WikiPathways is a community resource for contributing and maintaining content dedicated to biological pathways. Any registered WikiPathways user can contribute, and anybody can become a registered user. Contributions are monitored by a group of admins, but the bulk of peer review, editorial curation, and maintenance is the responsibility of the user community. WikiPathways is originally built using MediaWiki software, a custom graphical pathway editing tool (PathVisio) and integrated BridgeDb databases covering major gene, protein, and metabolite systems. WikiPathways was founded in 2008 by Thomas Kelder, Alex Pico, Martijn Van Iersel, Kristina Hanspers, Bruce Conklin and Chris Evelo. Current architects are Alex Pico and Martina Summer-Kutmon.
In addition to the pathway diagram, each pathway page also includes a description, bibliography, pathway version history and list of component genes and proteins with linkouts to public resources. For individual pathway nodes, users can access a list of other pathways with that node. Pathway changes can be monitored by displaying previous revisions or by viewing differences between specific revisions. Using the pathway history one can also revert to a previous revision of a pathway. Pathways can also be tagged with ontology terms from three major BioPortal ontologies (Pathway, Disease and Cell Type).
The pathway content at WikiPathways is freely available for download in several data and image formats. WikiPathways is completely open access and open source. All content is available under Creative Commons 0. All source code for WikiPathways and the PathVisio editor is available under the Apache License, Version 2.0.
WikiPathways content is used to annotate and cross-link Wikipedia articles covering various genes, proteins, metabolites and pathways. Here are a few examples:
|
|