All species would mean a detailed review by experts and I think that the dimensions of such a project are too big to be even estimated. At this point I think we should rather talk about wikispecies as a species directory without limitations rather than the demand of becoming "complete".
First of all, I think it would be attractive for people interested in limited groups of species; according to distribution, taxon, ecology, behaviour, etc.
What we should define as a target: Wikispecies should become the most extensive directory of its kind and not specialise exclusivly on a particular group of species (as fishbase does, for example) nor users (NOT for scientists only, for example).
Benedikt
Daniel Mayer wrote:
Looks essentially what a wikispecies should look like, I guess. I
guess a
w-species would focus more on the biology, history, genealogy,
genetics, or
what, so that it's different from the w-pedia?
All that should be covered in the Wikipedia article.
My impression is that Wikispecies' goal is to catalog *every* existing (and extinct?) species. We're talking about, what, hundred thousands of articles. This is similar to documenting every town and village, no matter what the size, and such attempts have historically not been appreciated within Wikipedia. This is why I think Wikispecies should be developed separately.
Consider another hypothetical project: Wikibibliography, that catalogs and reviews all books ever printed, which would be something like the OCLC WorldCat on an open content basis. Any such project has goals that have a rather small overlap with that of Wikipedia. However, that overlap (a few thousand articles) might be interesting enough that compatible licenses and some coordination could be useful.
-- Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik
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