WikiGenes ist still actively maintained and curated, however admittedly there are few people who have the motivation and stamina of a member of the International Society for Biocuration – thank you Chris for your excellent contribution!
A disclaimer – I could hardly be called objective because I have founded WikiGenes.
My goal was to create a new kind of resource that could embrace the potential of wikis and at the same time serve as rigorous scientific tool. Hence the emphasis on authorship attribution in WikiGenes to provide authors due recognition and to appraise origin, authority and reliability of information.
I have thought that such a tool could be a stepping-stone to a more interactive, collaborative and free form of scientific communication.
Of course the time for truly open scientific communication has yet to come, with the understandable resistance of big publishers stronger than ever. And yes, it is difficult to break the stronghold of conventional journals, with our careers depending so much on the 'publication record'.
Thus I am really happy about the success of Wikipedia and piggybacking GeneWiki!
For science (and other creative fields), however, I see Wikipedia only as an intermediate stage until the wiki potential takes off not only at the encyclopedic border, but also in the core of science.
Then, even the exchange of original and novel views in the forefront of scientific exploration should be possible in collaborative and open environments – and WikiGenes will be there :-)
In a more down-to-earth sense, I'd like to mention that WikiGenes covers all organisms (not just human) and is updated on a daily basis using text-mining to support the collaborative process in this stage.
Best of science everyone!
yes, GeneWiki is much more active these days. You should better contribute to it, rather than to WikiGenes.