WikiPathways: Community Curation of Biological Pathways

Abstract

Assembling biological pathways from information in scientific literature and biological databases is a challenging task. Building a pathway requires domain knowledge from specialists in various biological research areas. Furthermore, research is generating new biological knowledge continuously, making pathway curation an ongoing and dynamic process. To facilitate this process we developed "WikiPathways":http://www.wikipathways.org/index.php/WikiPathways ^1^, a wiki where users can curate pathways, using an easy to use pathway drawing tool. WikiPathways currently has over 1200 registered users and contains more than 1300 pathways for various organisms, spanning human, mouse, zebrafish, fruit fly, worm, yeast, plants and bacteria. WikiPathways is entering a phase of rapid growth, incorporating new pathway resources and engaging diverse communities with unique pathway needs.In this presentation we will provide an overview of the background, current state, and future of WikiPathways. We will highlight several approaches we take to improve community-based curation with WikiPathways. And we will provide context for this project within the larger shifts toward data sharing, data curation and new models for publication.