Database Commons

a catalog of worldwide biological databases

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.

Annotating the function of all human genes is a critical, yet formidable, challenge. Current gene annotation efforts focus on centralized curation resources, but it is increasingly clear that this approach does not scale with the rapid growth of the biomedical literature. The Gene Wiki utilizes an alternative and complementary model based on the principle of community intelligence. Directly integrated within the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, the goal of this effort is to build a gene-specific review article for every gene in the human genome, where each article is collaboratively written, continuously updated and community reviewed. Previously, we described the creation of Gene Wiki 'stubs' for approximately 9000 human genes. Here, we describe ongoing systematic improvements to these articles to increase their utility. Moreover, we retrospectively examine the community usage and improvement of the Gene Wiki, providing evidence of a critical mass of users and editors. Gene Wiki articles are freely accessible within the Wikipedia web site, and additional links and information are available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Gene_Wiki.