The RNA WikiProject: Community annotation of RNA families

  1. Jennifer Daub1,
  2. Paul P. Gardner1,
  3. John Tate1,
  4. Daniel Ramsköld2,
  5. Magnus Manske1,
  6. William G. Scott3,
  7. Zasha Weinberg4,
  8. Sam Griffiths-Jones5, and
  9. Alex Bateman1
  1. 1Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, CB10 1SA, United Kingdom
  2. 2Royal Institute of Technology, SE-105 71 Stockholm, Sweden
  3. 3Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California at Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, California 95064, USA
  4. 4Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06520-8103, USA
  5. 5Faculty of Life Sciences, Michael Smith Building, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PT, United Kingdom

Abstract

The online encyclopedia Wikipedia has become one of the most important online references in the world and has a substantial and growing scientific content. A search of Google with many RNA-related keywords identifies a Wikipedia article as the top hit. We believe that the RNA community has an important and timely opportunity to maximize the content and quality of RNA information in Wikipedia. To this end, we have formed the RNA WikiProject (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_RNA) as part of the larger Molecular and Cellular Biology WikiProject. We have created over 600 new Wikipedia articles describing families of noncoding RNAs based on the Rfam database, and invite the community to update, edit, and correct these articles. The Rfam database now redistributes this Wikipedia content as the primary textual annotation of its RNA families. Users can, therefore, for the first time, directly edit the content of one of the major RNA databases. We believe that this Wikipedia/Rfam link acts as a functioning model for incorporating community annotation into molecular biology databases.

Keywords

Footnotes

  • Reprint requests to: Paul P. Gardner, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, CB10 1SA, UK; e-mail: pg5{at}sanger.ac.uk; fax: 44-7788-120708.

  • Article published online ahead of print. Article and publication date are at http://www.rnajournal.org/cgi/doi/10.1261/rna.1200508.

    • Received June 2, 2008.
    • Accepted August 29, 2008.

  • Freely available online through the open access option.

| Table of Contents
OPEN ACCESS ARTICLE

This Article

  1. Published in Advance October 22, 2008, doi: 10.1261/rna.1200508 RNA 14: 2462-2464 Copyright © 2008 RNA Society

Article Category

Share

Current Issue

  1. May 2024, 30 (5)
  1. Current Issue
  1. Alert me to new issues of RNA