On Thu, 16 Sep 2004 10:25:29 -0400, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Are we going to have literally thousands of different project then? Why species in particular? Just off the top of my head I can think of dozens of other possibilities (such as languages). And why aren't these being made as wikibooks? When previously it came up that some people wanted general-purpose articles on food, and other people wanted more specialist articles specifically on how to cook food (i.e. recipes), the decision was made that recipes should be done at wikibooks. Why shouldn't a species reference work be a wikibook?
Species data (like dictionary data, actually) has a specific form, and applies to millions of items. Rather than comparing this to 'languages', I would compare this to 'book data'. Once again, there are millions and millions of records with very clearly-defined fields, which data is the same across all languages. And once again, there is room for book-wonks to enhance that data with comments -- "this book initially was assigned ISBN <foo>, but was later assigned <foo> when printed in compilation form..."
Finally, there *is* a place for a species reference in wikibooks... but that would call on raw data from wikispecies and transform it into a narrative, perhaps an instructional one (note for instance the dichotomous key started by TUF-KAT at http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Dichotomous_key , which would be enhanced by links to detailed species information at each leaf of the key).