On Thu, 16 Sep 2004 10:25:29 -0400, Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org> wrote:
Are we
going to have literally thousands of different project then? Why
species in particular? Just off the top of my head I can think of
dozens of other possibilities (such as languages). And why aren't these
being made as wikibooks? When previously it came up that some people
wanted general-purpose articles on food, and other people wanted more
specialist articles specifically on how to cook food (i.e. recipes), the
decision was made that recipes should be done at wikibooks. Why
shouldn't a species reference work be a wikibook?
Species data (like dictionary data, actually) has a specific form, and
applies to millions of items. Rather than comparing this to
'languages', I would compare this to 'book data'. Once again, there
are millions and millions of records with very
clearly-defined fields, which data is the same across all languages. And once
again, there is room for book-wonks to enhance that data with comments
-- "this book initially was assigned ISBN <foo>, but was later
assigned <foo> when printed in compilation form..."
Finally, there *is* a place for a species reference in wikibooks...
but that would call on raw data from wikispecies and transform it into
a narrative, perhaps an instructional one (note for instance the
dichotomous key started by TUF-KAT at
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Dichotomous_key , which would be enhanced
by links to detailed species information at each leaf of the key).
--
+sj+
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