[Taxacom] Google, Wikipedia, and Fungi

[bti at dsmz.de]

Dear Rod,
Try this with the names of prokaryotes. My guess is that google wins  
hands down and in the case of names published post 1980 a good bet  
would be that one of the top ten would be the link to the IJSEM/IJSB  
in one form or other. Similarly if one were to put in all validly  
published prokaryote species names in Wikipedia they would also  
ultimately link back to the IJSEM/IJSB at some point. Other top 10  
hits could be Pubmed, LPSN and the collections that hold the type  
strain. They would also link back to the IJSEM/IJSB. This is due to  
our "registration" system, but puts a different slant on things.

NCBI tells me that the IJSB/IJSEM is reference 25,000 times plus.

Brian

Quoting Roderic Page <r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk>:

> Dear Paul,
>
> On 2 Sep 2009, at 13:25, Paul van Rijckevorsel wrote:
>
>> 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).
>
> I'm not testing whether the Fungi in Wikipedia show up in Wikipedia,
> I'm testing whether for a given taxon name the Wikipedia page for that
> taxon appears in the top 10 of Google searches.
>
> For a given name we have three outcomes:
>
> 1. The name is in Wikipedia and the Wikipedia page appears in the top
> 10 Google search results
>
> 2. The name is in Wikipedia but the Wikipedia page isn't in the top 10
>
> 3. The name isn't in Wikipedia
>
> Outcome 3 isn't interesting, unless one is testing the coverage of
> Wikipedia.
>
> If outcome 2 were common, then one could argue that there's not much
> point getting involved in Wikipedia as nobody would find our hard work.
>
> So far, outcome 1 seems to the most common -- if a name has a
> Wikipedia page then Google points to that page as one of the top 10
> results (often the first hit).
>
> To me tis suggests that if one is going to make an effort to get basic
> taxonomic and biodiversity data online, then Wikipedia is the place to
> do it.
>
> Regards
>
> Rod
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>>
>> 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
>>
>>
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>>
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>> The Taxacom archive going back to 1992 may be searched with either
>> of these methods:
>>
>> (1) http://taxacom.markmail.org
>>
>> Or (2) a Google search specified as:  site:mailman.nhm.ku.edu/
>> pipermail/taxacom  your search terms here
>>
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------
> Roderic Page
> Professor of Taxonomy
> DEEB, FBLS
> Graham Kerr Building
> University of Glasgow
> Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK
>
> Email: r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk
> Tel: +44 141 330 4778
> Fax: +44 141 330 2792
> AIM: rodpage1962 at aim.com
> Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1112517192
> Twitter: http://twitter.com/rdmpage
> Blog: http://iphylo.blogspot.com
> Home page: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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> The Taxacom archive going back to 1992 may be searched with either  
> of these methods:
>
> (1) http://taxacom.markmail.org
>
> Or (2) a Google search specified as:   
> site:mailman.nhm.ku.edu/pipermail/taxacom  your search terms here
>



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