EDITORIAL
Submit a Topic Page to PLOS Computational
Biology and Wikipedia
Daniel Mietchen
1
*, Shoshana Wodak
2
, Szymon Wasik
3,4,5
, Natalia Szostak
3,4,5
,
Christophe Dessimoz
6,7,8
1 Data Science Institute, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, United States of America, 2 Vlaams
Instituut voor Biotechnologie-Vrije Universiteit Brussel Centre for Structural Biology, Brussels, Belgium,
3 Institute of Computing Science, Poznan University of Technology, Poznan, Poland, 4 European Centre for
Bioinformatics and Genomics, Poznan University of Technology, Poznan, Poland, 5 Institute of Bioorganic
Chemistry, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poznan, Poland, 6 University College London, London, United
Kingdom, 7 University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland, 8 Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, Lausanne,
Switzerland
* dm7gn@virginia.edu
Back in March 2012, PLOS Computational Biology launched its ‘Topic Pages’ project as a way
to help fill important gaps in Wikipedia’s coverage of computational biology content and to
credit authors for their contributions. Topic Pages are written in the style of a Wikipedia article
and are openly and publicly peer reviewed on the PLOS Wiki before being published in our
PLOS journals, with a second, editable version posted to Wikipedia.
Six years on, PLOS Computational Biology has published 11 Topic Pages covering a good
range of subjects, from the Hypercycle to Approximate Bayesian Computation. The published
articles have been widely viewed on Wikipedia as well as in the journal and well received by
the community.
We are welcoming submissions for further PLOS Computational Biology Topic Pages. We
are looking for topics in computational biology that are of interest to our readership, the
broader scientific community, and the public at large and that are not yet covered or insuffi-
ciently covered (i.e., exist as a ‘stub’) in Wikipedia. Last year, PLOS Genetics joined the Topic
Pages initiative, as detailed in this blog post.
We are also exploring how the Topic Pages approach could be extended to include
Wikidata, the community-curated database connecting concepts covered in any Wikipedia
article with the Semantic Web [1]. For instance, data from more and more research-related
databases are being integrated with Wikidata or its semantic core, Wikibase. This creates the
need to formalize data models: How should concepts like a disease outbreak, a cell-cycle check-
point, a sequencer, biomineralization, or a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)
data set be modelled in Wikidata or Wikibase? Conversely, what workflows allow us to collect
information about such concepts in Wikidata, to interlink it with related information, to vali-
date it, and to keep it up to date? Or, how can the data from Wikidata be explored or put to use
in other contexts relevant to computational biology? We are working on establishing the edito-
rial workflows to handle such Wikidata-focused Topic Pages and would welcome submissions
to test these waters. For some inspiration, we suggest taking a look at Wikidata-based tools for
browsing microbial genomes [2], scholarly publications [3], or software and file formats [4].
The Author Guidelines for Wikipedia-focused Topic Pages are available here. If you’ve
noticed a gap in Wikipedia’s coverage of particular computational biology topics, we want to
hear from you! Please send ideas for Topic Pages to ploscompbiol@plos.org.
PLOS Computational Biology | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006137 May 31, 2018 1/4
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OPEN ACCESS
Citation: Mietchen D, Wodak S, Wasik S, Szostak
N, Dessimoz C (2018) Submit a Topic Page to
PLOS Computational Biology and Wikipedia. PLoS
Comput Biol 14(5): e1006137. https://doi.org/
10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006137
Published: May 31, 2018
Copyright: © 2018 Mietchen et al. This is an open
access article distributed under the terms of the
Creative Commons Attribution License, which
permits unrestricted use, distribution, and
reproduction in any medium, provided the original
author and source are credited.
Funding: No funding was received for this article.
Competing interests: I have read the journal’s
policy and have the following conflicts: Daniel
Mietchen and Shoshana Wodak are Topic Page
Editors.