This article was taken from the May 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
If someone had told me ten years ago that there would be a single website that the public would visit for information about science and technology, I would have laughed at them. The very notion seems the antithesis of the anarchic disorganised web. If they had then told me that I, and anyone with an internet connection, would be able to edit that website, I would have thought they had seriously lost the plot. But ten years after the birth of Wikipedia, this is exactly what we have.
If you want to know what a zedonk looks like, the chances are your search engine will point you first to Wikipedia. What most scientists have yet to realise is that Wikipedia offers a huge opportunity for engaging with the public and explaining their science.
As a scientist, I want the public to understand my research and why it is important. After all, it's usually their taxes paying for it. This public engagement traditionally involves giving a lecture at a science festival or talking to classes of children. I think that this is preaching to the converted. At best I might lecture to 100 people at a time.
However, if I write or edit a Wikipedia article, my potential
audience is some of Wikipedia's 365 million readers worldwide. Even if only a small fraction of these are interested in knowing what a genome is, it's still a pretty large number of people. The
genome article in Wikipedia was viewed over half a million times last year.
The biggest surprise for me was that Wikipedia can provide completely new ways for scientists and the public at large to work together. My research group produces a database called Rfam about families of related RNA molecules. We use Wikipedia articles to describe each of the RNA families in our database. We currently have 850 that we download from Wikipedia and redisplay on our own web pages as any new edits are made. This system allows expert RNA biologists to update the information in Rfam easily by editing Wikipedia. We were surprised by just how many improvements come from non-scientist editors in Wikipedia. Some fix our grammar, others our spelling, and one particular editor fixed the format of all the et al. in our articles.
Andrew Su from the Scripps Research Institute also uses Wikipedia as a repository for scientific information. He leads the Gene Wiki, which is a collection of 10,000 Wikipedia articles about specific human genes. If you want to know something about the hormone human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG), then there is an article just for you. But does anyone really want to read about hCG? Well, it turns out that hCG can be used as an adjunct to anabolic steroids. When Major League Baseball player Manny Ramirez was banned for 50 games for taking the drug, over 50,000 people viewed the Wikipedia article in just two days. Some of those readers thought the article could be improved, and in those two days there was a flurry of edits to it.
This shows how the public makes a real contribution to science through Wikipedia. If you find Wikipedia useful, why not try to improve it -- you might teach the scientists a thing or two along the way.
Alex Bateman is a scientist at the Sanger Institute and a Wikipedia evangelist