Stan Shebs wrote:
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
[...] You presume that little is known about many species, when there is traction among the serious amateurs and the professionals, you will be amazed how much is known about things on a species, subspecies, variety and forma level.
That's because there are many for which little is known - I just recently added a beetle family (Glaresidae) for whom none of the larvae have never been identified, nor is anything known about their life history, not even what they eat.
The scientific descriptions of taxons are inherently public domain, there is no single resource that collects them. I know of a Yahoo group that has some descriptions on line for cacti. There are more of these small resources. By having an open place where these things can be posted with some assurance that they will remain there, you already have something that adds value beyond the current ToL and gives validation to the idea of a Wikispecies.
The implied comment here is that really-detailed WP content runs the risk of being deleted, but as far as I know that's never happened to species descriptions, and there are a bunch of valued pages discussing obsolete taxa. Adding detailed info and making sure it's accurate is simply a painstaking process, and there aren't very many people doing it; most of the time I just get the basics written down and move on, on the theory that breadth is more useful than depth, if one only has so much time. For some beetle families WP now has the sole English description to be found online anywhere, believe it or not, so we're not quite to the point of needing every beetle species yet.
So the value of a separate wikispecies hangs on where Wikipedia draws the line on its content; as far as I know, no one has ever actually drawn a line at less than "everything known about a species".
By contrast, if I proposed importing my database of 147,000+ types of postage stamps, about half of all types known, I bet a lot of people would say "too much detail for the encyclopedia!" :-)
Stan
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Stan, When you want to import your database on stamps, I personally would not mind. Propably it would be a great thing if it is were accompanied by pictures. I am pretty sure there are loads of people who would really welcome it. It would make wikipedia an important resource on stamps. On nl: we have a chess entheuasiast. He has written a zillion articles on chess including chess players. Why not ?
A scientific description of a taxon is in Latin sometimes in English. It is latin gooblediegook. It is relevant for those who can read it. I fail to see that several hundred thousant articles like this (overly optimistic, this will only happen in 25 years if at all, not that these articles do not exist) would be appreciated by the average Wikipedia user. When an authorised version of the scientific description is uploaded, it should be locked against further editing. The value is in it being the original description.
I do and did not imply that info would be removed/deleted from wikipedia. I do imply that wikipedia is not the environment for these kinds of information. As an aside again; I would definetly have a wikispecies article refer to the articles in the wikipedia. ToL is a valuable resource, it can be a better resource if cooperation is possible. Then again it is not only en:wikipedia that would be great as a cooperating partner. Fishbase was mentioned, there is IPNI, there are many resources. The more cooperation the better the quality. Again some of it will rub off on wikispecies some on ToL on en: nl: de: fr:
As to the Glaresidae family, GREAT, it proves my point that ToL is a valuable resource that is continually increasing in quality. Wikispecies will not detract from that. PS on http://www.zin.ru/Animalia/Coleoptera/eng/glaresi.htm there is a picture. As this is a Russian website it may be public domain..
Thanks, Gerard