Wikipedia talk:WikiProject drugs

Hello dear members, I'm very pleased that this WikiProject is taking off, and I intend to participate quite a lot. My previous "drug" additions include thiazolidinedione and subpages, imatinib, metformin and the statins. All need more work...

Some articles, especially the ones by User:Ksheka, have grown a nice box that might actually provide to be of some use in other drug-related articles. Examples can be seen on amiodarone and the recently featured article acetaminophen. JFW | T@lk 11:16, 17 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Structures

Hi, I notice the request for chemical structures. I'd like to put a vote in for using PPCHTeX since if all goes well it will be integrated into mediawiki some time in the future (see WikiTeX). I have been making lots of drug structures using PPCHTeX (see User:Rkundalini for instructions, and User:Rkundalini/images for the ones I've done so far), and would be happy do to a whole lot more, but will likely be too busy for the next month or so. Rkundalini 12:54, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)

The images created by PPCHTeX don't look as nice as those created by XyMTeX. There's a lot of aliasing (even in horizontal and vertical lines!), and the font is inconsistent with other TeX used by Wikipedia. --Eequor 13:27, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)

The aliasing problems are my own, both PPCHTeX and XyMTeX produce dvi output, and clearly the maker of the image in the XyMTeX page used a better procedure that I have used to rasterize it. Hopefully if/when PPCHTeX gets incorporated into wikimedia, it will use the same nice-looking rendering as it presently does for the math : see the WikiTeX entry for an example confirming this. Re the fonts, again that was my choice, without the \sf everywhere it would look the same, but personally, I think serifs in chemical structures create unwanted visual clutter (but see the WikiTeX entry for an example with a serif font). I take it you'd prefer serifs though? Rkundalini 11:37, 23 Jul 2004 (UTC)

For example, see meta:Help:Formula. Sans-serif would be inconsistent. --Eequor 15:15, 23 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Now that wikisophia [1] is back up, I have made some examples to show how nice the output is, see User:Rkundalini. What do you (and others) think? Rkundalini 03:52, 10 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Hello. I have drawn or corrected structural formulae of some drugs using open-source drawing program bkchem (the advantage of interactive drawing programs over scripts is clear) and edited in GIMP. I draw the formulae approximately three times bigger; then I scale them down to have them antialised. I produce grayscale PNG images with transparency, which may cause problems with older web browsers, so please let me know if you notice some strange rendering of them. Settings of the formulae (bond width, font size) evolved during the time, so the style of the my most recent structure images will be probably used in future. Please let me know if it's OK. I use sans-serif font because it is very usual in chemistry. Mykhal 10:23, 20 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Your structures look nice. One point is that if you were to use PPCHTeX instead, one day (hopefully soon) it will be incorporated into the wiki software. This means that instead of having to run bkchem, then GIMP, then upload, then add comments, all you have to do is put the code describing the structure directly in the text of the entry, and the wiki software will automatically generate a nice image (see WikiTeX). This fits in better with the wiki philosophy since it can be trivially edited by anyone, without needing special software. All that said, you're making structures where before there were none, and that's great. If you don't feel inclined to switch to PPCHTeX, never mind! Rkundalini 00:46, 31 Aug 2004 (UTC)

To frame or not to frame? Do you think it is better to place the formulas into the frame? Me thinks it is OK to place the structure formula without frame and also without caption - in the case if the page is on one single compund ant it does not have the infobox yet. Mykhal 14:57, 1 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Photos anybody?

gedday all, I've just added a few happy snaps from work to the propofol, metoclopramide, and acetaminophen. I can get more... especially intravenous ICU/critical care stuff if people are interested... adds a bit of colour... let me know and keep up the great work! Erich 08:09, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I've adjusted the colors in Image:Propofol.jpg some to try to make it less washed-out. Does this look okay?

Image:Metoclopramide_ampule.jpg is hard to see, and the label becomes a purple blur when it's resized. It'd be better to find an example that was larger and not transparent.

These would probably look better in better lighting, but, as I'm not a photographer, I couldn't really say what to do differently. --Eequor 15:22, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Gedday, I agree the lighting is not great... the flash is incompatible with macro mode so it limits the options... I could try under the theatre lights I guess... re the propofol touch up... unfortunately propofol really is very white... like milk. (We tell the kids we'll give them a "special milkshake". ) Any way I can keep trying if you think they add something to pages. Erich 00:12, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Infobox

I think we should really decide upon a standard infobox, because there are lot of drug infoboxes about, all good, but all slightly different. The on sample one here's really nice, but I think the side-effects section should be removed, just for simplicity's sake. I also suggest adding the drug's ATC code to the table, as it is an international and simple way of categorising drugs. Daevatgl 16:38, Jul 20, 2004 (UTC)

The side effects section is mostly just a skeleton. Probably most articles would leave out sections of that. Side effects will be mentioned somewhere in each article; it seems like the best standard location for those would be the infobox.

