Steve Bennett wrote:
On 02/05/06, Stan Shebs <shebs(a)apple.com> wrote:
It is true that identifying plants and animals
from photos is a bit
of a minefield - very often the key characteristic(s) distinguishing
a species from all others is not visible in the photo, so one might
say that that makes it "unverifiable" without other info, such as
a label on a cage. On the other hand, people who've worked with ToL
Well, I'd sort of say it doesn't matter. Take the simple case of an
animal whose sex can't be distinguished without close inspection.
There's no point captioning an image "Male ..." if you can't tell in
the photo. Perhaps we should just use captions like "A member of the
Red-horned Bat family, possible the Lesser" or something.
But if you know that, in fact, you have taken a closeup picture of
the hands of your local zoo's "Gertie the Gorilla", it's unduly
pedantic to limit oneself to describing the image only as "Gorilla
hands". You could even be misleading, because maybe some expert
knows that Gertie's hands are deformed or otherwise atypical, and
so the Gertie connection is crucial to interpreting the image
correctly, and to allowing that expert to fix up the article months
or years after the picture was taken. (Not entirely hypothetical
either, consider "Free Willy's" floppy dorsal fin that always had
to be explained.)
We have plenty of disk space for uploaders to supply all the
relevant facts they know, and to qualify everything they're
uncertain about.
Stan