University of Glasgow

Roderic Page

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I\'ve written a note on the Wikipedia Taxobox page [making the case for
adding NCBI taxonomy IDs to the standard
Taxobox](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template_talk:Taxobox#NCBI_Taxonomy_IDs)
used to summarise information about a taxon. Here is what I wrote:  

>   
> Wikipedia\'s taxon pages have a huge web presence (see my blog post
> [Google and Wikipedia
> revisited](http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-and-wikipedia-revisited.html)
> and Page, R. D. M. (2010). \"Wikipedia as an encyclopaedia of life\".
> Nature Precedings
> [hdl:10101/npre.2010.4242.1](http://%20hdl.handle.net/10101/npre.2010.4242.1)).
> If a taxon is in Wikipedia it is almost always the first search result
> in Google. Researchers in other areas of biology are making use of a
> Wikipedia as a tool to annotate genes [Gene
> Wiki](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Wiki) and RNA families
> [Wikipedia:WikiProject_RNA](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_RNA),
> respectively. Pages for genes, such as
> [Cytochrome_b](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cytochrome_b), have
> numerous external identifiers in their equivalent of the Taxobox (the
> Pfam_box). I think we are missing a huge opportunity by not including
> NCBI taxonomy ids. The advantages would be:  
>
> - It would provide a valuable service to Wikipedia readers by enabling
>   them to go to NCBI to discover more about a taxon
> - It would help Wikipedia contributors by providing a standardised way
>   to refer to NCBI (and enable bots to add missing NCBI taxonomy ids).
>   Putting them in an External links section makes it harder to be
>   consistent (there are various ways to write a URL linking to the
>   NCBI taxonomy)
> - It would facilitate linking from NCBI to Wikipedia. A mapping of
>   Wikipedia pages to NCBI taxonomy ids could be added to NCBI Linkout,
>   generating more traffic to the Wikipedia pages
> - Projects that are trying to integrate information from different
>   sources would be able to combine information of genomics from NCBI
>   with other information much more readily
>
>   
> Note that I am not arguing that Wikipedia should \"follow\" NCBI
> taxonomy, merely that where the potential to link exists, the links
> would create value, both within and outside the Wikipedia community.  

  
Some discussion has ensued on the [Taxobox
page](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template_talk:Taxobox#NCBI_Taxonomy_IDs),
all positive. I\'m blogging this here to encourage anyone who as any
more thoughts on the matter to contribute to the discussion.


I've written a note on the Wikipedia Taxobox page making the case for adding NCBI taxonomy IDs to the standard Taxobox used to summarise information about a taxon. Here is what I wrote:Some discussion has ensued on the Taxobox page, all positive. I'm blogging this here to encourage anyone who as any more thoughts on the matter to contribute to the discussion.

Rogue Scholar Beiträge

NCBI Taxonomy IDs and Wikipedia