WikiPathways:About

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What is WikiPathways

WikiPathways was established to facilitate the contribution and maintenance of pathway information by the biology community. WikiPathways is an open, collaborative platform dedicated to the curation of biological pathways. WikiPathways thus presents a new model for pathway databases that enhances and complements ongoing efforts, such as KEGG, Reactome and Pathway Commons. Building on the same MediaWiki software that powers Wikipedia, we added a custom graphical pathway editing tool and integrated databases covering major gene, protein, and small-molecule systems. The familiar web-based format of WikiPathways greatly reduces the barrier to participate in pathway curation. More importantly, the open, public approach of WikiPathways allows for broader participation by the entire community, ranging from students to senior experts in each field. This approach also shifts the bulk of peer review, editorial curation, and maintenance to the community.

Why Pathways

Strictly speaking, one could argue that pathways don't exist... there are only networks. Nonetheless, pathways are useful. Biological pathways provide intuitive views of the myriad of interactions underlying biological processes. A typical signaling pathway, for example, can represent receptor-binding events, protein complexes, phosphorylation reactions, translocations and transcriptional regulation, with only a minimal set of symbols, lines and arrows. These powerful representations are essential tools, common among the textbooks and review articles that document any given field of biology. Making these tools available for computational methods of analysis will allow researchers to connect pathways to databases of biological annotations and experimental data, creating effective products of systems biology. Collecting and maintaining pathway information in a robust database, however, is an ongoing challenge.

How Does it Work

Each pathway at WikiPathways has a dedicated wiki page, displaying the current diagram, description, references, download options, version history, and component gene and protein lists. Any pathway can be edited from within its wiki page by activating an embedded pathway editor. After editing, an updated pathway image is displayed on the wiki page along with the version history and list of component genes and proteins. Users can easily monitor and undo changes, compare differences and search for overlapping pathways. Using the search feature, one can locate particular pathways by name, by the genes and proteins they contain, or by the text displayed in their descriptions and comments. One can also browse the collection of pathways with combinations of species names and ontology-based categories. The pathway content at WikiPathways is freely available for download in a variety of data and image formats, including GPML, which is a custom XML format compatible with pathway visualization and analysis tools such as Cytoscape, GenMAPP and PathVisio. We are adding new features all the time. Visit the Help pages to learn how to use the latest features.

Who is Involved

Find information about the WikiPathways team.

For questions, comments or suggestions, please post a message to the discussion forum

To request web service access for an existing WikiPathways account (for WikiPathways plugin in PathVisio), contact kristina.hanspers[AT] gladstone.ucsf.edu

Additional contact:

  • Alex Pico: alex.pico[AT] gladstone.ucsf.edu
  • Martina Kutmon: mkutmon [AT] gmail.com


Note that though WikiPathways is inspired by the open philosophy of Wikipedia and other wiki's, it is an independent project and not directly related to Wikipedia or other projects of the Wikimedia foundation

How to cite WikiPathways

When referring to the latest website or content, please cite the most recent update paper:

  • Agrawal A, Balcı H, Hanspers K, Coort SL, Martens M, Slenter DN, Ehrhart F, Digles D, Waagmeester A, Wassink I, Abbassi-Daloii T, Lopes EN, Iyer A, Millán Acosta J, Willighagen LG, Nishida K, Riutta A, Basaric H, Evelo CT, Willighagen EL, Kutmon M, Pico AR. (2024) WikiPathways 2024: next generation pathway database. NAR 52(D1): (link to article)

When citing the WikiPathways project, we recommend citing either our latest NAR Database article or the original 2008 PLoS Biology article:

  • Agrawal A, Balcı H, Hanspers K, Coort SL, Martens M, Slenter DN, Ehrhart F, Digles D, Waagmeester A, Wassink I, Abbassi-Daloii T, Lopes EN, Iyer A, Millán Acosta J, Willighagen LG, Nishida K, Riutta A, Basaric H, Evelo CT, Willighagen EL, Kutmon M, Pico AR. (2024) WikiPathways 2024: next generation pathway database. NAR 52(D1): (link to article)
  • Pico AR, Kelder T, van Iersel MP, Hanspers K, Conklin BR, Evelo C. (2008) WikiPathways: Pathway Editing for the People. PLoS Biol 6(7): (link to article)

When you want to cite specific functionality, like biological interactions, metabolomics, the WikiPathways Academy, our nanopublication, the Web Service, RDF, etc, please see this page for more citetable research output.

Trademark

The WikiPathways trademark (our logo) can be reproduced with any use and redistribution of WikiPathways content. You do not necessarily have to ask permission before using the logo, if you are confident that you satisfy the license and Terms of Use. However, we always appreciate hearing about related efforts, so please drop us a line. We have a wiki page dedicated to listing such efforts here, and we would love to add your tool.

If you do not satisfy the license or Terms of Use (they're really quite leanient) our first measure will be to contact you and request that you change your behavior. Failing that, we will require that you remove the WikiPathways trademark from your site or resource. Please see this FAQ on Trademarks and CC0.

Logos can be downloaded or linked to from WikiMedia:

150px-Wplogo_with_text_500.png

100px-Wplogo_500.png

And here are some SVG versions:

WikiPathways Publications and Presentation

Open Access and Open Source

We are committed to open access and open source. All content is available under our license terms. All source code for WikiPathways and the PathVisio applet is available under the Apache License, Version 2.0.

Funding and Support

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