Should ATC codes and CAS numbers both be included? --Eequor 00:21, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I think the current infobox is skewed towards medical use of drugs. It seems fairly inappropriate for drugs that are predominantly of interest for their non-medical usage. I don't have any suggestions for how to improve the situation (yet). Also, I have been adding INNs to drug pages whenever possible. This can be found using ChemID (see CAS number) but this seems to be incomplete. I have obtained access to the official UN INN site but I'm yet to see how easy it is to look these things up. Also I think it is worth including the IUPAC name in each entry. Rkundalini 12:46, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)

You're right. The Indicated for: section should probably be expanded. Contraindications: is still useful for recreational drugs; for example, depressants with stimulants and vice versa. Side effects: is relevant too. --Eequor 13:32, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Agreed. But I don't think the term "recreational drugs" should be used since it does not encompass non-recreational, non-medical use of drugs, for example entheogens. Rkundalini 14:48, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I don't think you can do a search on the INN site, but http://hotdocs.usitc.gov/tariff_chapters_current/0400pharmappx.pdf is a pdf containing a list of INNs (and I think CAS no.s). It might not be a comprehensive list, but it's a good start. Also I use http://chemfinder.cambridgesoft.com/ often, it gives a list of synonyms (but doesn't say which is the INN) and the chemical structure (they ask for registration after 10 searches or so). Keep in mind that a drug may have several different ATC codes. Matt 16:42, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Yes you can search for INNs at http://mednet.who.int/ , but you (stupidly) have to apply for access (which I did, successfully). Perhaps if we flood them with requests they will realise it is a silly policy. Rkundalini 14:48, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)

There's another WHO site, http://www.whocc.no/atcddd/, where you can do a name search on the ATC index. If you get a hit, it should be INN. Not very practical either, but you can check whether a name's INN or not. Daevatgl 17:02, Jul 22, 2004 (UTC)

How does methamphetamine look? --Eequor 01:36, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Looks good, but see my comment on "recreational" vs "non-medical" above. Also, what is meant by "miscellaneous"? Are these actually indications or side-effects? Probably a link to anorectic should go there somewhere too. Rkundalini 15:05, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)

The miscellaneous section is for side effects that don't fit in the other categories. --Eequor 16:35, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Found an interesting reference site, Psychotropics by the Lundbeck Institute. Includes manufacturer ID numbers, chemistry, pharmacology, lots of half-life info, studies, commercial names, dosages and available forms. Foobar 03:07, 24 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Take a look at the Taxobox automated template, the WikiProject_Tree_of_Life folks have created something extremely useful. A live example is at fungus; edit it to see. Instead of cloning and hacking a static template layout each time, you just pass parameters to the dynamic template's code sections (e.g. {{drugbox_chemical_formula | color = "lightblue" | formula = "C6H12O6"}}). If we need to change or add things to the infobox in future, we just change the global template source, rather than the large and numerous static tables on each of our pages! If we can adapt this system to our project and create our own auto-infobox, things would be fantastically smooth :O I think I'll start experimenting. Foobar 15:31, 6 Aug 2004 (UTC)

So what's the story with the infobox on the project page, is it parameterized like Foobar mentions above, or not? I would like to change the word "Recreational" to "Non-medical", however if it's just a copy n paste thing then it probably already appears in a zillion places, pretty annoying... Rkundalini 00:10, 27 Sep 2004 (UTC)

IMHO the substance infobox should be split into two sections or boxes: into a chemical data box (including the molecular structure image) and a pharmacology data box (including the ATC code). This would allow to stay compatible with the widely used non-drug chemical data boxes and it would make sense to separate the chemical data from unrelated human pharmacological data. Compare DMT (drug boxes) and 5-MeO-DMT (chemical data box only as of now). Cacycle 19:03, 4 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Mediawiki and templates

The wiki engine seems to be barfing when given pages containing more than five templates. After the fifth template (including subtemplates), edit links on later ones no longer point to the correct location. Whether this is a bug or feature remains to be debated, but it's making the editing of templates (especially on this project's subpages) a bit annoying. Foobar 04:51, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Yes, that's so irritating! They did that intentionally, too. It's a terrible idea; the problem's been visible in lots of places. I'm hoping the developers will realize it's a bad idea soon, so they'll turn it off. --Eequor 05:31, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Systematic chemical names

