[Foundation-l] [WikiEN-l] CAS Discourages Using SciFinder to Help Curate Wikipedia

[Mathias Schindler]

On Sat, Mar 8, 2008 at 4:13 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

>  "Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) objects to anyone encouraging the
>  use of SciFinder - and STN - to curate third-party databases or
>  chemical substance collections, including the one found in Wikipedia."

Well, their subject line was "discourages" and in this case, it is
"objecting to encourage". So, basically, they are just stating that
they do not like it, which we should note and continue to do what's
best for Wikipedia. One might also spend a few hours to talk to them,
telling that it should be in their own interest that a) the CAS
numbers are mentioned in the articles and b) the numbers should be
correct.

In the meantime, I extracted a list for 2200 chemicals from dewp that
have their own CAS number mentioned in the template structure (thanks
to Lars Aronssons script. I put that list at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Chemistry/CAS_validation/CAS-German_Wikipedia
for reference purposes. Anyone with a (preferrably recent) dump of
enwp could so the same for comparison reasons.

Mathias