[Foundation-l] Why can't we have $12.5 million for Wikispecies?

[Tisza Gergő]

Nemo_bis <nemowiki at ...> writes:
> See 
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2009/aug/21/encyclopedia-life-species
> Where's the problem with Wikispecies?
> Moreover, EOL received 33.000 images from individual contributors 
> (http://www.flickr.com/groups/encyclopedia_of_life), Wikispecies didn't.
> So, why is EOL succeeding, and Wikispecies seemingly doesn't?

EOL is an encyclopedia, Wikispecies is just a raw taxonomy, which is totally
useless to the average reader. It is also useless to most readers interested in
taxonomies, because it lacks the software features to extract that. It is in a
similar position to Wiktionary: a project about relations between things that
totally lacks the concept of relations on the software level. That is like
publishing text in the form of JPG files. If you are one of the few people
specifically interested in taxonomies, you will probably use something that
allows you to query and extract the relational data.