Skip Navigation



Nucleic Acids Research Advance Access published online on September 15, 2009
Nucleic Acids Research, doi:10.1093/nar/gkp760
This Article
Right arrow Full Text Freely available
Right arrow Print PDF (1909K) Freely available
Right arrow Screen PDF (844K) Freely available
Right arrow Supplementary Data
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in PubMed
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrow Commercial Re-use Guidelines
for Open Access NAR Content
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Huss, J. W.
Right arrow Articles by Su, A. I.
PubMed
Right arrow PubMed Citation
Right arrow Articles by Huss, J. W., III
Right arrow Articles by Su, A. I.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

© The Author(s) 2009. Published by Oxford University Press.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Database Issue

The Gene Wiki: community intelligence applied to human gene annotation

Jon W. Huss, III1, Pierre Lindenbaum2, Michael Martone3, Donabel Roberts4, Angel Pizarro5, Faramarz Valafar4, John B. Hogenesch5 and Andrew I. Su1,*

1Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation, San Diego, CA 92121, USA, 2Department of Bioinformatics, CEPH/Fondation Jean-Dausset, Paris, France, 3Rush University Medical College, Chicago, IL 60612, 4San Diego State University, Bioinformatics and Medical Informatics Graduate Program, San Diego, CA 92182 and 5Department of Pharmacology, Institute for Translational Medicine and Therapeutics, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA

*To whom correspondence should be addressed. Tel: 858-812-1500; Fax: 858-812-1570; Email: asu{at}gnf.org

Received August 14, 2009. Revised August 26, 2009. Accepted August 29, 2009.

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.


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?




Disclaimer: Please note that abstracts for content published before 1996 were created through digital scanning and may therefore not exactly replicate the text of the original print issues. All efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, but the Publisher will not be held responsible for any remaining inaccuracies. If you require any further clarification, please contact our Customer Services Department.