I propose the systematic chemical names (when they are not very short, like N,N-dimethylaniline) to be written in  tag, e.g. 2,2-bis(4-chlorophenyl)-1,1,1-trichloroethane, because they mostly do not contain spaces and therefore are not wrapped, so they can overflow the page width. We should also use the proper nomenclature and typesetting rules. So instead of
(3E)-4-[(3aR,4R,6aS)-1,3-dimethyl-2-oxo-hexahydro-1H-thieno[3,4-d]imidazol-4-yl]-3-butenoic acid
we should write
(3E)-4-[(3aR,4R,6aS)-1,3-dimethyl-2-oxohexahydro-1H-thieno[3,4-d]imidazol-4-yl]but-3-enoic acid.
What do you think about it? Mykhal 15:13, 1 Sep 2004 (UTC)

shouldn't the names wrap at the hyphen marks? I hadn't noticed that they don't wrap. I find the teeny font to be tricky to read, but I don't like it when a page is forced to be wider because of a single "word". Are there other solutions to this? Matt 02:02, 2 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I was trying to look for some special html character (like  ) which would be invisible, but would turn into newline char in case of need. But I was unsuccesful. Mykhal 10:33, 2 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I use IE, it breaks at a hyphen (-) if needed. Do other browsers not break at the hyphen? Matt 21:50, 2 Sep 2004 (UTC) ... It also breaks between at the start and end of (parentheses) and [brackets]. For me, this is expected behaviour.

It seems that Mozilla browser does not wrap these names neither at hyphens nor parentheses.. So sometimes the chemical name is twice as longer than page width. I'll consider sending them a behavior change proposal. Mykhal 17:30, 8 Sep 2004 (UTC)

There's a character in the ISO-8859-1 specification (&#130 - see Control character), that is defined as "Break permitted here", which could be used to solve the problem. If only Mozilla/Firefox would support it...(it doesn't, I checked)--Aramgutang 05:59, 23 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Thus far I've been strategically leaving spaces in the IUPAC names, since Gecko-browsers (e.g. Mozilla) will linebreak at the spaces if necessary. However, since someone (obviously an MSIE user) labelled these spaces "spurious", the less-than-elegant solution I've used for imatinib is to simply put tags where linebreaks were needed - and it seems to work for both MSIE and Gecko browsers. Techelf 07:59, 3 Nov 2004 (UTC)

List of drugs

The initial List of drugs pages are finally up. When you are working on a particular drug, it would be helpful if you checked it's entries on the list to ensure that they're correct and complete. School has just started again for me now, so I don't know how much I'll be contributing in the near future. I wish you all the best of luck. Matt 22:17, 8 Sep 2004 (UTC)

MSIE fixing

I have edited most of the templates to display properly under MSIE. I'm surprised the project has gone for so long without anyone fixing any of the numerous problems, I mean, didn't the main project place look like this for anyone else? (I'm using IE 6.0sp1 under Win2000 with a 1280x960 resolution if you're wondering)

Apparently, the <div> tags around the tables were the reason for the messy appearance. Since they surved no useful purpose anyway, I removed them, putting align="center" into the table header istead. The orange footer had problems with display that were slightly different (only the bottom half of the table backgound and border would show), but were still fixed by removing the div tags.

The infobox was the most messed up template of all. Firstly, who's idea was it to write colours in #fff format? I changed all the colours to their 6 hex digit equivalents (ie. #def -> #ddeeff), so they work under IE. Also, a big problem was the fact that the Wiki engine would sometimes randomly add between the two tables in the infobox for no apparent reason. This messed considerably with page layout, as all space to the left of the first table would be made blank by this. I changed the code between the tables from:

 |}
 {| border="0" blah blah...

to:

 </table><table border="0" blah blah...

This ensures that nothing ever gets put between the tables. I hope the changes didn't mess up the layout for other browsers (I only checked with IE and Firefox).--Aramgutang 05:59, 23 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Legal/moral disclaimers?

Anybody else agree that we should most probably include a message at the top of all drug pages?

I mean if we are going to be writing patient/clinical information about a drug, it would probably be best to warn them about the risks of wikipedia information.

If not for legal reasons, then at least for moral reasons?

Something along the lines of:

Caution: This page on wikipedia contains both clinical and patient information on a drug. Remember that any page on wikipedia can be edited by anybody at any time. The information below is not to be considered a reliable source, and should all be checked against reliable references before it is put to use.

--Jaguar2k 07:44, 27 Oct 2004 (UTC)

sounds like a good idea. I think there is already a standard medical disclaimer somwhere (?)) -- Rkundalini

I have seen one for chemicals that warns against making use of hazchem info, and the Template:DrugsNotice does something similar however it doesn't warn against using the info. --Jaguar2k 01:12, 30 Oct 2004 (UTC)... Actually see Wikipedia:Medical_disclaimer for what you are referring to.