{ C O N T E N T S}
Volume 14, Issue 1

Letter to ISCB
Members & Colleagues


Bloggers Welcome at ISMB/ECCB

Sr. Scientist Award:
Michael Ashburner


Overton Prize:
Olga Troyanskaya


ISCB Policy Statement on Open Access Literature

ISCB President-Elect Elections

Meet the ISCB Fellows
Class of 2011


Mark Your Calendar
ISMB 2012


FASEB Updates

Improving Wikipedia Content

Announcing
Rocky 2011


Announcing
GLBIO 2012


SCS7 Highlights

ISCB Student Council
Overview


Call for Proposals
ISCB-Asia 2012

Announcing ECCB12

Bioinformatics Journal

CSHALS: Semantic
Technologies Meet
Big Data


PLoS Computational
Biology
Overview


Spotlight on PSB Conference

Announcing
CSHALS 2012

Announcing InCoB/
ISCB-Asia 2011 Joint Conference


Announcing ISCB-Latin America 2012

EMBnet Collaboration on Education and Training

Upcoming Conferences & Events

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International Society for
Computational Biology.
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IMPROVING COMPUTATIONAL BIOLOGY CONTENT IN WIKIPEDIA. ISCB NEEDS YOU!



A prominent aim of the ISCB is to communicate the significance of computational biology to the wider scientific community, governmental organizations and the general public. It has come to our attention that Wikipedia represents a highly used resource for both public and scientist alike to learn more about science in general and computational biology. To illustrate the importance of Wikipedia a search in Google for 'computational biology' returns the Wikipedia entry as the top hit in the ranking. A search for 'biological databases', again, returns the corresponding Wikipedia entry top of the list. Together its popularity, scope and content make it one of the major global resources in knowledge provision. But most importantly, the success of Wikipedia is largely due to using volunteer input to provide rapid, accurate, free and accessible information to the general public. ISCB has recently supported the creation of a Wikipedia Task Force (WTF) with the following aims:
1. To disseminate knowledge in computational biology
2. To establish a community-wide public engagement effort
3. To create accessible articles about computational biology, to excite new people to join the field The initiative is now accessible via the Computational Biology WikiProject at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Computational_Biology.
This WikiProject is an online, Wikipedia-hosted portal to integrate computational biology relevant articles and people. There are many ways that you can help, from identifying articles that are within the scope of Computational Biology,  to adding relevant information to articles in Wikipedia. If you would like to get some initial introduction on how to edit a Wikipedia entry the recent 10 Simple Rules article in PLoS Computational Biology provides some guidance
(see www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.1000941).

Also there are a set of training pages available http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:
Rockpocket/Training
. We believe Wikipedia provides a unique opportunity to educate
and inform on a global scale, and urge ISCB members to engage with this initiative.