Wikipedia paper out

My short note on "Wikipedia as an Encyclopaedia of Life" has appeared in Organisms Diversity & Evolution (doi:10.1007/s13127-010-0028-9) (yes, I do occasionally write papers). A preprint of this paper is available on Nature Precedings (hdl: 10101/npre.2010.4242.1).

My presentation at iEvoBio covers much the same ground, and is included below, although the paper was written before I made the mapping from NCBI taxa to Wikipedia pages.

Phyloinformatics in the age of Wikipedia (warning, do not view if easily offended)

View more presentations from Roderic Page.

iEvoBio: where to find out what went on

Now that I'm back in Glasgow, albeit rather jet-lagged, time for a quick summary of the first iEvoBio meeting, held at the Evolution meetings. I thought the meeting went very well, but perhaps I should leave that judgement to others. Meantime, if you want to see what the fuss was about, here are some ways to catch up.

Slides
Presentations from iEvoBio are going up at SlideShare, including the great keynotes by Jonathan Eisen and Rob Guralnick.

Abstracts
Abstracts and some presentations are going up at Nature Precedings, where you can add comments, and vote on abstracts you particularly like.

Challenge
We had five entries for the visualisation challenge. The audience voted for a clear winner, but second place was a dead heat, so we chose to split the second place prize money. Here are the entries:

Place	Screen shot	Link
1st		PhyloBox
2nd equal		jsPhyloSVG
2nd equal		GenGIS
		EOL tree viewer
		Nexplorer

The entries gave live demos and participated in the software bazaar so people could get to play with them hands on. Doing live demos is brave, especially if you have a Twitter client on, as Andrew Hill discovered:

Photos

Photos tagged with "ievobio10" are going up at Flickr, including my photo of Jonathan Eisen's "what would Jesus sequence?" t-shirt.

Twitter
You can follow the iEvoBio tweet stream by searching for ievobio at Twitter. I've grabbed this tweet stream and hope to do something interesting with it when I get the chance. One message that seems clear is that having keynote speakers who have a big Twitter presence is a great help in generating buzz.



The organising committee has a lot to digest as we reflect on the meeting, but personally I really liked the variety of formats (keynotes, short talks, lightning talks, software bazaar, and birds of a feather), the shortness of the meeting (2 days), and the fact that everything was in one place (no jumping between concurrent sessions). Feel free to add your thoughts below.