[Taxacom] NCBI to Wikipedia taxon mapping

[Roderic Page]

Some 52,956 taxa that have sequences in GenBank are linked to  
Wikipedia. These links appear in the NCBI taxonomy pages under the  
heading "External Information Resources (NCBI LinkOut)". For example,  
the NCBI page for "Mammuthus primigenius"

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Taxonomy/Browser/wwwtax.cgi?mode=Info&id=37349

shows a link to Wikipedia page for "Woolly Mammoth"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/index.html?curid=17369680

My motivation in creating this link was to provide an easy way for  
someone visiting a NCBI taxonomy page to get a quick sense of what we  
know about that taxon (even if it's simply to answer "what on Earth is  
this?").

For some details on how this mapping was created please see my blog  
post: http://tinyurl.com/35cljpv. Thanks to Scott Federhen and Kathy  
Kwan at NCBI for all their assistance in getting this into NCBI  
Linkout. There are inevitably going to be errors and ommissions in  
this mapping. These can be updated at http://iphylo.org/linkout.

Regards

Rod

---------------------------------------------------------
Roderic Page
Professor of Taxonomy
DEEB, FBLS
Graham Kerr Building
University of Glasgow
Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK

Email: r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk
Tel: +44 141 330 4778
Fax: +44 141 330 2792
AIM: rodpage1962 at aim.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1112517192
Twitter: http://twitter.com/rdmpage
Blog: http://iphylo.blogspot.com
Home page: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html