Making your database available through Wikipedia: the pros and cons

Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, is the most famous wiki in use today. It contains over 3.7 million pages of content; with many pages written on scientific subject matters that include peer-reviewed citations, yet are written in an accessible manner and generally reflect the consensus opinion of the community. In this, the 19th Annual Database Issue of Nucleic Acids Research, there are 11 articles that describe the use of a wiki in relation to a biological database. In this commentary, we discuss how biological databases can be integrated with Wikipedia, thereby utilising the pre-existing infrastructure, tools and above all, large community of authors (or Wikipedians). The limitations to the content that can be included in Wikipedia are highlighted, with examples drawn from articles found in this issue and other wiki-based resources, indicating why other wiki solutions are necessary. We discuss the merits of using open wikis, like Wikipedia, versus other models, with particular reference to potential vandalism. Finally, we raise the question about the future role of dedicated database biocurators in context of the thousands of crowdsourced, community annotations that are now being stored in wikis.

[1]  Michael Cariaso,et al.  SNPedia: a wiki supporting personal genome annotation, interpretation and analysis , 2011, Nucleic Acids Res..

[2]  Adrienne E. Zweifel,et al.  EcoliWiki: a wiki-based community resource for Escherichia coli , 2011, Nucleic Acids Res..

[3]  David S. Goodsell,et al.  The RCSB Protein Data Bank: redesigned web site and web services , 2010, Nucleic Acids Res..

[4]  Deborah A. Siegele,et al.  GONUTS: the Gene Ontology Normal Usage Tracking System , 2011, Nucleic Acids Res..

[5]  Luca de Alfaro,et al.  The Gene Wiki in 2011: community intelligence applied to human gene annotation , 2011, Nucleic Acids Res..

[6]  Dan M. Bolser,et al.  The SEQanswers wiki: a wiki database of tools for high-throughput sequencing analysis , 2011, Nucleic Acids Res..

[7]  Andrew I. Su,et al.  The Gene Wiki: community intelligence applied to human gene annotation , 2009, Nucleic Acids Res..

[8]  Alex Bateman,et al.  Ten Simple Rules for Editing Wikipedia , 2010, PLoS Comput. Biol..

[9]  Dan M. Bolser,et al.  PDBWiki: added value through community annotation of the Protein Data Bank , 2010, Database J. Biol. Databases Curation.

[10]  María Martín,et al.  The Universal Protein Resource (UniProt) in 2010 , 2010 .

[11]  Baris E. Suzek,et al.  The Universal Protein Resource (UniProt) in 2010 , 2009, Nucleic Acids Res..

[12]  E. Birney,et al.  Pfam: the protein families database , 2013, Nucleic Acids Res..

[13]  Christian M. Zmasek,et al.  TOPSAN: a dynamic web database for structural genomics , 2010, Nucleic Acids Res..

[14]  Robert D. Finn,et al.  Rfam: Wikipedia, clans and the “decimal” release , 2010, Nucleic Acids Res..