User:Proteins

Hello, I'm a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Michigan State University.

I teach an undergraduate course in protein science, and some of my honors students have been interested in evaluating Wikipedia as a resource for teaching and scientific outreach. We engaged subject experts (tenure-track faculty at research institutions) to assess roughly 100 Wikipedia articles on scientific topics for their content and presentation. We then correlated those results with Wikipedia's internal ranking system, and by the standard of commonly used textbooks. We also assessed the breadth and depth of Wikipedia's coverage of biochemistry, by examining its coverage of 800 topics highlighted as core concepts in standard textbooks. These assessments, correlations and their consequences for Wikipedia will form the bulk of my talk at Wikimania 2008. A few comparisons to the Encyclopædia Britannica will also be made, to place our results in context; however, they were not the purpose of our study and do not constitute a systematic comparison. Time permitting, some assessments of non-scientific articles will also be discussed.