[Wikipedia-l] Summary & questions was: Re: Taxoboxes.

Thu Aug 26 01:19:19 UTC 2004

Marco Krohn wrote:

>
>[...] "trivia 
>information" which exists in Wikipedia articles, but surely will not part of 
>any wikispecies article.
>
>If we strongly limit the Wikipedia "depth" for ToL articles, we still will at 
>some point have >100.000 articles, where - except trivia information - the 
>Wikipedia articles will be more or the less subset of the information which 
>is contained in wikispecies.
>
Just to cherrypick :-), I'm not sure that it's quite accurate to say
that specialists are not interested in "trivia" or connections to pop
culture; consider how popular clownfish experts got a week after
Finding Nemo came out, or look at Howard Scott Gentry's book on
agaves, where a number of difficult species identification problems
are shown to be intertwined with tequila consumption, wealthy
European plant collectors, and Yucatan seaport history. Look
closely and you'll see FishBase has a fish-on-stamps section...

In a way, wikispecies is seeming more like a cut-to-the-chase for
people who already know the background ("what are the species of
blind cavefish in Oklahoma?" in response to "what's that white
thing doing down there, a hundred miles outside its range?!?" :-) ).

Stan