Chemical webs, nets, and spiders

I love it, when people come together and try to understand why particular problems exist. In September 2007 we tried contacting several people for solving the problem of having proper chemical indexing or/and search services within Wikipedia. Some people replied, but there was still this strange feeling that there is not only one responsible person, but many. How can you adress a problem if nobody is really in charge and how to take decisions in such situations? Well, maybe spreading the news had some effect, because some things happened since then.

1. Tony (aka ChemSpiderMan) had a discussion with Walkerma from the chemistry group on Wikipedia. It turned out that both share some common interests, which is providing curated chemical data. This is a noble goal and as summarized not an easy one, especially not because there exist already some chemistry boxes at Wikipedia.
   
2. Tony and some other people from the advisory board are showing interests in creating WiChempedia, which has also one major goal, "what can be done to facilitate delivery of quality information to the chemistry community?".
3. Walkerma initiated a regular discussion on Wikipedia (via IRC) for helping to understand the technical and scientific issues for incorrect chemical information on Wikipedia. Though I must say: I do not like the meeting time, which is during business hours and not practical for me.
   
4. Tony is not only moving on with extending his net of dedicated persons, but also attracting new chemical sources, and spreading publications. Looks like he is a professional advocat and knows what he is doing.
   
5. Beside all of this has Chemspider itself updated and extended his structure deposition process (PDF slides), which allow people curating data there directly.
   

I am usually not easily impressed, but I must say that what was done so far is a great piece of work. I do not know what others think about it, but knowing the pros and cons of social networks, it is fun to see that ChemSpider is moving with its net, and not being hold back by it !