Gene Wiki


The Gene Wiki is a project within Wikipedia that aims to describe the relationships and functions of all human genes. It was established to transfer information from scientific resources to Wikipedia stub articles.
The Gene Wiki project also initiated publication of gene-specific review articles in the journal Gene, together with the editing of the gene-specific pages in Wikipedia.

Project goals and scope

Number of gene articles

The human genome contains an estimated 20,000–25,000 protein-coding genes. The goal of the Gene Wiki project is to create seed articles for every human gene, that is, every gene whose function has been assigned in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. Approximately half of human genes have assigned function, therefore the total number of articles seeded by the Gene Wiki project would be expected to be in the range of 10,000–15,000. To date, approximately 11,000 articles have been created or augmented to include Gene Wiki project content.

Expansion

Once seed articles have been established, the hope and expectation is that these will be annotated and expanded by editors ranging in experience from the lay audience to students to professionals and academics.

Proteins encoded by genes

The majority of genes encode proteins hence understanding the function of a gene generally requires understanding of the function of the corresponding protein. In addition to including basic information about the gene, the project therefore also includes information about the protein encoded by the gene.

Gene Wiki generated content

Stubs for the Gene Wiki project are created by a bot and contain links to the following primary gene/protein databases:
A report found that between 2013 and 2017, the content which Gene Wiki contributed to Wikipedia got crowdsourced development over time.