I received an email from Andrew Su at GNF today, reminding me about the Wikipedia Gene Wiki project and asking if I wouldn’t mind publicising their efforts. No worries Andrew.
I happened to stumble upon your blog, and I thought you might be interested in an ongoing project that I’ve been spearheading over at Wikipedia. The goal is to create gene stubs for every gene in the human genome. The stubs will have some minimal amount of structured content – links to important databases, GO annotations, PDB structures, etc. It’s our hope/expectation that these stubs will then seed contributions from experts in the field, specifically the “free-text” and unstructured sort of knowledge for which there really isn’t a great resource available.
If you’re interested, check out this link (warning – large page with long load time!):
which lists the ~8000 (and counting) pages at Wikipedia that have incorporated structured content from our effort. The top of the list is biased toward gene pages which were already established and were supplemented with content from our “bot”. Near the middle-to-bottom of the list are pages which were created de novo in our effort.
In any case, wiki efforts of course are dependent on having a large cohort of readers/editors, so if you saw fit to blog about the project, we would certainly welcome the additional eyeballs. Deepak at BBGM also blogged about it a while back, but the more the merrier!
