Curation Cafe's supporting the FAIR-ness of content on WikiPathways

Since last year, we try to organise a socalled Curation Cafe every month, to do some "hard-core" curation on a specific topic, related to the pathways in WikiPathways.

Every database needs curation, with the aim to maintain the value of the data in the database over time, and to allow the data to remain available for reuse and preservation. Since we want our database to adhere to the FAIR principles, we have several ways in which we curate the content of WikiPathways critically. These include (described in more detail here): 

* Quality tags for each pathway

* An Academy to show (new) users how pathways can be build for WikiPathways

* A dedicated Quality Assurance protocol

* Several involved people, volunteering for the Curation team (following the QA protocol every week)

* Computer-aided curation with Jenkins

And since Sept. 2017, there is also the Curation Cafe, were we sit together for a few hours (outside the regular office space) and work on a specific topic. Fig. 1 gives an overview of these topics, including how many people worked on the topic, and how many edits in total where made (bubble size).

Fig. 1. Curation cafe stats. The figure shows the amount of users and total amount of edits, for each of the 7 topics we handled so far. Please be aware that the edits that were counted, are related to the amount of updates to WikiPathways on the day of the curation cafe (which could contain more manual changes in a pathway). For the topic related to adding HMDB identifiers which where present in a pathway from WikiPathways to Wikidata, an internal overview sheet of the work was being used, to count the amount of edits and users.

For the last Cafe, we had the help of several new interns from the BiGCaT department (which explains the high amount of users). Before we started, I gave an introduction presentation on the other curation efforts that are being undertaken @WikiPathways. 

We would like to thank everyone that has contributed up to now, and if you are interested in helping us in the future, please contact us via the discussion group (or send me a Tweet @SMaLLCaT4Sci).