[Taxacom] Wikispecies is not a database: part 3 (after thinking about it!)

[Stephen Thorpe]

To your first point, I don't disagree per se. The challenge though,  
and I am working on it, is to make it self evident when a Wikispecies  
page is reliable and when it isn't. I have two broad approaches: (1)  
extensive and explicit referencing to allow for verifiability (may be  
difficult in practice, but could be done); and (2) signing off  
completed pages to distinguish them from possibly incomplete pages. If  
you flagged the incomplete pages instead, then the user would know  
what not to rely on, but would have nothing TO RELY ON!

To your second point, I DO disgree per se! Once any information has  
been put on a wiki, it cannot be permanently removed, and the edit  
history is preserved. The original edits are easily restored. At any  
rate, vandalistic whims are very unlikely to make a significant impact  
- you would need an army all working together faster than they could  
be blocked! What you describe is just a "negative spin". The reality  
is that open source allows for peer review by anybody at any time, and  
the surviving edit will be the one that can be made most convincing by  
way of literature citations and links...

Stephen

Quoting Jim Croft <jim.croft at gmail.com>:

> On Sun, Aug 9, 2009 at 11:52 AM, Stephen  
> Thorpe<s.thorpe at auckland.ac.nz> wrote:
>> Put it another way, Wikispecies already contains better information on
>> some taxa than any other available secondary source, i.e., certain
>> things in other sources are outdated and/or simply incorrect, so
>> looking at Wikispecies will give you information that is closer to the
>> actual truth. This is quite independent of "standards".
>
> And in some instances it contains worse; or worse than worse, nothing.
>  This is a cheap shot, but so is the above.  It is easy to find
> missing, incomplete, outdated or erroneous data in any data source of
> substance.
>
>> Also, even if there is money available in these so-called "troubled
>> economic times", do we really want to pay for a huge paper chain of
>> beauracrats to get a new name from a publication to an available
>> database, when anybody can just spend 5 minutes to put it on
>> Wikispecies?
>
> And *anybody* can spend 5 minutes taking it away again on a whim.
>
> Both of these counterpoints indicate, at least to me, that both
> approaches, and possibly others not mentioned, are needed.
>
> jim
>
> --
> _________________
> Jim Croft ~ jim.croft at gmail.com ~ +61-2-62509499 ~
> http://www.google.com/profiles/jim.croft
> ... in pursuit of the meaning of leaf ...
> ... 'All is leaf' ('Alles ist Blatt') - Goethe
>



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