Wikiomics:Other wikis and forums

There are a number of web communities that share information in bioinformatics, either exclusively or not. It might be helpful to list them here and to describe them a little, in terms of quality and activity.

Wikis with some bioinformatics contents
Here is a list of wikis that include bioinformatics material:
 * Category:Bioinformatics at Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
 * you are currently reading Wikiomics located at http://wikiomics.org, a world-writeable bioinformatics howto wiki for the whole bioinformatics community and users of bioinformatics.
 * The Open Bioinformatics Foundation coordinates open source bioinformatics software such as BioPerl, Biopython and several other projects.
 * The Bioinformatics Knowledge Base features very accessible articles about fundamental aspects of bioinformatics.
 * the Nodalpoint wiki is pretty recent too. http://nodalpoint.org is primarily an open blog (see the blog section).
 * OpenWetWare - Wiki started as a website for sharing methods and protocols in experimental biology, recently grown to the point of being main gateway of promoting sharing of information, know-how, and wisdom among researchers. It has the particularity of providing space for lab pages, whether they are wet labs or not. See their guidelines for getting started and their étiquette. Requires an approved subscription, so it is a good place to maintain your own lab pages.
 * FreeBio is a wiki maintained by Alexander (Sasha) Wait. His interests include synthetic biology, digital evolution, quantum information processing and sustainable Internet communities.
 * BioInfo wiki, an open knowledge library for bioinformatics-related content. This site is supposed to contain word definitions, articles and collected material about Bioinformatics.
 * The Science Environment for Ecological Knowledge (SEEK) is a five year initiative designed to create cyberinfrastructure for ecological, environmental, and biodiversity research and to educate the ecological community about ecoinformatics.
 * BioWiki is used as an online lab notebook for research and teaching at the Holmes Lab in computational bioengineering and evolutionary genomics at UC Berkeley.
 * Computational biology Wikibook is an open-content textbook, hosted at WikiBooks.
 * BioCybernetics wiki, covers mathematical description of biological information processing structures (-> WikiNode)
 * General-purpose bioinformatics libraries for different programming languages: BioPerl, BioJava, BioPython, BioRuby.
 * Amateur Bioinformatics Wiki is for the general public. It aims at making bioinformatics accessible to the layperson who has a taste for science.

Please also have a look at the compilation of biology wikis at BioWiki.

For a discussion about the use of wikis in science, and the practical issues that are related, check this page at Metacollab. This Nature article natureweb might interest you too.

Wikis dedicated to specific organisms

 * AAAWiki: Assembly, Alignment and Annotation of the different Drosophila genomes
 * EcoliWiki: community-based pages about everything related to E. coli K-12, its phages, plasmids, and mobile genetic elements

Forums, Mailing-lists

 * bio_bulletin_board@bioinformatics.org: this list is for general discussions about bioinformatics.
 * pdb-l@rcsb.org: this is the mailing-list of the Protein Data Bank. This is a very good place to ask questions about structural bioinformatics.
 * bioinformatics@yahoogroups.com: the Yahoogroups mailing-list about bioinformatics in general, has about 1000 members and relatively low traffic.
 * bioinfo@impg.prd.fr: the French mailing-list for announcements about bioinformatics. With more than 3000 members, this list is moderated and normally not for public discussions. It has a low traffic and is highly recommended to anyone among the French community of bioinformaticians.
 * bioedu@bioinformatics.org: discussions about bioinformatics education

Blogs
A Google Blog Search might return additional interesting results. Also, BioWiki has a current list of bio- and tech-oriented blogs - BlogRoll at Biowiki. Feel free to comment them here:


 * http://nodalpoint.org is an open bioinformatics weblog with an average of 3-4 messages a week since 2000.
 * http://hublog.hubmed.org/ - author's of HubMed own blog, mainly around biology oriented computer science
 * Flags and Lollipops - blog containing bioinformatics and genomics news, as in above, a lot of interesting content
 * Free Association - Nature Genetics blog, containing editorial comments, links and news in genetics
 * Notes from the Biomass (A Bioinformatics Blog) - blog written by Roland Krause, bioinformatician at the Max-Planck-Institute for Infection Biology.
 * In the Pipeline - drug-discovery oriented blog by Derek Lowe