(s) of the compound use in the article body, and has challenged the name(s) of the title compound! DMacks (talk) 18:36, 12 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I'm all for switching to the swank new ChemBox. I think that the ChemSpiderID still needs adding to it though? Also, not sure I like CAS500 as the source. Maybe I mistake the intent but what happens for CAS numbers >500? SHould it be "Validated CAS" and some definition somewhere?--ChemSpiderMan (talk) 02:12, 13 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I like Validated by CAS or something similar, for those entries where we have information directly from CAS. I agree, no need to limit it to the first 500. How should we cite the other entries from the master SDF, which have not had CAS validation? I agree that citation of data would be great - how should that be done? Just tonight I found an issue with boromycin - Ed's drawing missed two stereocenters, our SDF missed two as well (one was a different one), and White's total synthesis in J. Am. Chem. Soc. 1989, 111, 790-792 shows ALL stereocenters nicely resolved. If I'm finding all this when uploading just 10 entries, I'm (a) going to be doing this for a very long time and (b) convinced that we should cite our sources where possible. DMacks, would you be able to get a test version of that template working by Tuesday 11am EDT so we can take a look? Thanks, Walkerma (talk) 07:14, 13 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The way to do things seems (to me):

to define a parameter "CASNo_valid" in Template:Chembox Identifiers which, if it has the values "yes" or "Y" (default = NULL) AND parameter "CASNO" is defined, sends a value "valid=Y" to Template:Chembox CASNo
use the value of parameter "valid" (default=NULL) to define the formatting in Template:Chembox CASNo, and to add Category:Articles with validated CAS Registry Numbers (which won't show up on the article page)

This approach has the advantage of being extendable to all values in the chembox, if and when we get more advanced in the validation of values. Physchim62 (talk) 13:05, 17 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Test articles are 2-Chlorophenol and 2-Oxazolidone. This approach could also allow us to use different sources for temporary validation (eg "CASNo_valid=CAS" or "CASNo_valid=ICSC", etc) Physchim62 (talk) 13:10, 17 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I could be missing something obvious (and I'm just learning about the chembox template spaghetti), but why does Template:Chembox entry exist?. It appears that this template just takes a bunch of values, uses one value as the name of a template, and passes the rest of the values to it. Why not just call the lower template directly instead of this "indirect" calling? DMacks (talk) 20:13, 17 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It's only purpose is to avoid statements of the type "value={{{value|}}}", which will usually work in template syntax but I didn't want to risk it when I wrote it. Alas, by trying to keep separate parameter names at each level, I made the whole setup one level more complicated! My excuse is that was how Template:Taxobox used to work, and that was the most complicated infobox before the current chembox was developed. Physchim62 (talk) 22:23, 17 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]