r amended about 9000 Wikipedia “stub” entries on human genes, which anyone can edit. “Being part of the larger Wikipedia community is certainly an advantage of this system. The people there are experts at welcoming newcomers, fighting vandalism, and formatting things correctly,” Su says.
Su and Mons have plans to collaborate. WikiProtein and Gene Wiki entries will be linked through a common “entry page” (likely hosted in WikiProteins), making it easy to navigate between the systems. “This will allow users to take advantage of whichever system they feel comfortable with,” Su says.
Getting bench scientists to participate will be a challenge, Mons says, but he believes the incentives are high. The WikiProteins system mines PubMed for new information daily, finds new explicit and implicit associations—such as predicting protein-protein interactions—and alerts scientists of all edits and updates to concepts in their purview. “I hope it becomes a daily part of their knowledge discovery process,” Mons says. Since its launch, WikiProteins has also received requests to enable users to enter data as unstructured, free text, which should lower the barrier to participation.
Another factor that may boost participation is the development of ways to trace authorship for each entry, so that authors can get credit for their work and readers can assess the reliability of content. A recent proof of this possibility was demonstrated in “WikiGenes,” (not to be confused with the GeneWiki!) a project described in Nature Genetics in September 2008. WikiGenes was developed by Robert Hoffmann, PhD, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It’s part of his Mememoir project, which has, he says, “the ambitious goal to create a free collaborative knowledge base for all of science—where authorship matters.”
Though the creators of the various Wikis have not yet formally quantified participation, Su says that there’s been an uptick in Gene Wiki activity since the PLoS Biology paper came out. “It gives me hope that the system is right and that the framework is there, so if we are tapping into a desire in the community to share knowledge and harness community intelligence, then we have the structure to do it now.”