NCBI Taxonomy IDs and Wikipedia

I've written a note on the Wikipedia Taxobox page making the case for adding NCBI taxonomy IDs to the standard Taxobox used to summarise information about a taxon. Here is what I wrote:

Wikipedia's taxon pages have a huge web presence (see my blog post Google and Wikipedia revisited and Page, R. D. M. (2010). "Wikipedia as an encyclopaedia of life". Nature Precedings hdl:10101/npre.2010.4242.1). If a taxon is in Wikipedia it is almost always the first search result in Google. Researchers in other areas of biology are making use of a Wikipedia as a tool to annotate genes Gene Wiki and RNA families Wikipedia:WikiProject_RNA, respectively. Pages for genes, such as Cytochrome_b, have numerous external identifiers in their equivalent of the Taxobox (the Pfam_box). I think we are missing a huge opportunity by not including NCBI taxonomy ids. The advantages would be:

• It would provide a valuable service to Wikipedia readers by enabling them to go to NCBI to discover more about a taxon


• It would help Wikipedia contributors by providing a standardised way to refer to NCBI (and enable bots to add missing NCBI taxonomy ids). Putting them in an External links section makes it harder to be consistent (there are various ways to write a URL linking to the NCBI taxonomy)


• It would facilitate linking from NCBI to Wikipedia. A mapping of Wikipedia pages to NCBI taxonomy ids could be added to NCBI Linkout, generating more traffic to the Wikipedia pages


• Projects that are trying to integrate information from different sources would be able to combine information of genomics from NCBI with other information much more readily

Note that I am not arguing that Wikipedia should "follow" NCBI taxonomy, merely that where the potential to link exists, the links would create value, both within and outside the Wikipedia community.

Some discussion has ensued on the Taxobox page, all positive. I'm blogging this here to encourage anyone who as any more thoughts on the matter to contribute to the discussion.

Gene Wiki and Google

Andrew Su has posted an analysis of Gene Wiki, a project to provide Wikipedia pages on every human gene:

Here's the take home message: in terms of online gene annotation resources, Gene Cards is the most common top-ranked resource, followed closely by the Gene Wiki / Wikipedia, with NCBI in a very distant third (note the log scale).

This result is interesting in that an existing resource (Gene Cards) beats Wikipedia, but only just. There are various ways we could interpret this, but from the point of view of biodiversity resources I suspect it emphasises that if there is a good, existing resource that has a lot of traction (i.e., Gene Cards) it will do well in Google Searches. If there is no single dominant resource (as is the case for biodiversity), then it leaves the field open to be dominated by Wikipedia.