I'm revisiting the idea of building a wiki of phylogenies using Semantic Mediawiki. One problem with a project like this is that it can rapidly explode.

A little while ago I came across Wikisource, and it dawned on me that this is a model for BHL. To quote from the Wikisource web site:Much of their content comes from the Internet Archive (as does BHL's), and Wikisource have developed extensions for Mediaiwki to do some cool things, such as extract text and images from DjVu files.

I've written up some thoughts on Wikipedia for a short invited review to appear (pending review) in Organisms, Environment, and Diversity (ISSN 1439-6092). The manuscript, entitled "Wikipedia as an encyclopaedia of life" is available as a preprint from Nature Precedings (hdl:10101/npre.2010.4242.1). The opening paragraph is:The content will be familiar to readers of this blog, although the essay is perhaps a slightly more sober assessment

This year's Evolution meetings will feature a new satellite conference called iEvoBio.To quote from the website:I'm really excited about this conference, especially the visualisation challenge and the keynote speakers:Jonathan Eisen @phylogenomicsRob Guralnick @robguralThe conference is all about participation, so there is ample opportunity for people to get involved, whether giving contributed talks, lightning talks, software demos, or entering

Last month EOL took the brave step of including Wikipedia content in its pages. I say "brave" because early on EOL was pretty reluctant to embrace Wikipedia on this scale (see the report of the Informatics Advisory Group that I chaired back in 2008), and also because not all of EOL's curators have been thrilled with this development.

OK, first of all, I want one, I want one real bad.There's been a general sense of disappointment about the iPad, which I suspect is only natural given the enormous hype leading up to the announcement, as well as the fact that the applications shown were fairly conventional.

A quick, and not altogether satisfactory hack, but I've added a simple interactive treemap to BioStor. It's essentially a remake of the Catalogue of Life treemap I created in 2008, but coloured by the number of references I've extracted from BHL.

Jim Croft drew my attention to a cool crowd-sourcing project to convert scans of Australia's newspapers to text. The site has a nice chart showing the projects' coverage of the Australian newspapers, which motivated me to show something similar for BioStor.

My BioStor project has reached over 13,000 articles, making it a sizeable respository of open access articles on biodiversity. It's still a tiny fraction of what could be extracted from the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), but perhaps it's worth taking stock of what's there. Coverage One pleasing discovery is that, despite the 1923 cut-off due to U.S. copyright, BHL contains a lot of post-1923 articles.

Given that a new decade prompts predictions, as well as New Year's resolutions, and that 2010 is the International Year of Biodiversity, which comes complete with glossy web sites and calls for action, I'm making some predictions of my own, inspired in part by Eric Hellman's Ten Predictions for the Next Ten Years. I won't be nearly as bold as Eric, I'm limiting myself to biodiversity informatics, and the coming year.