Talk:Structural chemistry

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Wiki Education assignment: CHEM 300

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 6 September 2023 and 7 December 2023. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Huberyshen, Sunshine8899 (article contribs). Peer reviewers: Bird flock, Toady03, Mxmansa, Icocci.

— Assignment last updated by CHEM 300 UBC CJA (talk) 18:02, 8 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

A mess?

A major rewrite seems to be needed for an article worthy of this topic. Ldm1954 (talk) 14:12, 27 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Merge proposal

I propose to merge Chemical structure into this article. We could do the merge the other way too: merge Structural chemistry into Chemical structure. This job seems pretty obvious, but maybe I am missing something. --Smokefoot (talk) 21:16, 3 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Support To me "structural chemistry" is that subfield of chemistry devoted to understanding and applying structure, while "chemical structure" is resulting understanding developed by that subfield. However considering the states of these articles, I would agree that merging content and having "chemical structure" redirect (with the {{R with possibilities}} apology) to a subsection of Structural chemistry would be satisfactory. Johnjbarton (talk) 02:00, 4 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Comment To me, chemical structure focuses on drawing the 2D structure of a molecule, generally a small molecule, although proteins can be represented by amino acids and DNA/RNA by base-pair letters. The current Structural chemistry article would need a lot of work to add the various techniques used to ascertain 3D structure. Some of them were in the article before recently edited, although I see the LLM influence that led to its pairing down. I'm leaning oppose because I see the topics as separate enough, i.e. "Chemical structure" is primarily 2D and "Structural chemistry" is 3D. Nnev66 (talk) 18:16, 5 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

@Ldm1954 and Johnjbarton: Comment to Nnev66. I hear you, there is a nuance (or more) difference in "chem speak" between the Chemical structure vs Structural chemistry. Here is the predicament: maintenance and quality. The main contributor to this article was someone doing homework (user:Huberyshen). Chemical structure gets about 5-10 edits per year. Many or most of these editors, well intentioned as they are, would not know the difference between chemical structure and structural chemistry The editors in the ProjectChemistry are few. To make matters worse, the number of inorganic chemists are fewer still. Ultimately the core content of structural chem is inorganic (and materials science): packing, iconic motifs, dimensionality, structure-property relationships (off the top of my head). One might say, "well what about organic structures?" At the risk of being dismissive, organic structural chemistry is chump change relatively speaking because organic is so dominated by molecular chemistry, electronic structure is simple, and intermolecular interactions are flimsy. I digress. So, it would be a lot easier to have one good article. Also, already the articles overlap. --Smokefoot (talk) 21:16, 5 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I think you are thinking about chemical structure diagrams. All real chemical structures are 3D. Johnjbarton (talk) 18:52, 5 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

True, but I'm just sharing how I've heard the term used amongst chemists, and that's the reason I hesitate to merge the articles. The reason I labeled what I wrote as "Comment" rather than "Oppose" or "Weak oppose" was because I understand the term "chemical structure" can mean 2D or 3D. Nnev66 (talk) 19:01, 5 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]