ISCB’s Annual Wikipedia and Wikidata Competition -- Furthering Computational Biology Knowledge and Training the Next Generation of Wikipedians

Wikipedia has become  one of the most  widely used  sources of scientific information in the world, especially for students and the general public.  Since 2012, ISCB has hosted an annual competition to judge Wikipedia entries created by students or trainees, which has supported the education mission of the Society and improved the coverage of computational biology topics in Wikipedia.  Winners of the competition are awarded prize money as well as an annual membership to ISCB.

ISCB recently hosted a Wikipedia and Wikidata editathon at ISMB 2016 to promote the competition and highlight the Wikipedia Year of Science 2016. This editathon provided informal training forcreating and editing Wikipedia articles and Wikidata entries.

For the competition, Wikipedia entries must fulfill the criteria required of all Wikipedia articles and must also be within the scope of computational biology. Entries can include completely new articles, but most competitors work on existing articles within the Computational Biology WikiProject. ISCB has created various guidelines and resources for this competition, including the WikiProject Computational Biology page and the “Ten Simple Rules for Editing Wikipedia” article from PLOS Computational Biology. As of 2015, ISCB has also supported a separate Wikidata competition in parallel with the Wikipedia article competition to improve the Wikidata entries related to computational biology.

Course instructors have started using the competition as an exercise for students, which has helped drive up the number of high quality entries that are contributed each year. Alex Bateman of EMBL-EBI is one of the organizers of the ISCB competition and has helped guide this initiative since its inception. He has observed that students that work in pairs or groups are often more successful in creating well balanced and clearly written entries. This reflects the collaborative environment of Wikipedia, whereby editors across the globe work toward creating articles that are accurate, neutral in tone, able to be understood by the general public yet informative to subject-matter experts.

This year’s competition is open from July 13, 2016 to December 31, 2016: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Computational_Biology/
ISCB_competition_announcement_2016.

Encourage students or trainees to try their hand at a Wikipedia entry, not only for their own training and experience, but as a way to improve their science communication skills and give back to the computational biology community.

Growing Together,
Celebrating 25 Years of ISMB

The 25th Annual International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology will be held jointly with the European Conference on Computational Biology from July 21 – 25, 2017, in Prague, Czech Republic, with Chairs Janet Thornton and Yves Moreau.

As always the conference will provide an intense multidisciplinary forum for disseminating the latest developments in bioinformatics/computational biology. In response to the increasing interest in the activities of the ISCB’s Communities of Special Interest (COSIs) who have previously organized the Special Interest Group (SIG) meetings at ISMB, ISMB/ECCB 2017 will be organized with the active participation of the COSIs. ISMB/ECCB 2017 will be more streamlined and will have an outstanding scientifically effective program.

In previous years COSI/SIG meetings took place on the two days preceding ISMB. In 2017, the COSI/SIG meetings will be merged into the main meeting and aligned with the thematic structure around which ISMB-ECCB is organized. The new conference format will retain the key features that make ISMB a successful open conference, including the Proceedings paper talks, Highlights and Late breaking talks, outstanding Keynote lectures, technical talks and industry sessions. In addition, equal opportunities activities, a students’ council day, tutorials and other activities will take place. The new structure is intended to bring a new energy and flow to the conference by centering it thematically around the vibrant ISCB COSI communities.

The new scientific program structure will reduce redundancy and make it easier, and less expensive overall, for attendees to follow the wide diversity of topics important to our field. Further, with the COSIs more central to the conference, networking within and between the scientific communities will be greatly enhanced. Each year, including 2017, conference program chairs will encourage the emergence of new scientific themes through special sessions for emerging communities.

ISMB-ECCB 2017 will have a simplified system for all the submissions including Proceedings talks and Presentations that include Highlights and Late breaking research, SIG submissions and a single registration for either two or four days which will allow participants to attend talks across multiple special interest areas.

ISMB-ECCB 2017 will enable intensified community involvement and bolster its reputation as the leading conference in the field, with the strongest scientific and technical program that showcases the best international developments in bioinformatics and computational biology.

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Join us in Arizona for the ninth annual RECOMB/ISCB Conference on Regulatory and Systems Genomics, with DREAM Challenges and Cytoscape Workshop, the premier annual meeting in the fields of regulatory genomics, systems biology, and network visualization!