Closing the computational biology 'knowledge gap': Spanish Wikipedia as a case study.

MOTIVATION: Wikipedia is a vital open educational resource in computational biology. The quality of computational biology coverage in English-language Wikipedia has improved steadily in recent years. However, there is an increasingly large 'knowledge gap' between computational biology resources in English-language Wikipedia, and Wikipedias in non-English languages. Reducing this knowledge gap by providing educational resources in non-English languages would reduce language barriers which disadvantage non-native English speaking learners across multiple dimensions in computational biology. RESULTS: Here, we provide a comprehensive assessment of computational biology coverage in Spanish-language Wikipedia, the second most accessed Wikipedia worldwide. Using Spanish-language Wikipedia as a case study, we generate quantitative and qualitative data before and after a targeted educational event, specifically, a Spanish-focused student editing competition. Our data demonstrates how such events and activities can narrow the knowledge gap between English and non-English educational resources, by improving existing articles and creating new articles. Finally, based on our analysis, we suggest ways to prioritize future initiatives to improve open educational resources in other languages. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: Scripts for data analysis are available at: https://github.com/ISCBWikiTeam/spanish.

Nurturing tomorrow's leaders: The ISCB Student Council Symposia in 2018.

The Student Council of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB-SC) is a student-focused organization for researchers from all early career levels of training (undergraduates, masters, PhDs and postdocs) that organizes bioinformatics and computational biology activities across the globe. Among its activities, the ISCB-SC organizes several symposia in different continents, many times, with the help of the Regional Student Groups (RSGs) that are based on each region. In this editorial we highlight various key moments and learned lessons from the 14th Student Council Symposium (SCS, Chicago, USA), the 5th European Student Council Symposium (ESCS, Athens, Greece) and the 3rd Latin American Student Council Symposium (LA-SCS, Viña del Mar, Chile).