Wikipedia:WikiProject Molecular Biology/Computational Biology/ISCB competition announcement 2012

ISCB Wikipedia Competition

The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) announces an international competition to improve the coverage on Wikipedia of any aspect of computational biology. A key component of the ISCB's mission to further the scientific understanding of living systems through computation is to communicate this knowledge to the public at large. Wikipedia has become an important way to communicate all types of science to the public. The ISCB aims to further its mission by increasing the quality of Wikipedia articles about computational biology, and by improving accessibility to this information via Wikipedia. The competition is open to students and trainees at any level either as individuals or as groups.

The prize for the best article will be an award of $500 (US) provided by the ISCB and a year’s membership to the ISCB. A second prize of $200 and a year’s membership to the ISCB.

This page is for the 2012 competition. Please visit the 2013 competition page for the latest competition news.

How to Enter

The 2012 competition will officially start on the 9th September 2012, coinciding with the start of the ECCB conference, and finish four months later on the 10th January 2013. For each article that is entered in the competition, the difference in article quality between these two dates will be reviewed. Contributions made before the 9th September or after the 10th January will not be counted.

To enter, you should select the article or articles you intend to work on and record that along with your Wikipedia user name at the Competition Entries web page (Wikipedia:WikiProject Computational Biology/ISCB competition entries). If a group of authors intend to contribute to the same article, all Wikipedia user names should be listed.

Articles should be chosen in the area of computational biology. The Computational Biology WikiProject have selected over 1,100 articles that it considers within the scope of Computational Biology. Any article in this collection would be an excellent starting point for an entry. Here is a list of articles within scope of Computational Biology ordered by quality:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Computational_Biology_articles_by_quality

and here are list of a few articles that are considered of good quality and would be good examples to follow:

• Multiple sequence alignment
• Rosetta@home
• Metagenomics

If you plan to start a new article, please contact WikiProject Computational Biology to make sure the article would be considered within the scope of the project.

Training

To make the best possible contribution to Wikipedia it is important to understand what content should be added to Wikipedia and how best to go about adding content. We strongly recommend that entrants read the PLoS Computational Biology article describing 10 Simple Rules for Editing Wikipedia. In addition, entrants who are not familiar with Wikipedia editing should take an online training course. A full training course is also available as a Tutorial Session at the upcoming ECCB conference.

Rules and Regulations

Only articles listed on the Competition Entries page will be considered. At most two articles can be “claimed” per entrant or group. Once an article is “claimed” it is considered as out of bounds for other entrants in the context of the competition. However "claiming" an article does not provide an entrant with any ownership rights over it; all Wikipedia norms on collaborative editing must be respected. Eligible articles are limited to the regular English Wikipedia. All articles will be reviewed by students nominated by the ISCB Student Council ISCBSC. A shortlist of the best 6 articles will then be examined by the Judging panel. Any entrant may claim an article and edit pseudonymously, but if shortlisted he or she must identify themselves to one of the judging panel, with proof of student/trainee status, to be eligible for a prize.

The following criteria will be used for judging the entries:

• Clarity of writing
• Depth of knowledge of the subject area
• Quality of figures and photos used to illustrate the article

The judging panel will be composed of:

• Burkhard Rost
• Alex Bateman
• Predrag Radivojac
• Janet Kelso
• Thomas Abeel
• Geoff Macintyre
• Darren Logan
• Daniel Mietchen

The competition is open to trainees and students at any level.

For educators and course coordinators

This competition provides an excellent training opportunity and we encourage its use as a class assignment. Course organisers should consider adding any such classroom uses in the Wikipedia Schools and University programme:

• Wikipedia:School and university projects