Gerard Meijssen wrote: Sister projects are Wikipedia-Wikisource-Wikiquote-Wikibooks-Wictionary. The different languages have nothing to do with sister projects, every one of the project may be available in different languages. The Wikispecies has overlap with both the Wikipedia and Wikisource project. The problems I see so far: - The plain language description, photos, range maps, taxonomic classification are territory covered by Wikipedia - The original description of the taxon like the one you posted in another thread, as well as a (complete) list of references would not fit into a the Wikipedia, such better fit into something like Wikisource - For obscure taxons the Wikispecies article would only contain such source information, in Wikipedia it'd be something like a stub without any hope of growing (until someone researches that taxon), thus it'd clutter the database and might be better as a redirect to the upper-level taxon. - Something similar applies to one-child taxons like living fossils, where a species is is only one of a family. All the upper level taxons only have the taxonomic data as contents. - And we have the searching enhancements which are specially needed for the taxnomic database to be useful for professional use. It might be possible to generalize them to make them usable outside the ToL-articles, so no harm in creating them in Wikipedia as well. - At least in some languages it has fixed common names assigned to a species (or higher taxons). Yet in Wikipedia we can only use those for interwiki links once it already has the target article - an ugly way to put them into the article before would be interwiki-links hidden by HTML-comments. I second Mavs concerns about forking, yet including all of the Wikispecies contents (as I understand it) into Wikipedia would be stretching the rules as well. One possible (but not really beautiful) way I could see is to put the source and database stuff into the separate Wikispecies, but put the plain text stuff and basic in Wikipedia - and of course closely link the two. However I am not sure if this discussion in the mailing list is really the best place - meta might be better. Not all ToL contributors, especially not those from the other languages, are ready the mailing list. [[User:Ahoerstemeier]]

Marco Krohn wrote: Just to clarify, I think that wikispecies is not overlapping with the encyclopedia in any significant way, that it is not a fork, that it is a perfectly appropriate use of our resources, and that this discussion should end pretty soon. A species database is just a different kind of reference work than a general interest encyclopedia. This is not materially different from efforts at wikibooks, wiktionary, etc., to generate other kinds of reference works. By supporting Benedikt Mandl's proposal in-house, rather than being persnickity and forcing him to go outside for support, we guarantee such things as long-term software and content compatibility, etc. When fully developed, a wikispecies directory will be a delightful resource work as a standalone *and* a nice foundation for *some* encyclopedia articles. But the two are not identical. --Jimbo

Dividing our biology contributor base between two separate projects that have a great deal of overlap is a HUGE mistake. > I think you made your point very clear in several e-mails and there are other people who support your point of view - but on the other hand I think it has become obvious that a big number of people supports the wikiSpecies. Your arguments didn't convince them and repeating them again and again won't change that. WikiSpecies will evolve. I understand your worries and will respect them, please respect other people's ambitions to create wikiSpecies. Benedikt -- NEU: Bis zu 10 GB Speicher f�r e-mails & Dateien! 1 GB bereits bei GMX FreeMail http://www.gmx.net/de/go/mail

I wouldn't mind having the current wiki catergory system expanded to include (for biology) the various taxonomic categories of a life-form (Kingdom, Phylum, Sub-phylum....Genus, Species). That would (I think) allow someone to search for a creature or article based on its scientific name. I don't, however see it as dividing the biology base, but rather, allowing them to create a basic directory, which the wikipedia expounds upon, with links from the wikispecies article on, say, felis domesticus [having basic scientific information], linking to the wikipedia article for more prosaic style, distribution around the world, role in mythology, cat-worship in ancient Egypt, etc. James -----Original Message----- From: wikipedia-l-bounces(a)Wikimedia.org [mailto:wikipedia-l-bounces@Wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Daniel Mayer Sent: Wednesday, August 25, 2004 11:57 AM To: wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] What is the purpose of this mailing list ?? --- "Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales" <jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote: [[snip]] Our current category system could be extended to create such a directory *within* Wikipedia. Dividing our biology contributor base between two separate projects that have a great deal of overlap is a HUGE mistake. -- Daniel _______________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Win 1 of 4,000 free domain names from Yahoo! Enter now. http://promotions.yahoo.com/goldrush _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

Daniel Mayer wrote: I think the point is that yes, we can include everything into wikipedia, but then we'll have * normal people bored and scared away by a flood of dull data * scientists (who are to be considered borderline-normal people;-) taking their field so seriously that they'll simply refuse to work on an article about cats that links to [[catwoman]] The proposed solution therefore is * let normal people have their encyclopedia article, with an "in-house" link to the dull, boring flood of data at wikispecies * let scientists work on the cool, exciting data at wikispecies, amongst their own where they are comfortable, and provide a link to the "other stuff" at wikipedia Magnus

Daniel Mayer wrote: Yes, I would rather draw scientists to a wikipedia sister project within the wikimedia realm than see them repelled by "cat religion" stuff and don't work on species in a free wiki project at all. For the record, yes, there are several scientists who work on wikipedia and are not scared away (myself included). But, at the moment, they are the minority of the scientific community. If we can attract the "remaining" majority to a wikispecies project, they might, in time, start working on wikipedia as well. Most of them will *not* directly jump on the wikipedia bandwagon. Magnus

Daniel Mayer wrote: * Biology is a little more than a species directory :-) * We (wikipedians) can directly incorporate data from the big data dump that wikispecies will become, where demmed appropriate * _If_ it turns out that we have a huge overlap, wikispecies can be integrated into wikipedia at any point, if there is consensus IMHO there's a chance for a development boost in this project. Think of it as an evolutionary step. We had a mutation step from HTML to wiki, where the wikipedia and its software have become a very successful model. The wikispecies project, however, has demands that are a little different from "normal" wikis and wikipedia. We have a chance to introduce new functionalities (database-like functions, tree diagrams) and smoothen the old ones (categories, templates) into the software on a "blank page" testing field. They will be in the MediaWiki software and in the pages. Once these have stabelized and proven useful, we can take these successful concepts back to wikipedia, and some day, maybe the contents as well, if we (people in both projects!) see fit. Magnus

Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote: Looking through all the messages in this thread, I think you are very much in the minority by saying that. Other posters seem to have suggested that a) there would be overlap, and it would be a good thing or b) there would be overlap, and it would be a bad thing. What makes you think there would not be an overlap? Much of "this discussion" has been about how the two projects could scratch each other's backs in the best way. Clearly that needs to be ongoing.

