FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The International Society for Computational Biology Announces a Wikipedia Computational Biology Article Competition

July 15, 2012 - Long Beach, CA - At the 20th annual international conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB), the president of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB), Burkhard Rost, together with Alex Bateman, senior investigator of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, will announce on Sunday, July 15th, a competition to improve the existing Wikipedia articles about any aspect of computational biology.

A key component of the ISCB's mission to further the scientific understanding of living systems through computation is to communicate this knowledge to the public at large. Wikipedia has become an important way to communicate all types of science to the public. The ISCB aims to further its mission by increasing the quality of Wikipedia articles about computational biology, and by improving accessibility to this information via Wikipedia. This extends the work of PLoS Computational Biology (an official journal of the ISCB), which links with Wikipedia to provide Education Track articles.

By introducing a competition during ISMB, the ISCB will capitalize on the depth of expertise among its members in attendance at ISMB, and through its community of members and colleagues around the world to support the Computational Biology WikiProject (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Computational_Biology). As Wikipedia is a collaborative endeavor, the competition will be open to both individuals and groups, and prizes will be awarded for best contributions.

About ISCB

The International Society for Computational Biology is a not-for-profit scholarly society based in La Jolla, California, at the San Diego Supercomputer Center on the campus of the University of California, San Diego. The ISCB has a global membership of nearly 3,000 researchers from 70 countries. For more information, visit www.iscb.org.

Press Contact
BJ Morrison McKay
ISCB Executive Officer
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