PLOS/About

PLOS Topic Pages
PLOS Computational Biology • PLOS Genetics • PLOS ONE

Step 1: Register

Step 2: Draft

This is PLOS's presence on-wiki. It is in place to allow drafting of Topic Page review articles for PLOS Computational Biology, PLOS Genetics, and PLOS ONE in an editing environment close to that of Wikipedia.

Topic Pages are broad review articles that are are dual-published both in the journal as a citable copy of record, and into Wikipedia to seed a new Wikipedia page which acts as a living document (see introductory editorial^[1] and blog post^[2] as well as a more recent case study^[3] and PLOS Topic Pages collection^[4]).

Purpose

Wikipedia is consistently one of the world's most-read websites, and the top hit for most web search queries. Ensuring its content is accurate and up to date is consequently an important route for public engagement. Topic Pages combine the rigour of academic peer review, and the extreme reach of Wikipedia.

Licensing

Whilst being drafted, Topic Pages are the work of the respective authors, they are subject to change, and are under a CC BY license. If published at PLOS Computational Biology, PLOS Genetics, or PLOS ONE, content is published in that journal under a CC BY license license, and then also published in Wikipedia under the more restrictive CC BY-SA license. Note that the more restrictive license in Wikipedia means that content can be moved from PLOS journals to Wikipedia, but not the other way.

Contacts

Feel free to contact any of the involved editors:

PLOS Comput Biol editors: Daniel Mietchen and Shoshana Wodak
PLOS Genet editors: Thomas Shafee

Getting started

Authors of Topic pages should first read the Author Guide for information about the format and submission process. Once you have an account and ready to start drafting, just create a new page. If you use the page creation box below, the page will be preloaded with some generic information and structure, so as to help guide you through the process. You can also view published Topic Page articles and draft Topic Page articles as examples.

This site uses the same software as Wikipedia. Therefore, the first places to look for tips on editing, syntax, etc. are the Wikipedia help pages and introductory tutorials (editing text, adding references, adding images, adding tables).

Differences from Wikipedia

Links to Wikipedia. This site is not intended to have comprehensive content, so links to Wikipedia are encouraged. Just prefix your link with 'w:'. For instance, [[w:Ochre Sea Star|Ochre Sea Star]] renders to Ochre Sea Star. Links to other wikis will always display in blue, even if the destination pages do not exist. Be sure to check your links!
Templates. This drafting wiki does not support many Wikipedia templates, however simple templates can easily be imported from Wikipedia (as done for Template:PDB, for instance), For now, post requests for Wikipedia templates on this discussion page.
Figure hooks. PLOS articles are encouraged to include in-text links to figures and tables (will be omitted in the Wikipedia version).
Summaries. PLOS articles can have a final summary or outlooks section (will be omitted in the Wikipedia version).
License. This wiki uses the CC-BY license, while Wikipedia uses the more restrictive CC-BY-SA license. This means that PLOS content can be used on Wikipedia but not vice versa.