Submit a Topic Page to PLOS Computational Biology and Wikipedia (original) (raw)

2018, PLOS Computational Biology

Back in March 2012, PLOS Computational Biology launched its 'Topic Pages' project as a way to help fill important gaps in Wikipedia's coverage of computational biology content and to credit authors for their contributions. Topic Pages are written in the style of a Wikipedia article and are openly and publicly peer reviewed on the PLOS Wiki before being published in our PLOS journals, with a second, editable version posted to Wikipedia. Six years on, PLOS Computational Biology has published 11 Topic Pages covering a good range of subjects, from the Hypercycle to Approximate Bayesian Computation. The published articles have been widely viewed on Wikipedia as well as in the journal and well received by the community. We are welcoming submissions for further PLOS Computational Biology Topic Pages. We are looking for topics in computational biology that are of interest to our readership, the broader scientific community, and the public at large and that are not yet covered or insufficiently covered (i.e., exist as a 'stub') in Wikipedia. Last year, PLOS Genetics joined the Topic Pages initiative, as detailed in this blog post. We are also exploring how the Topic Pages approach could be extended to include Wikidata, the community-curated database connecting concepts covered in any Wikipedia article with the Semantic Web [1]. For instance, data from more and more research-related databases are being integrated with Wikidata or its semantic core, Wikibase. This creates the need to formalize data models: How should concepts like a disease outbreak, a cell-cycle checkpoint, a sequencer, biomineralization, or a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data set be modelled in Wikidata or Wikibase? Conversely, what workflows allow us to collect information about such concepts in Wikidata, to interlink it with related information, to validate it, and to keep it up to date? Or, how can the data from Wikidata be explored or put to use in other contexts relevant to computational biology? We are working on establishing the editorial workflows to handle such Wikidata-focused Topic Pages and would welcome submissions to test these waters. For some inspiration, we suggest taking a look at Wikidata-based tools for browsing microbial genomes [2], scholarly publications [3], or software and file formats [4]. The Author Guidelines for Wikipedia-focused Topic Pages are available here. If you've noticed a gap in Wikipedia's coverage of particular computational biology topics, we want to hear from you! Please send ideas for Topic Pages to ploscompbiol@plos.org.