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.

In the push to ‘communitize’ annotation and curation, one journal, RNA Biology, is requiring submitters to add or update their RNA sequences on wikipedia. This article suggests that it’s working so far (update, link to the article added),

The first examples of this program in action are already online. The journal is hosting an open access paper that describes a family of RNA molecules found in nematode worms; a corresponding Wikipedia page is already in place. In good Wikipedia form, the phylogenetic analysis of these RNAs is dinged for not providing citations, while the article as a whole is flagged as having excess jargon. (The talk page hosts an interesting discussion of how much jargon can possibly be eliminated from a highly technical description like this.)

So far, everyone is happy with the results. A few scientists have started updating the scientific content of the RNA entries, while the usual Wikipedia denizens have helped out in terms of catching typos and improving the formatting. The people backing the project expect that it will be immune to some of the issues that plague other Wikipedia entries; Nature quotes one of the biologists as saying, “”We don’t think vandalism will ever be as much of a problem for a Wikipedia page on transfer RNAs as it is for a page on George Bush.”

And looking at that one entry, it does seem to. But I have a question, if researchers are soon required not only to submit and/or annotate in a database and to wikis and curate and annotate if they wish to publish, doesn’t this start to place an undue burden on researchers who already have grant writing, teaching, and more in addition to actual research? There does need to be a solution to the growing need for curation and annotation of data, it will be interesting to see if this is one solution that will hold.

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:

ScienceRoll links to a search engine for Radiology, links to a post about a “Gene Wiki” project, from which I re-find the excellent blog by Deepak Singh. From there I find this interesting resource: FreeBase, which is different that Wikipedia (it doesn’t have ‘articles’, it has stats), which reminds me of that Google project I mentioned earlier and leads me to GoogleBase.

It’s all about finding that info!