[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.

Wikispecies has recently built a partnership with the open access
academic journal ZooKeys, which has a partnership with EOL and GBIF.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/ZooKeys
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/species/wiki/Wikispecies:Collaboration_with_ZooKeys
http://pensoftonline.net/zookeys/index.php/journal/announcement/view/6
http://www.gbif.org/News/NEWS1243931673

The partnership with ZooKeys results in images of new discoveries
being uploaded by the journal to Commons!

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Images_from_ZooKeys

This is _very_cool_.

Sadly there are no reliable sources picking up this story, and I can't
see any blogging about it either.

--
John Vandenberg