Re: [Wikispecies-l] Introduction

Hi Jon: I am on the interested list of Wikispecies. The thing I like about the idea is that a massive undertaking like compiling info on all species will take a concerted, community effort. The concepts I'd like to add to the thought about the effort are: 1) that images and image-mapping provide the easiest to navigate and the most visceral, user-friendly front-end to the database, and 2) that geographical cross-indexing, along with species indexing of the database is extremely powerful and scientifically valuable. My work has taken me to many places in the world and I have been working on a biogeographical web game for a few years in hopes of producing something that will catch kids interest in real creatures will the way that the imaginary Pokemon creatures did a few years ago. I continue to work on the game, now I'm in the process of writing scripts to add picture sets from new geographical locations easily, and hope to wiki'ize it in the future, as my day-job permits. My perception of the workers in this "field" is that we are all charging in different directions and don't work together well. Hopefully, as the "wikispecies" creature evolves, will incorporate the best approaches and ideas in the pool. So you can see what I'm talking about with regards to geographical-indexing and image-mapping, please check out these two links: http://www.cetus.ucsd.edu/~sauter/fishnthesea/NAmerica/Alaska/Seward/Fourth… and the "NavigationalTips" hyperlink on: http://www.fishnthesea.org page. This explains how to navigate through the images and maps. The reason I picked the first link is that several of the thumbnails are mushrooms, including your and my favorite Amanita muscaria. It is easy to make a link so that a user that wants to go to the Amanita database accesses it by clicking on the species name in the picture. Note that the first link is a long name and often email splits it into 2 lines, making it necessary to be sure the whole thing is in the browser URL window. Anyway, I"ll keep plodding along and I"m sure there are others out there doing similar and better things. Cheers! Allan Sauter On 1/29/06, Jon Ellifritz <ellijon(a)earthlink.net> wrote: