Die gemeinnützige Wikimedia Foundation betreibt die Wikipedia und weitere Plattformen. Jan Engelmann, deutscher Wikimedia-Vorstand, im Interview über die kommenden Herausforderungen für Wikipedia und die Bewegung für freies Wissen. iRights.info : Warum ist es gut, dass es Wikipedia seit mehr als zehn Jahren gibt?

My paper describing the mapping between NCBI and Wikipedia has been published in PLoS Currents: Tree of Life. You can see the paper here. It's only just gone live, so it's yet to get a PubMed Central number (one of the nice features of PLoS Currents is that the articles get archived in PMC).Publishing in PLoS Currents: Tree of Life was a pleasant experience. The Google Knol editing environment was easy to use, and the reviewing process quick.

Continuing experiments with a zoom viewer for large trees (see previous post), I've now made a demo where the labels are clickable. If the NCBI taxon has an equivalent page in Wikipedia the demo displays and link to that page (and, if present, a thumbnail image). Give it a try athttp://iphylo.org/~rpage/deeptree/3.htmlor watch the short video clip below: Zoomable viewer with Wikipedia thumbnails from Roderic Page on Vimeo.

My views on TreeBASE are pretty well known. Lately I've been thinking a lot about how to "fix" TreeBASE, or indeed, move beyond it. I've made a couple of baby steps in this direction.The first step is that I've created a group for TreeBASE papers on Mendeley.

My short note on "Wikipedia as an Encyclopaedia of Life" has appeared in Organisms Diversity &

Having made a first stab at mapping NCBI taxa to Wikipedia, I thought it might be fun to see what could be done with it. I've always wanted to get quantum treemaps working (quantum treemaps ensure that the cells in the treemap are all the same size, see my 2006[!] blog post for further description and links). After some fussing I have some code that seems to do the trick.

The 52,956 links from NCBI to Wikipedia that I've been busy creating are now "live." If you go to a NCBI taxon such as Sphaerius you'll see something like this:Clicking the "Wikipedia" link takes you to the Wikipedia page for this taxon.

In an earlier post I discussed linking NCBI taxonomy to Wikipedia. One way to tackle this is to add NCBI Taxonomy ID to Wikipedia pages. I reopened the case for adding the Taxonomy IDs to the Taxobox on each taxon page, but this met with substantial resistance.

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.

I'm revisiting the idea of building a wiki of phylogenies using Semantic Mediawiki. One problem with a project like this is that it can rapidly explode.