In his Review on page 678 of this issue, Lincoln Stein discusses the biological science cyberinfrastructure — the collective term for the databases that biologists use to store and disseminate their results, the tools that are available to retrieve and analyse these data, and the computational and communications networks that connect them. A key element of the cyberinfrastructure must be people and the interactions between them. This applies at many levels; for example, researchers must be willing to share their raw data, those who run databases must be prepared to make them widely accessible and interoperable, and communities of scientists must think through the needs of the wide range of researchers who would benefit from using their data.

For the cyberinfrastructure to reach its full potential, there needs to be a two-way interaction between the available data and the community it serves. A massive increase in the amount of information available is possible if researchers are willing and able to annotate data with the results of their own research. One way to do this is by using WIKIs — web pages where the reader can become the editor, adding or altering content using a simple mark-up language. As highlighted in the Web Watch article on page 654, geneticists are rapidly picking up on the potential of the WIKI format, for example, by adapting the popular Wikipedia resource to provide a forum for community gene annotation.

This issue of Nature Reviews Genetics sees our own first foray into the world of the WIKI and the interactive web. Lincoln Stein's Review is accompanied by WIKI pages and a commenting facility, which can be accessed at http://nrgwiki.nature.com.