F@h article on Wikipedia now a Featured Article

[Jesse_V]

It is my pleasure to announce that the Folding@home article on Wikipedia is now a Featured Article. This means that it is one of the most highest-quality encyclopedic articles Wikipedia offers, and more specifically that it meets Wikipedia's Featured Article criteria. Some of you may recall my post back in early April when the article was promoted to become a Good Article. Since then, it passed through a lengthy peer review and more recently an F.A. nomination where seven reviewers, including two experts, carefully examined every aspect of the article and after an extensive discussion eventually gave their support for promotion to Featured Article status. As a Featured Article, it is now a candidate for Wikipedia's Featured Article of the Day on the Main Page, which has always resulted in a large spike in visibility and traffic. However, it'll be competing with other Featured Articles for that appearance, and I'll post later when it gets close to appearing on some specific date.

While this essentially means that the article doesn't require any more serious work, I'd like to point out that it can still be updated. I usually update the FLOP numbers about once a month, the papers count will increase at irregular intervals, and when any major discoveries are reported by this project a summary can be added in. Little things like that, which anyone can easily do since the article can be modified by anyone.

There are many people who assisted me in some way with this article including on Wikipedia and both on this forum and off. I've named you before, you know who you are, and I'm grateful for your help. I'd particularly like to thank screen317 for leading the way with a crowdsourcing effort to create an overall F@h stats graph, two screenshots of which are included in the article for the world to see. J. Coffland used GIMP to create the main logo image and he also uploaded it to the article. Several PG scientists, including Drs. Bowman, Voelz, and Pande, clarified some technical issues and assisted me with image copyrights. TJ Lane in particular led the way with the development of some text that was eventually published as the Simulation FAQ, which I used to finally figured out what in the world adaptive sampling and Markov State Models actually are and how they are helpful to F@h.

As with all other articles on Wikipedia, the text is under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license, which basically means that it can be shared or adapted at will, and all you have to do is attribute Wikipedia in some way. I'd recommend using this article in presentations or advertisements about Folding@home, as that's one of the reasons I wrote it. It's also an interesting subject. Although this was a more complex subject than I had originally anticipated, I've strived to make it understandable by the laymen, yet still giving enough information to satisfy an expert. In particular, it summarizes many of the technical publications, which is useful in case you're interested in understanding how this project actually works. I think nearly everyone can learn something from reading it.

I also want to share how impressed I've become with this project as a result of doing all the research for this article. Numerous publications, both from the PG and from others describe how its pioneering technologies, doing science, and making discoveries that would have been very impractical before. Folding@home is the world's most powerful distributed computing project, for a number of years it dramatically outperformed the world's fastest supercomputers, and it's really accelerating diseases research. It's hard to find a publication on protein folding that doesn't at least mention Folding@home, and Dr. Pande's work has over 11,000 citations from other publications, if that's any reflection on the impact this project has had. This is all due to the perseverance of thousands of people around the world in a massive team effort. And all the results are essentially open. Seriously, this is awesome. Keep this in mind.

Fold on!

[kiore]

Well done, I will be linking this on my team thread.

[jimerickson]

i will be linking to this in my team's forum. thanks for all your work jesse!

[Nathan_P]

Congrats and thanks for all the hard work

[P5-133XL]

Very good work!

[7im]

Well done. Will be fun to track donor participation...

[Jesse_V]

Thanks everyone! And 7im, yes I will be watching that as well. I'm watching the traffic to the article as well. I know at least one Wikipedian started folding as a result of the article: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?tit ... =514581839

I added Folding@home to the request page for Today's Featured Article and I'll just have to see how that goes.

[Jesse_V]

Wow, that was really fast. The article is now scheduled to appear on Wikipedia's Main Page on November 1st, 2012.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia: ... er_1,_2012

[7im]

Time to put 7.2.9 on the download page before then.

[Jesse_V]

Time to put 7.2.9 on the download page before then.

My thoughts precisely. Personally, I think it's ready.

[jimerickson]

outstanding jesse!

[rhavern]

Fine work, Jesse_V, much appreciated.

[Jonazz]

Congrats man, let's hope this brings in lots of new folders!

[Jesse_V]

I just noticed that the Main Page gets about 8 million views per day.
http://stats.grok.se/en/latest/Main_Page

[screen317]

Well done everyone who has contributed to this! I'm very happy to have been able to contribute!