User:TimVickers/Symatlas and Wikipedia

SymAtlas and Wikipedia: involving the scientific community in an open-annotation database.
Wikipedia is an on-line encyclopaedia that aims to become a complete record of human knowledge. The English Wikipedia contains about 600 million words in over 1.5 million articles, which deal with subjects ranging from enzyme kinetics to the Athenian statesman Alcibiades. With over 2,000 new articles created every day, Wikipedia will soon have articles on every conceivable subject, with the vast size of this encyclopedia making it the primary reference tool for millions of people. Indeed, the articles on popular topics are accessed tens of thousands of times a day. However, although this resource has a very broad reach and compares favorably in accuracy with traditional print encyclopaedias, its coverage of scientific topics could be improved by more involvement from professional scientists.

At present, Wikipedia’s unparalleled size and rate of growth comes from the community of about 75,000 active editors. The Wikiprojects are important parts of this community and are collaborative groups of editors with similar interests. In the Molecular and Cellular Biology (MCB) Wikiproject, about one hundred people cooperate to improve biochemistry articles. We are currently working on a set of core topics, ranging from DNA to the immune system. These fundamental articles are steadily improving to become fully-referenced top-quality articles that have passed through Wikipedia’s peer-review system.

As the next step from these general reviews, the MCB project is pursuing collaborations with the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation and the Sanger Institute, to import and annotate the huge amount of genetic information produced from genome sequencing and expression studies. This is currently held in databases such as Symatlas. The long-term goal is for the encyclopaedia to contain a constantly-updated review article on every human gene, with links to other databases and a detailed and specific collaborative discussion of current research. Such an open-access resource would be an invaluable adjunct to the current sequence databases as it would aid public access to current scientific research, and also foster new collaborations within the scientific community.

Tim Vickers 17:12, 9 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Note, this idea was enacted by User:AndrewGNF with the User:ProteinBoxBot and the Gene Wikiproject. Tim Vickers (talk) 18:40, 9 May 2009 (UTC)