Talk:Neurofilament light polypeptide

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"Common names" of proteins

@Boghog: You may already be aware of this problem on WP, but there are articles on many proteins on WP that are not located at a title which academic literature typically refers to them as, and which do not have redirects to the article on that topic (assuming the page about the human protein even exists). It has taken me up to an hour in the past to find the correct Wikipedia article on a human protein and verify/cross-reference the identifiers; in this particular instance, it wasn't difficult to find this article (originally located at NFL (protein)) from special:search/neurofilament light chain (this wasn't a redirect as of an hour ago), but cross-referencing "Neurofilament light polypeptide" with "Neurofilament light chain" was sort of a pain in the ass since I ultimately had to resort to a pubmed search.

I'm not sure what can be done about this, but if an article isn't located at its "common name" (i.e., the term that academics use for a protein in the relevant literature) and a redirect from the common name to the existing article doesn’t exist, then the existing article on the protein is going to remain a stub for a very long time. It's also possible that a duplicate protein article will be created at some point. I know it'd take way too much time to manually fix this issue. Since UNIPROT doesn't always list the common name as an identifier for the official name of a protein, I don't know how it'd be possible to address this problem systematically with a bot either.

In any event, do you have any ideas on what could be done to address this? Seppi333 (Insert 2¢) 21:33, 21 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Seppi. Gene/protein nomenclature is a pain. Molecular biologists would sooner share tooth brushes than share protein names. You could try searching for "<HUGO gene symbol> (gene)", for example NEFL (gene). I ran a bot once to add these redirects to solve this very problem. The informal convention that we have been following is to use the HUGO gene symbol as the article name, and if the protein name is relatively short, the recommended UniProt name. As you point out, sometimes the UniProt name does not correspond to the most common name used in the scientific literature. This is not a problem if there are appropriate redirects. UniProt does not list "neurofilament light chain" as an alternate name, therefore it would be difficult if for a bot to automatically create these redirects, since this alias does not appear to be listed in any of the systematic databases. So I am not sure anything could have been done about this particular case other than manually add a redirect. Boghog (talk) 04:40, 22 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]