--- lcrocker@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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