This is the user page of Alex Bateman, Head of Protein Sequence Resources at the European Bioinformatics Institute. My group runs several molecular biology databases: MEROPS, Rfam, TreeFam and Pfam. I am involved in improving the pages describing non-coding RNA, protein families and computational biology within Wikipedia.
WikiProject Computational Biology
I am a participant in WikiProject Computational Biology which attempts to organise and improve content in the area of Bioinformatics. You can help! There is a growing list of tasks that you can help out with if you have a few free moments.
Rfam and Wikipedia
I was involved in a project to import annotation for over 2,000 RNA families from the Rfam database into Wikipedia. These Wikipedia pages are then reimported into Rfam on a nightly basis, which allows researchers to essentially edit Rfam annotation via Wikipedia.[1]
Pfam and Wikipedia
As of release 25.0, we also use Wikipedia as the source of annotation for Pfam. Unlike Rfam, we don't have an article linked to every Pfam family. You can help us by pointing out any Pfam families that are missing a link to an existing Wikipedia article. You can also help by creating new articles in Wikipedia about protein families. For example, this Pfam family doesn't yet have a Wikipedia article:
http://pfam.sanger.ac.uk/family?acc=PF00563
Outreach to scientists
I am very keen to persuade scientists to get involved in Wikipedia editing to fulfill their public engagement responsibilities. Recently, along with Sanger colleagues, I co-authored an article to help scientists edit Wikipedia.[2] I was involved in persuading the journal RNA Biology to include an RNA families track that requires authors to add or edit a Wikipedia article describing it. Interestingly, the Wikipedia article will be part of the peer review process. This is described in a Nature News article by Declan Butler:
http://www.nature.com/news/2008/081216/full/news.2008.1312.html
If you'd like to find out more about this work then why not watch this lecture recorded for the BioIT conference in Boston in April 2010 http://www.scivee.tv/node/17454.
References
- ↑ Daub J, Gardner PP, Tate J; et al. (2008). "The RNA WikiProject: Community annotation of RNA families". RNA (New York, N.Y.). PMID 18945806. doi:10.1261/rna.1200508. Unknown parameter
|month=ignored (|date=suggested) (help) - ↑ Logan DW, Sandal M, Gardner PP, Manske M, Bateman A (2010). "Ten simple rules for editing Wikipedia". PLoS Comput. Biol. 6 (9). PMC 2947980. PMID 20941386. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000941.