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 checked out a number of entries in a few visits during the past year. One of my primary areas of interest is mycology, more specifically mushrooms and other large, fleshy fungi, so when I came across a mention of Wikispecies and its apparent goal of listing, with certain as yet unspecified additional information, all species of life on earth, I experienced a few moments of great anticipation. However, after going to the website and then checking out the discussion archives, I was wondering whether the whole project had just died of lack of interest, or from getting impaled on that "fork" which was mentioned in some discussions. (Joking! I'm not sure what was meant by the term, as used, although it sounds as if the question was whether Wikispecies would be a stand-alone site or merely other pages Wikipedia users would be led to via link when they wanted more specific information than was found in a general article about, say, Chiroptera/Bats.)
So, before sharing some of the thoughts I had about what Wikispecies might become, I'd like to hear whether it's just in temporary limbo until those working on it have a little more time to really get going, or whether it's "terminal." I also wanted to let you know about another site and project, Species 2000, which seems to have similar, if not identical, objectives. You can get to it (I hope - I somehow came across it months ago and marked it as a Favorite) via: http://www.annual.sp2000.org, which, when you do a search for, say, Amanita muscaria (the Fly Agaric mushroom), will take you to a page listing synonyms of that species, with a link to the source database, Species Fungorum, at: www.SpeciesFungorum.org or www.indexfungorum.org. The sites don't provide much more than synonyms, species authors and dates, and species publication information, but those are all important items of information for taxonomic purposes.
Hope to hear from somebody!
Jon
Jon Ellifritz ellijon@earthlink.net Why Wait? Move to EarthLink.
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/FourthJ... 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@earthlink.net wrote:
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
wikispecies-l@lists.wikimedia.org