Wikipedia Science Conference/Submissions/Using Wikipedia to annotate Scientific Databases

This is an invited talk and so has been accepted. MartinPoulter (talk) 13:40, 9 May 2015 (BST)

Personal details

Alex Bateman

EMBL-EBI

Alexbateman (agbebi.ac.uk)

Cambridge. UK. I do not require any funding to attend.

I will attend the whole conference

Session details

Conference themes

• Wikipedia and/or Wikimedia as platforms for research (including citizen science)
• Wikipedia and/or Wikimedia as models for scientific publishing

Type of session

• Presentation (20 mins + 10 mins questions)

Using Wikipedia to annotate scientific databases

Abstract: In this talk I will present the results of using Wikipedia as the repository for information for biological databases. In particular our experience with the Pfam and Rfam databases where we use Wikipedia articles about protein and RNA families as our annotation (e.g. http://rfam.xfam.org/family/RyhB). Users of our resources can go to Wikipedia to update the content which is then copied back on a daily basis to our websites. We have had thousands of edits of the Wikipedia articles from scientists, wikipedians, robots and vandals over the past 6 years. I will discuss the statistics as well as our other efforts to motivate scientists to get involved in updating Wikipedia content, including the ISCB Wikipedia Competition.

Thank you for your proposal.