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

[John Vandenberg]

On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 10:37 PM, Tisza Gergő<gtisza at gmail.com> wrote:
> Nemo_bis <nemowiki at ...> writes:
>> See
>> http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2009/aug/21/encyclopedia-life-species
>> Where's the problem with Wikispecies?
>> Moreover, EOL received 33.000 images from individual contributors
>> (http://www.flickr.com/groups/encyclopedia_of_life), Wikispecies didn't.
>> So, why is EOL succeeding, and Wikispecies seemingly doesn't?
>
> EOL is an encyclopedia, Wikispecies is just a raw taxonomy, which is totally
> useless to the average reader. It is also useless to most readers interested in
> taxonomies, because it lacks the software features to extract that. It is in a
> similar position to Wiktionary: a project about relations between things that
> totally lacks the concept of relations on the software level. That is like
> publishing text in the form of JPG files. If you are one of the few people
> specifically interested in taxonomies, you will probably use something that
> allows you to query and extract the relational data.

While the wiki software layer is very basic, we have many complex
tools on our toolserver.  Here is a small sample of the projects which
run on the toolserver.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Toolserver/Projects

If you can specify what queries you are most interested in, the
technical group may be able to write a tool to do this.

--
John Vandenberg