Professor ZHANG Zhang from Beijing Institute of Genomics (BIG), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), was invited as a speaker to attend the 6th International Biocuration Conference. The Conference was held on April 7-10, 2013 at Churchill College, Cambridge, UK.

During the Conference, Prof. ZHANG presented a talk to describe the current status of community curation in biological knowledge wikis (bio-wikis) and then to introduce AuthorReward, a MediaWiki extension developed by his team. AuthorReward provides a practice to reward community-curated efforts in bio-wikis through automated authorship quantification. AuthorReward quantifies researchers’ contributions by properly factoring both edit quantity and quality, provides due recognition according to their quantitative contributions and gives automated explicit authorship in bio-wikis. AuthorReward is freely available at http://cbb.big.ac.cn/Software.

The Biocuration Conference is organised by the International Society for Biocuration (ISB). Biocuration involves the translation and integration of information relevant to biology into a database or resource that enables integration of the scientific literature as well as large data sets. Accurate and comprehensive representation of biological knowledge, as well as easy access to this data for working scientists and a basis for computational analysis, are primary goals of biocuration. More information can be available at http://www.biocurator.org.

Abstract:

Community curation in biological knowledge wikis

Harnessing community intelligence in knowledge curation bears great promise in dealing with the flood of biological knowledge. To exploit the whole power of the scientific community for collaborative and collective knowledge curation, more than a dozen biological knowledge wikis (bio-wikis) have been built to date. However, none of them have achieved a substantial impact on knowledge curation. One of the major limitations in bio-wikis is insufficient participation from the scientific community, which is intrinsically due to lack of explicit authorship and thus no credit for community curation. To increase community curation in bio-wikis, we develop AuthorReward to reward community-curated efforts in bio-wikis. AuthorReward quantifies researchers’ contributions by properly factoring both edit quantity and quality, provides due recognition according to their quantitative contributions and gives automated explicit authorship in bio-wikis. AuthorReward is implemented as an extension to MediaWiki and is freely available at http://cbb.big.ac.cn/Software. To test the functionality of AuthorReward, we installed it in RiceWiki (a community-curated resource of rice knowledge). As testified on the semi-dwarfing gene (sd1) in rice (that was extensively curated by multiple different researchers; http://ricewiki.big.ac.cn/index.php/Os01g0883800), AuthorReward is capable of yielding sensible contribution scores and providing automated explicit authorship, consistent well with perceptions of all contributors. To achieve community curation of massive biological knowledge, it is critically required in the long run that the community as well as curators and journals should collaborate together to establish such a collaborative community-curated and contribution-rewarded model that would make it possible to build a biological encyclopedia by and for the scientific