[OWW-Discuss] Proposal to 'Wikify' GenBank Meets Stiff Resistance

[Dan Bolser]

"That we would wholesale start changing people's records goes against
our idea of an archive," says David Lipman, director of the National
Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), GenBank's home in
Bethesda, Maryland. "It would be chaos."

I think that quote highlights the problem (ignorance) that we have to
overcome. People simply don't understand the nature of community
projects. Just take the open source software movement for example;
community + tools for basic collaboration = massively successful
projects.

How many databases in the molecular biology community include even the
most basic of tools - a public bug tracker? If there is one out there,
I don't know it. I find this fact simultaneously infuriating and
dumbfounding, because it is simply unjustifiable. How about a public
database project with a publically archived mailing lists? I had to
start my own because the NCBI refused to do so;

http://www.bioinformatics.org/mailman/listinfo/ssml-general


I am having a similar running battle with the PDB, who staunchly
refuse to alter (some of) their data, even though it contains clear
errors. The recent remediation has been a huge improvement, but it
doesn't go far enough.

We simply need to build the kind of community annotation projects that
will show the way for others. I have given up on the above kind of
stupidity. There are only so many times that you can tell someone they
need to install a public bug tracker before you get too tired to care
that they won't install one any more.


With hope for the future,

Dan.


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http://BioDatabase.Org
http://PDBWiki.org