Having made a first stab at mapping NCBI taxa to Wikipedia, I thought it might be fun to see what could be done with it. I've always wanted to get quantum treemaps working (quantum treemaps ensure that the cells in the treemap are all the same size, see my 2006[!] blog post for further description and links). After some fussing I have some code that seems to do the trick. As an example, here is a quantum treemap for Laurasiatheria.

The 52,956 links from NCBI to Wikipedia that I've been busy creating are now "live." If you go to a NCBI taxon such as Sphaerius you'll see something like this: Clicking the "Wikipedia" link takes you to the Wikipedia page for this taxon.

In an earlier post I discussed linking NCBI taxonomy to Wikipedia. One way to tackle this is to add NCBI Taxonomy ID to Wikipedia pages. I reopened the case for adding the Taxonomy IDs to the Taxobox on each taxon page, but this met with substantial resistance.

I've written a note on the Wikipedia Taxobox page making the case for adding NCBI taxonomy IDs to the standard Taxobox used to summarise information about a taxon. Here is what I wrote: Some discussion has ensued on the Taxobox page, all positive. I'm blogging this here to encourage anyone who as any more thoughts on the matter to contribute to the discussion.

I'm revisiting the idea of building a wiki of phylogenies using Semantic Mediawiki. One problem with a project like this is that it can rapidly explode.

I've written up some thoughts on Wikipedia for a short invited review to appear (pending review) in Organisms, Environment, and Diversity (ISSN 1439-6092). The manuscript, entitled "Wikipedia as an encyclopaedia of life" is available as a preprint from Nature Precedings (hdl:10101/npre.2010.4242.1). The opening paragraph is: The content will be familiar to readers of this blog, although the essay is perhaps a slightly more sober

Continuing the theme of taxonomic classification in Wikipedia, I'm perversely delighted that Wikipedia demonstrates Gregg's paradox so nicely. The late John R. Gregg wrote several papers and a book exploring the logical structure of taxonomy.

Wikipedia is wonderful, but parts of it are horribly broken. Take, for example, taxonomic classifications. A classification is a rooted tree, which means that each node in the tree has a single parent. We can store trees in databases in a variety of ways. For example, for each node we could store a list of its children, or we could store the single unique parent of each node. Ideally we'd choose to store one or other, but not both.

Stumbled across Alex Wild's post Pyramica vs Strumigenys : why does it matter?, which takes as it's starting point a minor edit war on the Wikipedia page for Pyramica . Alex gives the background to the argument about whether Pyramica is a synonym of Strumigenys , and investigates the issue using the surprisingly small about of data available in GenBank.

Andrew Su has posted an analysis of Gene Wiki, a project to provide Wikipedia pages on every human gene: This result is interesting in that an existing resource (Gene Cards) beats Wikipedia, but only just.