[Foundation-l] Wikispecies

[teun spaans]

Dear Klaus,

You refer to http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:Gnom/Wikispecies, which
refers to Wikispecies:Village pump/Archive 24092005, a page which has been
deleted. The discussion on
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:L%C3%B6schkandidaten/11._September_2006#Wikispecies_.28gel.C3.B6scht.29refers
to a page on the german wiki, not to wikispecies. So I doubt you have
a point with 4 old references. From your references I also dont see a
permanent boycot of wikispecis by the german community, though

Personally i would not shed a tear when wikispecies is shredded, its
information is usually outdated - if present. And then I am not speaking
about the support of multiple taxonomies. Commons does (see for example
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cyclamen).
Imho wikispecies has a number of problems:
* It is text based, not db-structure based.
* Allthough often references are given at the bottom of a page, it is not
clear what is coming from what. See for example
http://species.wikimedia.org/wiki/Aspidytidae.
* Some species even have no reference at all, for example
http://species.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ateles_paniscus
* Some referenced sources are not scientific publications.
* The target audience is not clear: scientific researcher? student?
interested laymen?
* Allthough I feel high respect for the people working at species,
information is soon outdated in this field. I feel sincere doubts about ever
being able to maintain a project like this by a limited number of volunteers
without substantial support from the scientific community.

For these reasons I would support a closure vote at meta.

kind regards,
teun spaans


On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 2:18 PM, Klaus Graf <klausgraf at googlemail.com>wrote:

> I cannot understand why WMF is unable to terminate Wikispecies which
> is a zero quality project. See
>
> http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:Gnom/Wikispecies (also in English)
>
> Klaus Graf
>
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