--- lcrocker(a)nupedia.com wrote:
Chemical structure diagrams seems like something
there ought to be a
specialized free program to generate. If we
standardized on such a
program,
There are several
http://www.openscience.org/links.php?section=56
the article source should contain whatever input
file to that program was
used
I'm not sure I follow what you mean here. The "input"
for the non-free
programs I've used is interactive input, via keyboard
and mouse. I expect
that any free program one might use would work
similarly.
There is a format called SMILES for depicting
molecules in a supposedly
platform-independent fashion (in ASCII), but support
for that is uneven.
Worth pursuing though, maybe.
and we can use its output (in PNG, or EPS rendered
in PNG) in the articles
themselves.
While promoting free software is laudable, I don't
think any of the
commercial programs capable of producing rasterized
molecular image output
restrict the use of that output in a way that would
conflict with the
Wikipedia's content licensing. Ie, just because I
generate, say, a BMP with
a commercial version does not restrict me from making
a PNG and posting that
to wikipedia.
I wouldn't see a problem, for instance, with me
generating image in ChemDraw
and then posting them. Is there something about this
I'm missing?
The only restrictions we have to watch out for are
directly lifting an image
from a non-free source (ie, scanning from textbooks,
copying files from
websites, etc).
--Joe
I don't think HTML is adequate for the task.
We'll
need something similar
for mathematical equations as well at some point
(though complex HTML with
special characters is a possible alternative there).
You Wrote:
posted to the Wikipedia-l mailing list at:
http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>> I was trying to show a triple bond on the
>>
http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Acetylene page.
How is
>> in normally
>> shown using ascii text to html markup?
>
>There might be something in extended (ISO)
character
>set that would work,
>but I'm not terribly familiar with those so far.
>
>A broader question revolves around support for
images
>on Wikipedia--many of
>us could probably draw diagrams that would enrich
the
>content of pages, like
>the chemistry-related pages, dramatically. We
could
>develop them and
>release them under GDFL terms, and it would seem a
>shame to limit their
>availability and redistribution to off-Wiki
linking.
>
>I mean, after all, dead-tree encyclopedias and
even
>some dictionaries have
>illustrations. It's an interesting challenge,
working
>within the confines
>of a primarily-text medium (Lynx is my primary
>browser, after all), but at
>some point, the *pedias should support pictures.0
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