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
there is a
picture. As this is a Russian website it may be public domain..
Thanks,
Gerard