[Taxacom] Wikispecies as an open alternative to Catalogue ofLife

[Paul van Rijckevorsel]

I am glad to see agreement that creating a Tree-of-Life,
an all-encompassing classification, is necessarily Original
Research. In this respect Wikispecies is indeed an OR-project.
This is not necessarily bad, but the more "creation" goes into it,
the more room there is for disagreement.

I don't really see that Wikispecies needs to include an in-depth
classification, after all, it is supposed to be a directory of species,
and, on the face of it, does not really need to include more depth
than up to family, or perhaps order.

Speaking in general, I don't particularly understand this compulsion
of building complete classifications and the religious fervour
with which these classifications are then pushed upon the
unsuspecting public. Building complete classifications is best
left to the Ken Kinmans of the world, puttering in their own
corner [no offense meant to Ken Kinman], and then putting
out their own books, websites, etc.

Paul

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Stephen Thorpe" <stephen_thorpe at yahoo.co.nz>
To: "Curtis Clark" <lists at curtisclark.org>; <taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu>
Sent: Friday, December 16, 2011 5:08 AM
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Wikispecies as an open alternative to Catalogue
ofLife


>Is this a general principle of Wikispecies, or only your personal
>philosophy?

Officially only my personal philosophy, but it is hard to see how
Wikispecies can avoid it, given the way it is structured ...

>It also necessarily involves a *lot* of original research, ...

again, although officially OR is not encouraged on Wikispecies, how can it
be avoided when we have to stitch together info from numerous different (and
sometimes partly or wholly inconsistent) sources and shoe-horn them all into
a single classification?

>I'm not saying that any of this is bad, but it's a really different goal
>from having a literature repository

yes, but I didn't say that the only goal was to be a literature repository!
The goal is to be a taxonomically structured and integrated bibliography of
life (with links to the literature wherever possible) ...

Stephen