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/FourthJuly/T_FourthJuly.htm
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.
Hello to all the Wikispecies-interested, which at the moment
doesn't seem to be a very large number. Yesterday I registered
for the first time with Wikipedia, although I had