Hello all,

I asked FishBase (http://www.fishbase.org; there are articles about it in nl:, en: and de:) to share their data with us to write articles.

I think we can have a productive cooperation, but I'm not sure yet about the exact things. I forward their mail for your information.

Cheers,

Jelle Zijlstra (Ucucha from nl.wikipedia)

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Rainer Froese rfroese@ifm-geomar.de Date: Sep 14, 2005 9:34 AM Subject: RE: FishBase and a Wikipedia To: jelle.zijlstra@gmail.com Cc: "Pablico, Grace (WorldFish)" g.pablico@cgiar.org, Nicolas Bailly < n.bailly@cgiar.org>, "Sven Kullander (Sven Kullander)" ve-sven@nrm.se, "Eli Agbayani (Agbayani, Eli)" e.agbayani@cgiar.org, Sven Mohr < sven.mohr@web.de>

Dear Jelle S. Zijlstra,

Collaboration between FishBase and Wikipedia is indeed a good idea. As a first step we can deep-link from FishBase to all pages in Wikipedia that contain information on fishes. All we need for this is a list of the scientific names and the respective Wikipedia URLs. We would expect similar links from Wikipedia into FishBase. We can provide a respective list of scientific names and FishBase URLs. I am not sure how that would then be implemented in Wikipedia. Given that we are talking about 29,000 species manual editing is not an option.

A next step would be to create new species pages directly from FishBase as new postings in Wikipedia. We can create a routine that would put together the respective information. Again I am not sure how that would then be incorporated in Wikipedia, as again manual entry is not an option. Maybe you can establish contact to colleagues who have direct access to the database behind Wikipedia?

I copy this to some colleagues who may have additional ideas or suggestions.

Greetings

Rainer

Dr. Rainer Froese Leibniz-Institut für Meereswissenschaften IfM-GEOMAR Düsternbrooker Weg 20 24105 Kiel Germany Tel. +49 431 600 4579 Fax +49 431 600 1699 rfroese@ifm-geomar.de www.fishbase.org http://www.fishbase.org http://filaman.uni-kiel.de/ifm-geomar/rfroese/

-----Original Message----- *From:* Jelle Zijlstra [mailto:jelle.zijlstra@gmail.com] *Posted At:* Saturday, 2005 September 10 3:18 AM *Posted To:* fishbase_cgiar_org *Conversation:* FishBase and a Wikipedia *Subject:* FishBase and a Wikipedia

Hello,

I am user Ucucha from the Dutch Wikipedia (http://nl.wikipedia.org). Wikipedia, as you may know, is an online encyclopedia under GNU-FDL that can be edited by anyone.

I think we have too few articles about fish in our encyclopedia. I think it might be possible to make pages automatically from the FishBase database.

Such a page should not include too much information, I think. A good start would be a taxobox (see for example http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwarte_dwergmeerval), author, distribution, and a link to the full record in FishBase.

It's my opinion that this will be good for both FishBase and Wikipedia. For FishBase, because this will make FishBase better known under our many visitors. For Wikipedia, because it's important for us to have articles about all subjects, so that we can cover a broad range of subjects. Furthermore, this will make these fish species better known, which is probably a common goal of ours, isn't it?

Yours sincerely,

Jelle S. Zijlstra jelle.zijlstra@gmail.com Oegstgeest, The Netherlands