Biological Pathways in the Open – Read, Write, Participate – Medium

"Alex Pico (@xanderpico) is the Associate Director of Bioinformatics at The Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco where he develops biomedical data visualization, analysis and collaboration software. Alex was selected to join the current round of Mozilla Open Leaders with his work on WikiPathways. I interviewed Alex to learn more about WikiPathways and how you can help at the Global Sprint 2018.

What is WikiPathways?

It’s a wiki, like Wikipedia, but focused on biological pathways. Basically, we ripped out the text editor in Wikipedia and replaced it with a drawing tool to let folks diagram pathways of biochemical reactions. Importantly, the diagrams you draw are more than just pictures; they are also fully annotated computational models. Also like Wikipedia, the content and code are all free, open access and open source. WikiPathways has been practicing open science for the past 10 years.

Why did you start WikiPathways?

At the time we came up with idea, we were using wikis for project management and shared documents, but not directly as a publicly accessible database. We had been maintaining a traditional database of pathways models for many years, but were having trouble keeping up with edits, corrections and new discoveries. Applying the concepts of a wiki to our pathway database challenges turned out to be a perfect match. ..."