Jelle Zijlstra, 13/01/2013 02:34:
I'm skeptical that mass creation of species articles is a good idea, at least until we have good integration with Wikidata. Such a bot would work with database data, and database data belongs in a database. Who is going to maintain millions of articles in a small Wikipedia when taxonomic changes happen, errors in the underlying database are corrected, or new information becomes available? On the English Wikipedia, we have enough of a problem maintaining the articles Polbot generated; the problems will be far worse on a smaller wiki that has fewer people qualified to work on biological articles.
Wikipedias are better at providing textual, complex information that does not fit well in a database. For database data, we should provide a bridge to a database (e.g., Wikidata), not replicate database content in an unmaintainable form.
I surely agree with you, but I think Wikispecies is the only wiki exempt from such a consideration: it's its job, after all. As for Wikidata, there's https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata/Notes/Future#Wikispecies which would use some additional work. As far as I understand, given that use of Wikidata for all projects other than Wikipedia is very far in the future, it's currently considered ok to have a plan where data is first ingested on a local wiki and then migrated to Wikidata. All the data they're adding to sv.wiki will eventually go to Wikidata together with all infoboxes data, so some kind of central planning is needed and Wikispecies seems the most logical place. Again, if the Wikispecies community is interested you should probably get some feedback from the Wikidata team, but also not wait indefinitely for some perfect solution before starting work to make things less broken.
Nemo