On the issue of scientific data knowledge in Wikipedia versus "specialist databases"... Magnus emphasizes a great point that the unstructured nature of Wikipedia (free-text, figures, diagrams, etc.) is very complementary to the structured databases of existing resources. Consider these two links:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=gene&Cmd=ShowDetailView&... ToSearch=5649
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reelin
Clearly they have different goals in what information to present and how to present it. I'd also say that Wikipedia has an advantage of presenting data to a more diverse audience, having information of interest to both lay-people and scientists.
-andrew
-----Original Message----- From: foundation-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:foundation-l- bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Magnus Manske Sent: Thursday, July 24, 2008 1:45 AM To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List Subject: [Junk released by User action] Re: [Foundation-l] Another
look a
bot creation of articles
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
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