WikiProject Article Submission
Wikipedia article entry for ISCB competition
Almost an year ago, I had written a blog post about different Wikipedia WikiProjects and how one could contribute to them. In short, A WikiProject is simply an organized effort by the community of editors on the Wikipedia, where they try to curate and improve the quality of articles belonging to a particular genre or of specific interest to a group. In loose terms, WikiProjects to Wikipedia are what subreddits are to reddit.
In the same blog post, I shared my excitement about an interesting article writing competition that I had found on Computational Biology WikiProject. The competition, organized by International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) awarded people for the best contributions to the computational-biology related articles. Sadly, by the time I came across the page, the competition for the year had already ended.
Fast forward ten months, ISCB article writing competition was renewed for 2015 with an additional scope of improving Wikidata items. Call it a coincidence, but working with WIGI had already provided me a good level of familiarity with Wikidata items.
There was no time to waste!
I discussed with Nithin, a Ph.D. student in the Computational and Structural Biology lab of my department and decided to write about Veinna RNA Package, a popularly used bioinformatics software of RNA secondary structure prediction. In the Wikidata category, I added a corresponding entry to same article and also improved the entry of lac operon.
Overall, one article and two Wikidata entries with an effort of few days. See all entries here.
Apart from my contribution, I would also like to highlight the work done on the Docking article by a couple of participants. Docking is an important process and rightfully required a major expansion in content, which it did, thanks to these people.
The results will be announced in summers, but It was a great experience to be a part of this largely unknown effort.