Ohio’s bioscience industry just got the Wikipedia treatment.
An anonymous author over Easter Weekend created the Ohio bioscience sector page on Wikipedia. It’s a well-sourced – albeit quirky and a little dated – summary of the state’s biotech community (Exhibit A: the Ohio bioscience Wikipedia page’s signature photo is of the lagoon outside the Cleveland Museum of Art).
The author seems like a bit of a Wikipedia hobbyist rather than a healthcare insider. For example, he has also heavily edited the Wikipedia website on subjects including the history of Ohio, economy of Ohio and the energy sector of Ohio.
But the author inadvertently put Ohio biotech in rare company: mostly national biotech industries, not states, have their own Wikipedia pages.
Local biotech trade groups had no idea about the site. Cleveland’s BioEnterprise and Ohio’s statewide organization, BioOhio, didn’t know the page existed until Monday.
Really, it’s amazing someone in the industry didn’t think of doing this earlier. Wikipedia entries are almost universally among the top of search results on their subject matter. After just two days, searches for “Ohio bioscience sector” on Google have the new Wikipedia page as the second most popular result.
Now some local insider should consider taking charge and cleaning it up.
By Chris Seper MedCity News
Chris Seper is the CEO at MedCity Media, which publishes MedCityNews.com. He is also a senior writer at MedCity News. Reach him at chris@medcitynews.com.More posts by Author
Hey Chris, Very cool. I keep wishing someone would start putting the Midwest companies on the Crunchbase regulary. Unrelated but related - I notice a lot of organizations include healthcare providers and sometimes insurance in thier count of "bioscience" jobs. Seems a rather poor measure since health care depends on other jobs in the communtiy to be successful unless the institution is a Cleveland Clinic, Mayo or other major research/tourist hospital. Plus, population messes the numbers up. Larger states tend to have more hospitals but that does not mean their bioscience industry is larger.
I agree with previous poster... here are the sources for accurate and updated Ohio bioscience industry info: www.BioOhio.com and www.micrOHscope.com. For Northeast Ohio and VC-related info: www.BioEnterprise.com.
Error creep will make the article useless over the next 12 months. Wikipedia science articles have a poor history of being maintained and keeping the vandalism out once started.