[Taxacom] Wikispecies is not a database

[Roderic Page]

Some quick thoughts on some of the comments in this thread.

Although I'm probably guilty of this, given the subject heading, I  
don't want to over egg the difference between Wikis and databases.  
Essentially, if you have an editable database that retains a versioned  
history of all changes made, you have a wiki (just add community  
editing). What I'm arguing is for more structured wikis (or, if you  
prefer, community editable databases).

Paul Kirk wrote:

"In the real world (outside taxonomy) what are the primary tools used  
by publishers, governments, banks, insurance companies, the retail  
trade etc etc etc to store and manage content - it aint Wikis its  
databases/datawarehouses ... I think there is a message there ... ;-)"

Well, enterprise wikis are big business (http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/ 
  ), so one could argue that when it comes to semi-structured  
information, wikis have a clear role.

Stephen Thorpe is arguing that we should use Wikispecies more. I have  
sympathy with this, but only if Wikispecies did some key things:

1. Make more use of identifiers (such as DOIs and Handles for  
literature, LSIDs for names, etc.)

2. Added some of Semantic Mediawiki's ability to do queries and add  
some key functionality (like compute all names a person has authored,  
rather than type this in manually).

Tony Rees (comment on my blog post http://tinyurl.com/lfy2hl ) lists  
what databases can do. Much of this can also be provided by wikis, if  
they have the appropriate bits added (e.g., Semantic Mediawiki)

Bob Mesibov stuck his neck out and said that the

"underlying assumption in this exchange is just plain foolishness,  
namely this one: -- A single, complete, online resource for all  
taxonomic information is desirable."

Hmmm, let's imagine the web without Google. Imagine how much fun that  
would be. I'd suggest that if we don't have a decent aggregation of  
what we know, then we can kiss the field good buy (or, maybe we've  
done that already...?)

Regards

Rod

---------------------------------------------------------
Roderic Page
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DEEB, FBLS
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