Gene Wiki in the News
A BMIRC papers titled "A Gene Wiki for the Community Annotation of Gene Function" (PLoS Biol 6(7): e175 doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0060175) published on July 7, 2008 has been the focus of international media attention. Two, including the first, of the article's eight authors are from SDSU's Bioinformatics and Medical Informatics Research Center (http://bioinformatics.sdsu.edu), five are from Genomic Institute of Novartis Research Foundation (GNF) in San Diego, while one is from Washington University in St. Louis. Over 200 news articles have been since published about the Gene Wiki article by media around the world, including USA Today, San Francisco Chronicle, Sydney Morning Herald, and San Diego Union Tribune.
"SAN DIEGO -- Researchers plan to create a library of human genetics, with entries on the workings of individual genes, and make it available for anyone in Wikipedia rather than in an obscure academic format. Authors of the 'gene wiki' say they have created 7,500 Wikipedia entries on different genes and are editing another 650 already existing entries," wrote USA Today in a July 10 article.
Dr. Valafar, the director of the Center and one of the authors of the paper said "I have grown to be a big fan of community contributed intelligence, and believe that Gene Wiki can serve to collect, in one place, all information that we know about the human genome. Without the Gene Wiki and its community intelligence, this would be a very expensive and time consuming endeavor. We have created a 'Protein Box Bot' (PBB) that automates much of the data collection and creation effort that goes into a tool like this. The Wiki pages are created and seeded with the information that is publically available in widely accepted databases. The created pages then are open to scientists to edit and improve."
In the USA Today article, Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's de facto leader was quoted as saying "We are very excited to see academics getting involved in Wikipedia in a systematic way, and encourage other disciplines to follow suit," he wrote in an e-mail. "I am asking our volunteers to form a welcoming committee to help with this effort."
Dr. Andrew Su, one of the authors, and a senior researcher at the GNF was quoted as saying "I'm a big fan of community intelligence and the idea that together we can collaborate and edit documents and synthesize knowledge better than any one person could," in a San Diego Union Tribune article.
In terms of scientific impact and expected outcomes Dr. Valafar said: "Much has already been debated and speculated in public and scientific forums about the impact of the Gene Wiki. But my favorite expectation is that with active community contribution, I think we will see that the network of hyperlinks between protein and gene pages will start to resemble the actual biological regulatory networks. If this comes true, we will have a tool that inexpensively and quickly offers potential drug targets for many genetic diseases. Pharmaceutical companies spend millions of dollars to do just that. This, in my opinion, would be a significant contribution to science."