The Gene Wiki: community intelligence applied to human gene annotation

Annotating the function of all human genes is a critical, yet formidable, challenge. Current gene annotation efforts focus on centralized curation resources, but it is increasingly clear that this approach does not scale with the rapid growth of the biomedical literature. The Gene Wiki utilizes an alternative and complementary model based on the principle of community intelligence. Directly integrated within the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, the goal of this effort is to build a gene-specific review article for every gene in the human genome, where each article is collaboratively written, continuously updated and community reviewed. Previously, we described the creation of Gene Wiki 'stubs' for approximately 9000 human genes. Here, we describe ongoing systematic improvements to these articles to increase their utility. Moreover, we retrospectively examine the community usage and improvement of the Gene Wiki, providing evidence of a critical mass of users and editors. Gene Wiki articles are freely accessible within the Wikipedia web site, and additional links and information are available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Gene_Wiki.