On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 8:04 AM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, You may want to consider the scale of things ... when you are talking chemicals, proteins a number like 240 million articles can be expected. With such numbers you have to wonder to what extend Wikipedia can cope.
IMHO the point is database vs. free-style text annotation.
It is reasonable to expect that every human gene, in the not-so-long run, will have loads of text annotation that doesn't fit well in a classic database; in fact, it will have a few data points and a lot of text. Remember, we're talking <25.000 genes in human. This is what a wiki is best at, and pre-creating articles for them that contain the bare facts is perfectly valid.
OTOH, millions of real/predicted/hypothetical molecules that will, for the most part, have nothing but a few numbers with them, would fit better in a "normal" database. That doesn't exclude the possibility of writing about some of these molecules on wikipedia when there's something to write about.
Magnus