[Wikipedia-l] Re: What is the purpose of this mailing list ??

[Andreas Hoerstemeier]

Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> Which wikipedia articles are you talking about? en:articles de:articles 
> ? Should nl: articles not be written because they have an overlap with 
> de: or en:? WikiSpecies will if anything provide a resource for all 
> wikipedia.
Sister projects are Wikipedia-Wikisource-Wikiquote-Wikibooks-Wictionary.
The different languages have nothing to do with sister projects, every 
one of the project may be available in different languages.

The Wikispecies has overlap with both the Wikipedia and Wikisource 
project. The problems I see so far:
- The plain language description, photos, range maps, taxonomic 
classification are territory covered by Wikipedia
- The original description of the taxon like the one you posted in 
another thread, as well as a (complete) list of references would not fit 
into a the Wikipedia, such better fit into something like Wikisource
- For obscure taxons the Wikispecies article would only contain such 
source information, in Wikipedia it'd be something like a stub without 
any hope of growing (until someone researches that taxon), thus it'd 
clutter the database and might be better as a redirect to the 
upper-level taxon.
- Something similar applies to one-child taxons like living fossils, 
where a species is is only one of a family. All the upper level taxons 
only have the taxonomic data as contents.
- And we have the searching enhancements which are specially needed for 
the taxnomic database to be useful for professional use. It might be 
possible to generalize them to make them usable outside the 
ToL-articles, so no harm in creating them in Wikipedia as well.
- At least in some languages it has fixed common names assigned to a 
species (or higher taxons). Yet in Wikipedia we can only use those for 
interwiki links once it already has the target article - an ugly way to 
put them into the article before would be interwiki-links hidden by 
HTML-comments.

I second Mavs concerns about forking, yet including all of the 
Wikispecies contents (as I understand it) into Wikipedia would be 
stretching the rules as well. One possible (but not really beautiful) 
way I could see is to put the source and database stuff into the 
separate Wikispecies, but put the plain text stuff and basic in 
Wikipedia - and of course closely link the two.

However I am not sure if this discussion in the mailing list is really 
the best place - meta might be better. Not all ToL contributors, 
especially not those from the other languages, are ready the mailing list.

[[User:Ahoerstemeier]]