[Taxacom] Google, Wikipedia, and Fungi

[Paul van Rijckevorsel]

From: "Roderic Page" <r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk>
Sent: Wednesday, September 02, 2009 1:13 PM

> As a quick test of whether Wikipedia would not do so well for a less
> "charismatic" group of taxa I looked at the search rank for the 1500
> species of Fungi in Wikipedia 
> http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2009/09/fungi-in-wikipedia.html
>
> If anything, Wikipedia does even better...

***
Well, it cannot be surprising that the fungi present in Wikipedia show up
in Wikipedia; it might be more interesting to extract all the names of the
Dictionary of the Fungi (10th Edition) and see how they fare (this might
have the side effect of raising the Google profile of the Index Fungorum).

These searches suffer from a high degree of circular reasoning, but 
certainly it is true that if you are going to do what Wikipedia does, 
with the same strictures as Wikipedia, then it makes sense to do it 
in Wikipedia rather than elsewhere. This raises the question of why 
EOL has chosen to release its contents under this Creative Commons
license; this cannot be very encouraging to prospective contributors.

Paul