[Pdx-pm] wiki note

[Thomas J Keller]

FYI, from the science journal "Nature":

Nature 446, 856 (19 April 2007) | doi:10.1038/446856a; Published  
online 18 April 2007



Other riffs on cooperation are already showing how well a wiki could  
work

John D. Osborne1, Simon Lin2 & Warren A. Kibbe3

University of Alabama at Birmingham, 845 19th Street South, Bevill  
Building, Room 273C, Birmingham, Alabama 35294, USA
Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center, Northwestern University,  
676 North St Clair, Suite 1200, Chicago, Illinois 60611, USA
Center for Genetic Medicine, Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer  
Center and Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, 676  
North St Clair, Suite 1200, Chicago, Illinois 60611, USA


Sir:
Barend Mons's Wiki for Professionals at http:// 
www.wikiprofessional.info is among the first open collaborative  
databases to use the wiki format in biology, as your News story "Key  
biology databases go wiki" (Nature 445, 691; 2007) points out.

However, other, non-wiki resources have already shown the feasibility  
of cooperative, online database construction. One such success story  
is GeneRIF (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/projects/GeneRIF), which is  
like a miniature wiki where the author is restricted to a single  
short sentence. Currently, GeneRIF contains close to 200,000 entries,  
and each is attached to a particular gene at the Entrez database of  
the National Center for Biotechnology Information.

Being interested in gene–disease relationships, we assessed the  
coverage and specificity of GeneRIF and compared them to OMIM (Online  
Mendelian Inheritance in Man), a traditional source of gene-disease  
information. We found that GeneRIF already covers more than twice the  
number of diseases per gene and includes many more newly discovered  
mappings (http://www.basic.northwestern.edu/publications/generifdo).  
This seems to us to answer the scepticism that has been expressed  
about the expected community involvement in wiki collaborations.
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