Jelle Zijlstra, 13/01/2013 02:34:
I'm skeptical that mass creation of species
articles is a good idea, at
least until we have good integration with Wikidata. Such a bot would
work with database data, and database data belongs in a database. Who is
going to maintain millions of articles in a small Wikipedia when
taxonomic changes happen, errors in the underlying database are
corrected, or new information becomes available? On the English
Wikipedia, we have enough of a problem maintaining the articles Polbot
generated; the problems will be far worse on a smaller wiki that has
fewer people qualified to work on biological articles.
Wikipedias are better at providing textual, complex information that
does not fit well in a database. For database data, we should provide a
bridge to a database (e.g., Wikidata), not replicate database content in
an unmaintainable form.
I surely agree with you, but I think Wikispecies is the only wiki exempt
from such a consideration: it's its job, after all.
As for Wikidata, there's
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata/Notes/Future#Wikispecies which
would use some additional work.
As far as I understand, given that use of Wikidata for all projects
other than Wikipedia is very far in the future, it's currently
considered ok to have a plan where data is first ingested on a local
wiki and then migrated to Wikidata. All the data they're adding to
sv.wiki will eventually go to Wikidata together with all infoboxes data,
so some kind of central planning is needed and Wikispecies seems the
most logical place.
Again, if the Wikispecies community is interested you should probably
get some feedback from the Wikidata team, but also not wait indefinitely
for some perfect solution before starting work to make things less broken.
Nemo