[Foundation-l] Wikispecies

[Samuel Klein]

Andrew,

This is a great response and anecdote.

I have regularly run across people working on EOL, which has a broad
staff one of whose tasks is to keep an eye on species-data resources
around the web; and they are generally quite positive about
wikispecies, and thinking about ways to better collaborate with the
project.

So there is certainly no consensus among the field experts that there
is anything wrong with the project -- to the contrary, there is a
certain sense that wikispecies may one day become a place to find the
largest mutually collaborating community (in contrast to many other
places that accept submissions of formally structured data but don't
have much in the way of discussion or meta-analysis -- for instance on
how to display disputed classificaitons; many sources simply make an
executive choice and don't highlight the fact of the dispute at all).

That said, it's true that many things could be done improve
wikispecies -- for instance better translations of the main page and
information about the site, and a move to its own domain name, for
better stats tracking if nothing else.

--SJ

On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 1:52 PM, Andrew Leung<andrewcleung at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Full disclaimer: I contribute in Wikispecies.
>>
>> First, calling a project as "zero quality project", whether it belongs to WMF or Wikia or somewhere else, is downright assuming bad faith. Second, all of the discussion links in your "boycott" section took place in 2005 and 2006, clearly unable to recognize that consensus can change (and probably had changed since those are aged discussion). Third, we have accommodated multi-lingual requests by including vernacular names section. But you have to recognize the fact that the entire scientific community describing new species all communicate in English and use Linnaean taxonomy. Even if the paper is in foreign language, the abstract would at least have an English version. This norm has been set since 1735 (the year which Linnaeus first published Systema Naturae).
>>
>> We often get compared between Encyclopedia of Life (EOL), so I grabbed a correspondence with someone who shares data to both EOL and Wikispecies (permission already granted beforehand by these 2 individuals on quoting this email). The Zookeys, a peer-reviewed scientific journal on species, publisher Dr. Lyubomir Penev said this to a Wikispecies editor:
>>
>> "Today I was amazed to see that your latest edit of the Haplodesmidae page (with my Agathodesmus revision and Sergei  Golovatch's Eutrichodesmus paper) was dated 19 June, *one day* after ZooKeys published it. You may even have beaten ZooBank, which   links to ZooKeys."
>>
>> Furthermore, Dr. Penev said Encyclopedia of Life still hasn't got any details from  ZooKeys, and the Catalogue of Life is years behind. Keep in mind that ZooKeys and EOL are partners, yet EOL has not used any data even from the first issue of ZooKeys, which is published in July 2008. Also, keep in mind that most images from EOL are licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA, which is unsuitable for reuse in Commons or WMF projects.
>>
>> Finally, to dismiss any claims that Wikispecies is a zero quality project, we have an agreed collaboration with ZooKeys, which will see hundreds of new species images continuously being uploaded to Commons. We are already planning another collaboration with Acta Entomologica Musei Nationalis Pragae which will grant us permission to upload their otherwise-copyrighted images to Commons under CC-BY-SA 3.0 to illustrate articles in WMF. We also granted special access to their pdf papers without a 2-year delay. Has any WMF projects successfully worked out collaborations to get large quantities of new species images in high quality and accuracy?
>>
>> Andrew
>>
>> "Fill the world with children who care and things start looking up."
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 1:18 PM, Klaus Graf <klausgraf at googlemail.com>wrote:
>>
>> > I cannot understand why WMF is unable to terminate Wikispecies which
>> > is a zero quality project. See
>> >
>> > http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:Gnom/Wikispecies (also in English)
>> >
>> > Klaus Graf
>> >
>>
>> Propose it be closed at Meta then.
>>
>> --
>> Alex
>> (User:Majorly)
>>
>>
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