The OpenHelix Blog

In the continuing effort to get scientists and researchers to annotate and curate data and to capture the huge amount of knowledge available, UCSC Genome Browser has added a wiki annotation track to the browser. It’s not the first effort of course, GeneWiki is an effort, with mixed results so far, to annotate gene function information as a community exercise using Wikipedia. Some journals are requiring wiki entries, and several databases have opened wikis for curation. Wikis could be a solution for capturing the exponentially increasing amount of data,

or they could be just another place for adding confusion… or both. I suspect out of the plethora the wikis coming available for annotation and curation of genomic data, something will stick and find that Goldilocks balance of a dedicated community, ease of use, usability, and other aspects that will be needed for this to work.

Perhaps UCSC Genome Browser has that balance. It will remain to be seen, but let’s get started. Today’s tip is introducing the new wiki track in the UCSC Genome Browser.

PLoS Biology has an article out today entitled “A Gene Wiki for Community Annotation of Gene Function.” The article describes the authors attempts to create a comprehensive gene wiki of gene functions by ’seeding’ Wikipedia with a foundation of ’stub’ articles with information from existing databases (such as Entrez Gene). This foundation would then be built upon in Wikipedia fashion by community editing.

Speaking of Genbank’s 25th, a few weeks ago Science had a news piece “Proposal to ‘Wikify’ Genbank Meets Stiff Resistance.” Apparently, those in the Mycology research community have found many inaccuracies in the Genbank records and wish to see a change that would allow annotations to be made by the community:

a scheme like those used in herbaria and museums, where specimens often have multiple annotations: listing original and new entries side by side. It would be a community operation, like Wikipedia, in which the users themselves update and add information, but not anonymously.

But the idea is meeting resistance from Genbank’s Managers: