Wikipedia as an encyclopaedia of life
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FORUM PAPER
Wikipedia as an encyclopaedia of life Roderic D. M. Page
Received: 26 February 2010 / Accepted: 23 May 2010 / Published online: 7 July 2010 # Gesellschaft für Biologische Systematik 2010
Abstract In a 2003 essay E. O. Wilson outlined his vision for an “encyclopaedia of life” comprising “an electronic page for each species of organism on Earth”, each page containing “the scientific name of the species, a pictorial or genomic presentation of the primary type specimen on which its name is based, and a summary of its diagnostic traits.” Although biodiversity informatics has generated numerous online resources, including some directly inspired by Wilson’s essay (e.g., iSpecies and EOL), we are still some way from the goal of having available online all relevant information about a species, such as its taxonomy, evolutionary history, genomics, morphology, ecology, and behaviour. While the biodiversity community has been developing a plethora of databases, some with overlapping goals and duplicated content, Wikipedia has been slowly growing to the point where it now has over 100,000 pages on biological taxa. My goal in this essay is to explore the idea that, largely independent of the aims of biodiversity informatics and well-funded international efforts, Wikipedia has emerged as potentially the best platform for fulfilling E. O. Wilson’s vision. Keywords Biodiversity informatics . Encyclopaedia of life . Taxonomy . Wikipedia
Introduction Wilson (2003: 77) envisaged an “encyclopaedia of life” in which each “page is indefinitely expansible. Its contents are
R. D. M. Page (*) Division of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Faculty of Biomedical Life Sciences, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK e-mail: [email protected]
continuously peer reviewed and updated with new information. All the pages together form an encyclopaedia, the content of which is the totality of comparative biology.” Although Wilson did not mention wikis (which were in their infancy when he wrote his article), to today’s reader his vision has echoes of several key features of a wiki. Wikis are expandable, and can be continuously edited and updated. Perhaps just as significant as the pages themselves is the emergence of the large community of contributors to sites such as Wikipedia. The potential of this community to make significant contributions to the task of biological annotation is already being explored by other biologists (Waldrop 2008), notably in the Gene Wiki project which has created numerous Wikipedia pages for human genes (Huss et al. 2008; 2009). This project was motivated by the realisation that centralised annotation by a small pool of experts simply couldn’t keep pace with the rapid growth of biomedical literature. Increasing concerns about the accuracy of DNA sequences and their annotations in the GenBank sequence repository (Bridge et al. 2003), and the difficulty of correcting such entries have led to calls to “wikify” GenBank (Pennisi 2008; see also Bidartondo 2008), so that errors can be corrected rapidly by th
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