Sir

Barend Mons's Wiki for Professionals at http://www.wikiprofessional.info is among the first open collaborative databases to use the wiki format in biology, as your News story “Key biology databases go wiki” (Nature 445, 691; 2007) points out.

However, other, non-wiki resources have already shown the feasibility of cooperative, online database construction. One such success story is GeneRIF (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/projects/GeneRIF), which is like a miniature wiki where the author is restricted to a single short sentence. Currently, GeneRIF contains close to 200,000 entries, and each is attached to a particular gene at the Entrez database of the National Center for Biotechnology Information.

Being interested in gene–disease relationships, we assessed the coverage and specificity of GeneRIF and compared them to OMIM (Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man), a traditional source of gene-disease information. We found that GeneRIF already covers more than twice the number of diseases per gene and includes many more newly discovered mappings (http://www.basic.northwestern.edu/publications/generifdo). This seems to us to answer the scepticism that has been expressed about the expected community involvement in wiki collaborations.