Wikipedia:School and university projects/reactorgo/Spring 2013

Spring 2013 Organic Honors Project (see also School and university projects/reactorgo/projects)

Objective
Learn academic research skills then apply them to increase accessibility of chemical information to the general public through wikipedia.

Project guidelines
Each group of students will create a wikipedia page on a chemical for which there is no page. Choose a chemical and add it to the Project Page under Spring 2013. There are two key components to complete this project, research and creating the wiki page. Students are also welcome to write an article about another chemistry topic of their choosing, so long as there is no article on it.

Research
Each student will be required to find four references relating to their project. All references must be from reliable sources, most of which should be scholarly peer reviewed journals. For each reference, a brief write-up summarizing the information is required.

Write-ups
Write-ups should include a brief summary of the material, from which we should be able to tell the purpose of the paper, what was done and how it was done experimentally (if the article involves an experiment), and what the major results were. Each student will write four summary with at least one totaling about a half page in length.

Accounts
Each student will be required to create his or her own Wikipedia account. Students will then be assigned to a group. The sandbox feature, accessible from the top right of the page once you have logged into your account, is a space that you can create your article in stages. Your fellow group members are also able to edit the page. It will be the way we measure group progress before final submission. Each group will elect a leader whose account sandbox will be used to prepare the article before submission. Once the leader is chosen, they will add a link to their sandbox to the group project page. Instructions for creating links can be found here Help:Link. Each group will then choose a relevant chemical lacking a Wikipedia article and update the project page to reflect this.

Article Requirements
Each group will be responsible for one article. Articles must conform to Wikipedia's standards on notability and must follow the manual of style for chemical articles. Each article will contain a chembox which will contain the chemical property data of the group project.

The body of the page may contain whatever sections suitable to the project. Most, if not all, should include a section on
 * Properties
 * Occurrences
 * Synthesis
 * Reactions
 * Characterization
 * etc.

The article will be graded on the quality of the information presented, proper formatting of the page, and appropriate use of references.

Wikipedia has an extensive collection of tutorials and guides to aid in creating an article. Both Help:Contents and Your first article are excellent resources to get started.

Examples of quality articles

 * Carboxylic acid
 * n-Butyllithium
 * Lead(II) nitrate
 * Caesium fluoride

Resources
For any Wikipedia questions, Help:contents has all of the answers.

A list of potentially useful resources and software exists here. In addition, the University of Illinois Chemistry library has a number of useful resources, most importantly, SciFinder. SciFinder is an extensive database of scholarly chemistry articles.

http://www.library.uiuc.edu/chx/

ChemDraw is another useful program for drawing chemical structures. It can be found for free here:

http://www.chem.illinois.edu/clcwebsite/ChemDrawUIUC.html

The CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics has an extensive list of chemicals with their properties. It's available in the library and here:

http://www.hbcpnetbase.com/

Feel free to use the "Talk" page (tab at the top of the page) to ask questions, leave comments or suggestions, etc. Instructions for talk page use are here. You can also email us. Be sure to use the following format for the subject line, "Group #-Chemical." We would like to avoid your emails getting lost or ignored.

Deadlines

 * Feb. 8 Group Submissions with wikipedia user name
 * Feb. 18 5PM Scholarly research clinic
 * Mar. 1 Article summaries due
 * Mar. 5 6PM Wikipedia tutorial
 * Mar. 15  First drafts due
 * Apr. 12 Final projects due

Quick links

 * Project page
 * Help:Contents
 * Your first article
 * Chemical infobox
 * Manual of Style/Chemistry/References and external links