Gene Wiki
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!
Let the flame wars begin!
Paulo
January 31, 2008 at 12:09 pm
Thanks Neil. Could be coincidence, but I think I noticed a small blip in the number of edits overnight. Readers checking in on their favorite gene?
Paulo, is your favorite gene really so controversial as to incite a flame war? Global warming maybe, but COX5B?
Andrew
February 1, 2008 at 3:25 am
[...] Gene Wiki (What You’re Doing is Rather Desperate): The goal is to create stub articles for every gene in the human genome in Wikipedia. [...]
What’s on the web? (10 February 2008) « ScienceRoll
February 10, 2008 at 7:54 pm
[...] links to a search engine for Radiology, links to a post about a “Gene Wiki” project, from which I re-find the excellent blog by Deepak Singh. From [...]
Web strolling finds | The OpenHelix Blog
February 12, 2008 at 4:54 am
[...] other great project is the Gene Wiki presented by Nsaunders: The goal is to create gene stubs for every gene in the human genome. The [...]
Wikipedia: Reliable Sources and Gene Wiki « ScienceRoll
February 17, 2008 at 1:19 am
Does this gene wiki uses some kind of templates and automated import scripts to publish the gene based info or is it completely manual (hand written).
pj
February 22, 2008 at 1:28 am
@pj – you’d have to ask Andrew for the details. I would suspect that templates are used, but entries are by hand.
nsaunders
February 22, 2008 at 8:56 am
We’re hoping for a hybrid model. The “stubs” are created from all the structured content we harvest from the usual sources (Entrez Gene, Ensembl, PDB, etc.). Stub creation is *mostly* automated (a little manual supervision is required from time to time when content needs to merged into an existing page). Check out this page, for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUP214. This one was created completely using an automated “bot”.
After gene stubs are created automatically by the bot, our hope, of course, is that the legions of scientists will come through and manually add all the really interesting information about the gene’s function. The sort of stuff that can’t be harvested (or pigeon-holed) into a database.
Andrew
February 23, 2008 at 11:37 am
Oh, and as evidence that this could be working as planned, we have created/amended about 8500 gene pages now. When searching by gene symbol, 60% show up on the first page of google.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Gene_page_google_rank.png
So everyone should go on over to Wikipedia now and add one sentence about their favorite gene… ;)
Andrew
February 23, 2008 at 11:41 am
[...] but there were plenty of other things going on in the bioinformatics blog community. Neil Saunders mentioned the Gene Wiki project, the aim to give every human gene a page on Wikipedia, some kind of online encyclopedia. He also [...]
Bioinformatics Zen » February 2008 edition of Bio::Blogs
March 16, 2008 at 4:14 am
[...] Online-Lexikon Wikipedia wird künftig eine eigene Bibliothek zu den menschlichen Genen anbieten. Seit heute stellen US-Forscher ihre Informationen darüber in das frei [...]
Westaflex Markenwelt Lufttechnik Schallschutz Filtration » Blog Archiv » Genetik Wikipedia
July 9, 2008 at 4:30 am