Steve Bennett wrote:
On 02/05/06, Stan Shebs shebs@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