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BBB Seminar: Alex Bateman

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Why biologists should care about Wikipedia 

Alex Bateman
Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, UK

Wikipedia is the most successful community annotation project of all time. But can it be used successfully for scientific information? I will discuss the strengths as well as the weaknesses of the Wikipedia approach. In particular I will discuss the issue of getting scientists engaged in editing Wikipedia as well as show examples of spectacular failures and the reasons for these.

During this talk I will detail our efforts to engage the community of RNA biologists to improve the annotation of the Rfam RNA families database as well as more generally contribute to the annotation of RNA in Wikipedia.

Finally, I hope to persuade you that contributing to Wikipedia is a valid and important contribution to scientific knowledge and its dissemination.

Host: Helene Bustad Johannessen , Department of Biomedicine