Wikipedia:WikiProject Molecular Biology/Molecular and Cell Biology

WikiProject WikiProject Molecular and Cellular Biology

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Some Wikipedians have formed a project to better organize information in articles related to Molecular and Cellular Biology. This page and its subpages contain their suggestions; it is hoped that this project will help to focus the efforts of other Wikipedians. If you would like to help, please inquire on the talk page and see the to-do list there. Also of interest is the Molecular and Cellular Biology Portal associated with this project.

For more information on WikiProjects, please see Wikipedia:WikiProjects and Wikipedia:WikiProject best practices.

You may notice some changes

You may notice some changes. Do not be alarmed!.

Before we can organise anything else, we need to organise ourselves!

Old, apparently disused conversation threads have been moved to Discussion_Archive. You can peruse them, saving any you think are necessary (by copying and pasting them back here) and then if there are no further objections, I propose we leave them there and then begin a proper archiving routine.

Further, I have moved proposals that may need to be or are still being discussed to the Proposals page, help requests to the Help page and announcements to the Announcements page.

Right now I suggest that our biggest concern are the Proposals which need further discussion before they can be archived and the decisions thus made can be enacted.

This is a temporary but important announcement which I intend to remove after a few days.

--Username132 (talk) 10:28, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

Scope

This project aims to improve coverage of molecular and cell biology at wikipedia. A major problem facing biology is organizing the vast amount of information that has been and continues to be collected about genomes, proteomes and cell function. Can wiki tools make a significant contribution to solving this problem? Can wikipedia provide an entry point for the world to the wealth of biological data that is currently hidden in obscure databases and journal articles?

Similar WikiProjects

The list of active projects has sections for both Biology and Health sciences, but the most relevant seems to be the Medicine Project listed at the Biology Portal and the Medicine Portal. Listed within the Medicine Project, there is a Preclinical Medicine Project that is concerned with the kinds of basic science courses that medical students take, however, there is only minimal emphasis on the type of molecular and cell biology issues that are centered on fundamental concerns such as naming and categorizing genes, proteins and cell types.

Wikipedia articles about cellular and molecular biology topics can also be improved by making use of the Wikiversity Biomedical Research Project.

Daughter projects

• Wikipedia:WikiProject Cell Signaling
• Wikipedia:Wikiproject Metabolic Pathways

Joining the Molecular and Cellular Biology Wikiproject

To join the group simply add yourself to Participants where you may also peruse a list of existing members.

Goals

1. Create a standard system for providing fundamental information about the proteins and cells that are mentioned and discussed in wikipedia articles.

Projects

1. Public relations/outreach. Ways need to be found to recruit more of the molecular and cell biologists of the world (and their students) to contribute to wikipedia.
2. Categorization of articles about proteins. See Whole proteome analysis.
3. Organizing and upgrading articles about proteins. See the section on infoboxes
4. Requested articles. List new wikipedia pages that are needed:

Key Tasks

Example of a GFDL image that can be used to illustrate protein structure.

1. Expand stubs at Molecular and cellular biology stubs
2. Replace images with restrictive copyright and create images that do not yet exist. The Homeobox article is a good example of a page that contains an image that is for non-commercial use. All images covered by a non-commercial uses disclaimer should be replaced by molecular model images generated by Wikipedia users themselves. This can be done using the raw structural data from the Protein Data Bank. The image to the right is an example of such an image. The Protein Data Bank says, "The contents of PDB are in the public domain. Online and printed resources are welcome to include PDB data and images from the Structure Explorer pages, as long as they are not for sale as commercial items themselves, and their corresponding citations are included." (source)
   Other images that should be replaced include Nucleosome Crystal Structure.jpg, Nucleosome DNA Contacts.jpg, Nucleosome Tail Structure.jpg and Tetranucleosome Structure.jpg,
3. Make sure that all articles about proteins are placed in the Proteins category or lower level categories that are subcategories of the Proteins category.
4. Put links to this project in all of the correct places within wikipedia. This includes existing short articles about specific proteins and new stubs (see #Stub templates) for other proteins that are currently only mentioned in other wikipedia articles. Note on finding existing articles about proteins and mentioned proteins: search wikipedia for "protein"; many proteins are mentioned in this sort of context: "the protein X", "a protein called Y" etc. On 8/30/05 I (User:JWSchmidt) went through the first 50 Google hits for "protein" in wikipedia, placing some stub templates (see below) and adding to List of proteins. See also: requested protein articles. Note: many enzymes can be found in the wikipedia enzymes category.

Templates

The templates for this project may be found on the project's style guidelines page.

We can continue to develop the template for protein information boxes. Protein information boxes can be included in each wikipedia article about a particular protein. Eventually, there should also be an information box about cell types.

Lists

Here are some lists we are trying to maintain. You can add proteins or biomolecules that are not currently listed.

• List of proteins
• List of biomolecules