[Foundation-l] Why can't we have $12.5 million for Wikispecies?

[John Vandenberg]

On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 8:23 PM, Nemo_bis<nemowiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> John Vandenberg, 26/08/2009 12:07:
>> On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 1:23 PM, Steven Walling<steven.walling at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Very good question. I'd say two major factors:
>>> 1. Support from scientists. Founded by one of the best-known scientists
>>> alive, the EOL automatically gained support from the biological sciences in
>>> academia. Support from the scientific/academic community is the only reason
>>> their largely single-author system has flourished in my opinion.
>>
>> Why cant we have this?
>
> I think that at this point we can't hope to do better than EOL, so «If
> you can't beat them join them»: we should evaluate if and how much
> Wikispecies (and Commons, which has great pictures of many species) can
> contribute to EOL content (the main problem here can be that they're
> mainly CC-BY while we are CC-BY-SA, but their licenses are very flexible
> – even too much, indeed).
> Wikispecies could benefit of a "jump on the bandwagon" effect.

I agree; EOL has eclipsed WikiSpecies in many respects.  They have
nearly caught up on the number of taxonomic entries, but their
experience is far better, primarily because they have links to
pagescans on [[Biodiversity Heritage Library]].

However most of the information in EOL is just facts, and there in the
public domain, and we should be able to syncronise the two sets of
data.  As a result, the "wiki" will gradually become as complete as
the others, and time will tell whether a community will continue to
find the wiki useful.

I doubt that there is much that WikiSpecies can "give" to EOL, but it
would be good to hear from WikiSpecies people as there may be some
parts of the project which are especially detailed. (I couldnt quickly
find any "featured" content on WikiSpecies.)  As you say, Commons can
provide current images, and Wikisource can organise proofread
transcriptions of the bibliographies.

--
John Vandenberg