[Taxacom] Wikispecies as an open alternative to Catalogue of Life

[Kim van der Linde]

Stephen,


On 12/14/2011 5:56 PM, Stephen Thorpe wrote:
 > I reiterate that full edit histories are preserved for Wikimedia
 > articles, and these can be linked to by way of stable URLs. Vandalism
 > can only "put a new sheet of paper on the pile", it cannot alter the
 > history. Hence, if you were to cite a Wikimedia article in a serious
 > scientific context, you would site the current version not qua
 > current version, but via the stable URL to that version of the
 > article in the article history. This link would then be unaffected by
 > any subsequent edits, by vandals or anyone else.

This is dubious. Yes, the edit history of the taxon itself is stored in 
the edit history of the taxon, but the information of the transcluded 
templates, which are used to code the higher ranks, are stored in as 
many pages as there are ranks. Hence, for scientific publication, you 
need to cite ALL ranks to preserve the whole ranking of a single taxon. ~~~

Kim
P.S., the ~~~~ is an wikimedia insider joke)