May 23 at #UCDavis - Wikipedia editathon about women in science and academia

Phoebe Ayers, librarian extraordinaire at UC Davis is running another Wikipedia Editathon on women in science and academia.  See Wikipedia:GLAM/University of California Davis Libraries.  It will be May 23.  The last one went quite well.  I had posted a few announcements here and there (e.g., Wanted - participants and helpers for a "Women in Science Editathon) about the previous one that was inspired by Dawn Sumner and run by Phoebe.  These are good ways not only to help promote women in science but also to learn a bit about Wikipedia and about some female scientists.

Wanted - participants and helpers for a "Women in Science" Wikipedia Editathon at #UCDavis March 4 - UC Davis ADVANCE

I wrote a post on the UC DAVIS ADVANCE Blog recruiting people to participate in a Wikipedia Editathon regarding Women in Science: Wanted - participants and helpers for a "Women in Science" Wikipedia Editathon at #UCDavis March 4 - UC Davis ADVANCE

And Phoebe Ayers from the UC Davis Physical Sciences and Engineering Library has volunteered to host the event there.

See her post about this.   Please consider signing up to participate if you are around UC Davis at that time ...

Pluses and minuses if Wikipediafying your database

There is a really interesting article that just came out from Robert Finn, Paul Gardner and Alex Bateman: Making your database available through Wikipedia: the pros and cons.  The article is part of the Nucleic Acids Research Database Issue.

The abstract does a good job of summing up the article

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.

Hmm - How did I miss this paper discussing RFAM, Wikipedia & community annotation #cool

Edits for Wikipedia articles on RNA families. The cumulative number of edits since 1st January 2007 for the 733 Wikipedia articles that are associated with Rfam entries is shown in black. The total number of edits that were reverted or labeled as vandalism is shown in red. To mid-2010, there were just 106 of these. However, some reverted edits may have been well-intentioned but were deemed inappropriate for Wikipedia. From http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/content/39/suppl_1/D141.long

Very interesting discussion in this paper on Rfam about community annotation: Rfam: Wikipedia, clans and the “decimal” release. In the paper the authors (inlcuding Alex Bateman, Sean Eddy, Paul Gardner and others) discuss the use of Wikipedia for Community Annotation of biological databases. They report:

Given our positive experiences, we can highly recommend other curation efforts turning to Wikipedia for their annotation

I am not sure how I missed this paper when it came out recently.  But it is definitely worth a look.  The last line hints at future developments

We look forward to working with the wider community to develop these new tools and techniques.

It seems that they have bought into the Wikipedia based annotation system as having enormous potential.  I generally agree though I am not sure how this is best done.