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[Taxacom] Wikispecies as an open alternative to Catalogue ofLife

Stephen Thorpe stephen_thorpe at yahoo.co.nz
Thu Dec 15 16:23:19 CST 2011 

some of the comments by Paul are arguable, but perhaps only the last really needs?clarification: 
there are two kinds of nitwit: (1) the kind that disregards the rules; and (2) the kind that plays by the rules, using them as a weapon to defend their own nitwitious contributions!
clearly, type (1) nitwits are relatively easy to deal with, using the rules as a weapon against them
type (2) nitwits, on the other hand, are less frequent but more problematic, but more so on Wikipedia than on Wikispecies (which has more tightly structured format), and more so in certain areas of study (eg. philosophy) that are not so tightly bound to verifiable facts
?
Stephen


________________________________
From: Paul van Rijckevorsel <dipteryx at freeler.nl>
To: taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu 
Sent: Thursday, 15 December 2011 9:55 PM
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Wikispecies as an open alternative to Catalogue ofLife

This is a recurring topic, but some quick points:
* it may be that Wikispecies already is better than the
Catalogue of Life, but is that really an achievement?
* Wikimedia does not have a NOR-policy; the NOR-
policy belongs to Wikipedia. There are projects in
Wikimedia that embrace OR (Wikiversity often being
mentioned as an example), and in fact Wikispecies
also is an OR-project.
* I agree with Stephen Thorpe that there is no technical
reason why there could not be multiple competing
classifications in Wikipedia. In some versions of
Wikipedia (including the English one) groups of users
have chosen to allow only one classification, but this
is a deliberate and idiosyncratic choice, and in fact is
pretty explicitly disallowed by central Wikipedia-policies
(notably the NPOV-policy).
* " ... incompetent nitwits ... deleting or vandalizing
legitimate contributions - but you may need to act
as the enforcer yourself!" is highly unrealistic; anybody
doing so is likely to have the OWN-policy thrown in his
face. Actually, the " ... incompetent nitwits ... deleting or
vandalizing legitimate contributions ..." are the reason
most commonly given by competent, long-time editors
who leave Wikipedia.

Paul

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Stephen Thorpe" <stephen_thorpe at yahoo.co.nz>
To: "Doug Yanega" <dyanega at ucr.edu>; <TAXACOM at MAILMAN.NHM.KU.EDU>
Sent: Wednesday, December 14, 2011 11:56 PM
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Wikispecies as an open alternative to Catalogue
ofLife


I suspect that Wikimedia is as "political" as any other institution, at
least in some ways. However, (1) Wikispecies exists; and (2) it seems stable
(very rarely does the site go down for a short time).

The rationale behind the site Species-ID explains some of the concerns about
Wikimedia sites: the scientists who developed Species-ID didn't like
anonymous contributions, and also didn't like the NOR policy of Wikimedia.
The latter does give Species-ID a significant advantage over Wikimedia sites
FOR SOME PURPOSES. However, if what we are interested in doing is just the
integration of published biodiversity data, with names linked to the
literature using BHL, etc., then Wikispecies is a great place to do this,
though, for some reason, Rod page seems to think that his BioStor, and also
Mendeley are better places.

>From my perspective, the major drawback of the Wikispecies/Wikipedia
>approach to classification is that it really does not accommodate for
>multiple competing classifications in the same interface. That is, you
>cannot present the same taxon as both a
family (following authority A) and a subfamily (following authority B),
etc.<

actually, it is possible! At least it is easy to indicate alternative views.
Other projects suffer from the same drawback, so it isn't really a problem
unique to Wikimedia sites. Perhaps if Doug could indicate an actual example,
we can see how we might handle it?

