[Wikipedia-l] Re: wikispecies

Wed Sep 15 18:23:24 UTC 2004

Gerard Meijssen wrote:

> Well, I can remember that I have tried my darndest to get the 
> en:wikipedia resource "Three of Life" to consider working towards a 
> unified Taxobox that is acceptable to *all* Wikipedia. I was basically 
> ignored with the argument, "see our arguments in the archives it was a 
> hard slug to get this far we do not want any more of this". I have 
> presented arguments about things that were wrong for 
> internationalisation eg [[Animal]]ia in stead of [[Animalia]], I 
> stated that the mentioning of "Bionominal name" does not add anything 
> as it is inherent in "Scientific classification". The only result was 
> "we have voted on this, this is our consensus".
>
So the executive summary I get out of this is "people on en: didn't
like my ideas, so I want to make a separate wiki".

That's why we're concerned about forking; the underlying reasons
seem to be interpersonal conflicts in existing wikis, rather than
a clearcut difference in content.

It would be great to have a common store for language-independent
information, but not only is there a commons to serve just that role,
but without higher-powered database and wiki machinery than is
currently available or being worked on, wikispecies is inevitably
going to be another pile of per-language data that partly duplicates
wikipedia content. Then the board will be faced with the really
enjoyable decision of whether to perpetuate the fork or put an end
to it...

Stan