[Tiger/Great White Shark] To be fair though, those ultra-well-known animals are the exception rather than the rule. To pick a more typical example at random from Josh Grosse's recent contributions page - how should wikimedia treat ''Naegleria fowleri''?

--- "Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales" <jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote: And yet the only example you have given shows fairly clearly that that info should be in Wikipedia. Directory structures can and should be developed through the use of categories. -- mav __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Address AutoComplete - You start. We finish. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail

Daniel Mayer wrote: Absolutely. I don't think anyone has suggested that we should not have such information in Wikipedia. We should. This is clearly a point against WikiSpecies, but I don't find it a very compelling point. The kind of scientific information in WikiSpecies does not change that rapidly for most species, and in any event, it will be very simple for contributors to copy from one resource to the other... It is important to understand that we don't control the question of whether or not WikiSpecies will exist. It will. We can either do it in-house, in which case the task of updating from one to the other can be greatly simplified by software and common culture (i.e. Wikispecies contributors will be Wikimedians, we will all know each other, we can find common solutions). We have testimony from biologists who are eager to work on the project that they would find it useful. Presumably, they understand that a general purpose encyclopedia will cover much of the same ground and more besides. It's just a different _kind_ of work, with a different _purpose_ and a different _audience_. Is wiktionary a fork because the content in wiktionary could be incorporated into wikipedia? I don't see how. It's a different sort of work, and it is valuable *even if* we could legitimately have a full encyclopedia article about every word in every language, including such information as etymology, pronunciations, etc. --Jimbo

On Wednesday 25 August 2004 18:16, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote: Jimbo, I don't consider this as a strong indication that there is much overlap between wikitionary and wikipedia. We are not talking about article _names_, but about the _content_ of the articles. If you compare the content they are not even close to being similar. A small correction in the Wikipedia article about "economics" would in 99% of the cases not lead to a need to correct the corresponding article in wiktionary and vice versa. For other articles this is even more obvious, e.g., http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Building http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building which is just one example from about 10 articles I compared. Agreed, but as Pete already pointed out these are just "those ultra-well-known animals". This is nothing against the ten-thousands of articles we talk about and which we need to keep in sync in case of a partial-fork. IMHO a closer comparison than a sister-project is another language, like "en" and "de". But this time the difference is that we risk to lose a lot or even all experts of the field to a more specialized project. I don't see who then will sync these articles with Wikipedias. And I don't see why we should duplicate effort before we are sure that there is no way around it. I would much prefer a technical solution, where our user base is not forked. The only argument I consider valid so far in favour of wikispecies is that a spezialized project could attract more experts from the field in a shorter time frame. This is probably true for every subproject, like physics, mathematics and so on. And I already can see that wikispecies will eventually divide into more subprojects using the same arguments. I really am not sure if such a fragmentation is a good thing. best regards, Marco

Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote: Where I think you'd get into trouble is pointing at some specific piece of FishBase data and saying "this is too detailed for Wikipedia, must go elsewhere". So far as I know, not a single word of WP ToL material has ever been rejected for excessive depth. So while conceptually one can talk about species content beyond what WP allows, in practice we haven't actually set any limits on WP. On the contrary, the bird people are well on the way to documenting every bird species in detail, so it would be pretty hard for a wikispecies to have anything new to offer in that area, and if it's OK for birds, why not for beetles? Without an agreed-upon rule about what species data may not be included in WP, then what reason is there for me not to import every single wikispecies addition into WP also? Just as an experiment, let's try it; somebody please point out a specific piece of FishBase data for a fish species that they think is too detailed, I'll write it into WP and we can see what kind of reaction it gets. Stan

Pete/Pcb21 wrote: I fully support this, as I think it is an absolutely excellent thing to be doing. Huh? Why would we put a stop to that? Why would we come up with guidelines to prohibit some species from wikipedia? I do not support any such thing. Especially not me! I wonder if you misunderstood something I said, because I absolutely agree that Wikipedia and the Tree of Life project should have a very ambitious goal of every species. If anything, it makes more sense to say that I think that WikiSpecies should be "crippled" in that it should not have references to Tigger and Jaws, because it is not a general encyclopedic reference work but a specialized database. But I don't accept that this amounts to "crippling" anymore than wiktionary is crippled by our insisting that a dictionary is not an encyclopedia. --Jimbo

--- "James R. Johnson" <modean52(a)comcast.net> wrote: That is a total strawman since Wiktionary defines *all* words or *all* languages. There are only a small handful of words in Wikipedia that have articles about them but they are *not* dictionary definitions, they are encyclopedia articles. Any other weak arguments? -- Marv __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com

--- Marco Krohn <marco.krohn(a)web.de> wrote: Exactly. What we need to do is add database functionality to our current projects. This is already badly needed. -- mav _______________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Win 1 of 4,000 free domain names from Yahoo! Enter now. http://promotions.yahoo.com/goldrush