[GET-Editors] questions on editing

[Madeleine Ball]

Sorry for the late reply, I was very happy to hear about your interest
in GET-Evidence! Hopefully the list will become more active as more
people become involved.

> I had a few quick questions regarding variant impact scores and how useful
> an editor is if they mostly add publications and summaries.

Just adding publications is definitely useful -- the first step in
evaluating any variant is digging up papers, having that work already
done by a previous editor is very helpful. Also, even simple additions
are an incentive for others to participate and add more complicated
analysis -- I know I'm more likely to become curious and try to help
fill out an evaluation once someone else has started it.

> I have to admit, I'm a bit cautious about adding variant evidence and
> clinical importance data. Does everything edited by someone outside the main
> research group get reviewed to make sure that nothing incorrect was added?

Tom added a "curation" ability where some users can have curator
status and "approve" a page. This hasn't been used much because we
haven't had many outside editors -- a lot of them have been done by
Church lab members. Having edits from other sources will encourage us
to use and improve this curation system, and I'd actually appreciate
edits from other people to give us an incentive to use it. So, don't
worry too much about making mistakes -- human error is going to exist
no matter the expertise level, we all occasionally misunderstand or
misread a paper or figure (I know I have, and I've caught mistakes by
others). The power of allowing anyone to edit means that we can
quickly and easily fix those mistakes.

I've had some experience with Wikipedia and I think GET-Evidence is
very much inspired by that model, a lot of the rules and
recommendations for Wikipedia hold true here. Wikipedia says "Be
Bold": most people are more hesitant than they should be. Don't be
afraid of large changes, act in good faith, having page histories mean
that nothing is lost forever. Changes don't have to be large to be
useful, every little bit helps, even minor additions like PMIDs for
papers are a valuable addition. I think, like in Wikipedia, there can
be a variety of useful editing methods -- some people might just go
through a lot of variants and perform one type of action on them (in
Wikipedia some people just format references, or just fix grammar,
etc.), others might be specialists in a given disease, others might
just edit things that they're interested in for personal reasons (e.g.
the variant is present in their own genome). It's all valuable.

Let me know if there's anything we can to do to help you with editing!
I was unusually busy this week, I should be able to respond faster in
the future.

  Thanks!
    Madeleine