The articles for the annual database issue are starting to appear in the NAR collection. My favorite one this year is, immodestly perhaps, ours about the Gene Wiki! The simple message here is that the Gene Wiki is continuing to grow and that the content remains very high quality overall. For more information, the abstract is below, and of course the paper is freely accessible online:
“The Gene Wiki is an open-access and openly editable collection of Wikipedia articles about human genes. Initiated in 2008, it has grown to include articles about more than 10 000 genes that, collectively, contain more than 1.4 million words of gene-centric text with extensive citations back to the primary scientific literature. This growing body of useful, gene-centric content is the result of the work of thousands of individuals throughout the scientific community. Here, we describe recent improvements to the automated system that keeps the structured data presented on Gene Wiki articles in sync with the data from trusted primary databases. We also describe the expanding contents, editors and users of the Gene Wiki. Finally, we introduce a new automated system, called WikiTrust, which can effectively compute the quality of Wikipedia articles, including Gene Wiki articles, at the word level. All articles in the Gene Wiki can be freely accessed and edited at Wikipedia, and additional links and information can be found at the project’s Wikipedia portal page:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Gene_Wiki.”