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. On the other
hand, EoL links to Wikipedia articles by capturing them as they are at a
time, and then displaying them as yellow until they are "validated" by one
of their curators (which rarely happens). In this context, it seems rather
disingenuous to avoid possible updates and improvements of the article ...

call me cynical, but I still maintain that reinventing the same
infrastructure over and over is seen as a good easy way to spend research
money (after institutions have "recouped their overheads"), which makes the
Wikimedia sites unattractive precisely because they are independently
funded. In other words, if scientific institutions don't create their own
versions of Wikispecies, their employees are going to have to do something
much more difficult (e.g. taxonomy) in order to keep the same money flowing
through the system ... and what are all those GBIF and EOL people going to
do to make ends meet?? Rubberstamping is great work, if you can get it,
though you might suffer from RSI in your elbow!!

another crucial issue is that no system is perfect. Yes, any nitwit can edit
Wikimedia, BUT errors are effectively locked into other sites like EoL (when
will they get around to fixing this (http://eol.org/pages/478954/overview),
for example, and the "trusted" rubberstamp on the misidentified image really
annoys me!)

Stephen


________________________________
From: Doug Yanega <dyanega at ucr.edu>
To: TAXACOM at MAILMAN.NHM.KU.EDU
Sent: Thursday, 15 December 2011 11:12 AM
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Wikispecies as an open alternative to Catalogue of
Life

There are a large number of "pro" arguments supporting the use of
Wikispecies as a legitimate portal for biodiversity knowledge, not
the least of which is that it has not only a robust infrastructure
and flexible (and utilitarian) interface, but a funding source that
is, presumably, not subject to politics or struggles for external
support. It is basically a no-strings-attached gift to the scientific
community, and we are free to make of it whatever we'd like. That so
few scientists seem to exploit this seems more of an issue of
perception than of reality; folks seem to believe that any work they
contribute will inevitably be deleted or vandalized by incompetent
nitwits, and this is simply untrue. The concept of a wiki is that if
you are a contributor, you are ALSO a participant. That is, if you
are serious about your contributions, then you remain involved
*after* you have made your contribution, rather than just plopping
something down, and then going away forever and hoping no one touches
it. Wikis are self-policing, but they also have formal editorial
policies in place, and mechanisms for ensuring that those policies
are enforced. That includes policies to prevent incompetent nitwits
from deleting or vandalizing legitimate contributions - but you may
need to act as the enforcer yourself!
If one can get past the perception of wikis as the
playgrounds of vandals, and recognize them for the potentially
valuable resources they are, there are only a few significant "con"
arguments, and if there is to be a debate about the utility of wikis,
it should focus on these *real* drawbacks, rather than imaginary ones.
>From my perspective, the major drawback of the
Wikispecies/Wikipedia approach to classification is that it really
does not accommodate for multiple competing classifications in the
same interface. That is, you cannot present the same taxon as both a
family (following authority A) and a subfamily (following authority
B), etc. This has significant consequences, some good, and some bad.
Since taxon pages are not indpendent of the ranks they are assigned,
there can only be ONE overall classification framework, which would
be ideal for the user community, but the taxonomic community is
unlikely to be able to agree upon it (should all interested parties
become involved). There is too little consensus and stability
involving higher-level ranks for a single master classification -
however *desirable* it may be to have one - to be unanimously
accepted. It is one thing for an idiosyncratic taxonomist to publish
idiosyncratic classifications and then pretend that their work is
meeting with limited acceptance, but it is another if they are
directly confronted by a mass of dissenters who refuse to acknowledge
their work, and maintain the "official" classification according to
consensus (where "limited acceptance" translates to nothing, since
the hierarchy is all-or-nothing). It would make the disputes in the
community less academic, and more personal, so such an approach is
virtually guaranteed to cause greater friction and alienation - and,
therefore, meet with resistance, especially from anyone whose
concepts are not mainstream. At its best, this level of consensus can
be viewed as a natural extension of peer review, and entirely
positive and desirable, but at its worst, it can amount to
censorship, which is not desirable. I can't see any easy way to set
things up so the former is permitted but the latter is not, which
therefore puts the entire enterprise at risk of losing support -
thus, the "single classification" model has to be treated as a
drawback so long as this issue of censorship is a legitimate concern.
John Grehan's point regarding phylogenies is, in part, not
directly applicable (since you can have ranks and nested groups
without an explicit phylogeny), but certainly along similar lines.
But just because you can't please everyone, does that mean we can't
ever even attempt a consensus classification?

Sincerely,
-- 

Doug Yanega Dept. of Entomology Entomology Research Museum
Univ. of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0314 skype: dyanega
phone: (951) 827-4315 (standard disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)
http://cache.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html
"There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82

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