[Taxacom] Wikispecies as an open alternative to Catalogue ofLife

[John Grehan]

Another problem with 'global hierarchies' is that they can end up being exclusive of minority reconstructions and treat the accepted phylogeny as somehow having the true reality. This occurs in the Tree of Life project which is based only on a molecular reconstruction for humans and the great apes (I tried proposing the representation of both trees but that was dismissed). People may have the power of being selective about phylogeny, but it can misrepresent the reality of phylogenetic research in at least some cases.

John Grehan

-----Original Message-----
From: taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu [mailto:taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of Stephen Thorpe
Sent: Wednesday, December 14, 2011 4:36 PM
To: dmozzherin at gmail.com
Cc: TAXACOM
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Wikispecies as an open alternative to Catalogue ofLife

you think GBIF, EOL, etc. care about data quality?!



________________________________
From: Dmitry Mozzherin <dmozzherin at eol.org>
To: Stephen Thorpe <stephen_thorpe at yahoo.co.nz> 
Cc: TAXACOM <taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu> 
Sent: Thursday, 15 December 2011 10:24 AM
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Wikispecies as an open alternative to Catalogue of Life

Hi Stephen,

I probably see only small part of "what's in it for me" puzzle. A few
possible incentives I can imagine --

- better quality control which leads to better quality of data at Wikispecies
- new level of acceptance of work done by Wikispecies contributors
- usage of Wikispecies data by sites like GBIF, EOL, etc. which leads
to a better visibility of your work
- more contributors to the Wikispecies project (people who depend on
Wikispecies classification and data will have incentive to fix
problems and add data)


On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 3:27 PM, Stephen Thorpe
<stephen_thorpe at yahoo.co.nz> wrote:
> Great idea, obviously! However, I suspect you will run into a "what's in it
> for me" brick wall ...
>
> Stephen
>
> From: Dmitry Mozzherin <dmozzherin at eol.org>
> To: TAXACOM <taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu>
> Sent: Thursday, 15 December 2011 6:00 AM
> Subject: [Taxacom] Wikispecies as an open alternative to Catalogue of Life
>
> I was playing last couple of days with conversion of Wikispecies data
> into DarwinCore archive format. What did strike me that Wikispecies
> format is almost formal enough to compile into a full-fledged
> classification which could be widely used the same way as Catalogue of
> Life does. It uses recursive templates as a basis for classification
> information and if applied consistently it would be possible with a
> little effort to assemble it to a hierarchy. Several people (most
> vocal is probably Rod Page) expressed a desire to have such an open
> system as an alternative to a more closed and guarded Catalogue of
> Life. I see no technical problems for Wikispecies to become one. I is
> possible to write scripts to atomize a subset of Wikispecies data and
> organize it into a classification tree. Such a tree would have a
> publicly editable hierarchy, references, synonyms, vernacular names.
> The scripts could also serve as a quality control for the Wikispecies.
> And eventually most of the pages in the system can become harvestable.
>
> Would it be nice to make Wikispecies a basis for a community editable
> wiki-based hierarchy of a global scope?
>
> Dima
>
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