Proteopedia:Policy

Regarding linking to WikipediaRegarding linking to Wikipedia

1. Most topics should have their own page in Proteopedia, even if that page starts out with nothing but a link to the corresponding page on the topic in Wikipedia
2. If the page exists within Proteopedia, you should link to it, and not to Wikipedia.
3. If the page topic is a protein or a molecule, especially one that could benefit from Jmol applets and scenes to describe it structurally, then a "red" link to an empty page in Proteopedia might encourage someone to create the page within Proteopedia, and should be created.
4. The name of a crystallographer should link within Proteopeida and that page may contain a link to her/his entry in Wikipedia if it exists.
5. When Wikipedia has an article relevant to Proteopedia, one should never hesitate to link to Wikipedia. However, such links to Wikipedia should nearly always be made on a page with the same topic in Proteopedia. There is no reason to duplicate what is in Wikipedia within Proteopedia. However, often Proteopedia may wish to emphasize or summarize specific aspects of a topic, whereas Wikipedia will attempt to be broad and comprehensive. That is the reason for the following rule.
6. For most topics, and certainly when in doubt, it is better to create a new page within Proteopedia, and then put a link to Wikipedia on that Proteopedia page on the same topic. This provides a place to emphasize aspects of the topic important to Proteopedia, even though these aspects may be mentioned somewhere in Wikipedia's article. For example, the Proteopedia page on the Protein Data Bank could emphasize that new entries are released weekly, and that following each weekly release, new Proteopedia pages are created for each new entry automatically, a process called "seeding". However, the Proteopedia page on the Protein Data Bank need not repeat everything that Wikipedia says, and should certainly link to the Wikipedia article for more information. Also, we don't want to scatter links to Wikipedia's articles throughout Proteopedia articles, and then later realize it would have been better to have all those links go to to a Proteopedia article (which in turn links to Wikipedia). This would probably create a maintenance problem, trying to find and update all those links.
7. If the page is unrelated to proteins or molecules (like a page for an organism), and the page exists and is useful within Wikipedia, you may link directly to Wikipedia.