[Taxacom] "Why would you waste your time editing Wikipedia?"

[Shorthouse, David]

> Let's face reality - whatever organism one considers, the number one
> link people will get in Google is pretty much going to be the
> Wikipedia link (as long as the organism is listed in Wikipedia). Now,
> and even more so in the future. Whatever other resources we may
> develop on our own, or as a community, I rather suspect Wikipedia
> will ALWAYS come out as the first link. As such, I do a greater
> public service by working to ensure that Wikipedia contains accurate
> information, since more people in the public will see it.

[David Shorthouse wrote:] 

I disagree here. If you develop good content and have good internal and
external link density, you will ALWAYS come out above Wikipedia. The reason
is simple: If you have good content before it appears in Wikipedia (true for
the majority of the 1.8M species), an eventual Wikipedia page will likely
link to yours. Being first out the gates is usually an advantage. Does that
mean we ought to produce new Wikipedia pages for species that do not yet
have any online content? I'm not so sure.

An altruistic sense of duty is fine and dandy but we work in a landscape
where administrators and funding agencies are watching and doling out funds,
respectively. In today's financial landscape, it is far more fruitful to
develop one's own content either as an individual or as a tight-knit
community with a common goal because there is public visibility. Attribution
& institutional/community branding are mostly lost in Wikipedia. This is
precisely why Google is experimenting with knol (http://knol.google.com); to
re-inject a more human touch into the generation of content.

There have also been a number of criticisms thrown at EOL in this thread.
While much of these criticisms are warranted (and I could add more for other
reasons), the point to take home is that EOL and Wikipedia are not
either/or. If you choose to develop species pages in Wikipedia, charge out
on your own with your own database-driven site, get a Scratchpad (or a
comparable, emergent environment for EOL), etc. then please do! The most
important thing is to get the content out there in a format that can be
shared and re-used. Once the curatorship of EOL species pages is made fully
functional and once we start implementing some taxonomically intelligent
ways of presenting content, the errors due to straight namestring matches
will diminish.

Cheers,

David P. Shorthouse
--------------------------
Encyclopedia of Life - WorkBench
Woods Hole, MA
508-289-7493
dshorthouse at eol.org
http://www.eol.org