User talk:Csparr

Hi Cyndy,
As perhaps the single main contributor of taxonomic information presently to Wikispecies, I hope that we can cooperate and aim for CONSISTENCY and RELIABILITY of information. I would be interested in your comment on the standard I am now trying to raise Wikispecies to, e.g., see my pages Homepuraea and included species. My approach is to reference everything explicitly, and provide links wherever possible to pdfs and other sites. This means that my pages are in principle independently verifiable.
Cheers, Stho002 22:54, 18 March 2009 (UTC)
PS: my approach is also to make taxa searchable under synonymous names, and do a search for Edalus to see how I handle homonymy.

Wikispecies:Village Pump discussion

Hello Cindy - I noticed you added some contributions to the discussion of EOL at the Village Pump. I presume you noted that I commented on some EOL errors remaining uncorrected despite my repeated submission of these errors. How can these errors be corrected? Some of them are quite serious. If you prefer to contact privately please do so via "E-mail this user" - thanks, MPF 22:45, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

Hello Cindy - I hope you come back and continue contributing here :-) There is a great deal that can be accomplished through better collaboration. Regards, Sj 04:55, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, there are way too many places to monitor so I haven't kept up. In most cases, the errors you are probably talking about on EOL are ones we inherited from Catalogue of Life. If you find such errors, the best thing to do is leave a comment on the page on EOL -- we do monitor those and try to direct the concerns to the offending partner. Keep in mind that we have 2 million pages and only one staff member spending just a few hours a week on this. We are still gearing up our network of curators, and we are still trying to encourage our source databases to make the necessary changes. I'm sorry it takes longer than corrections on Wikispecies. For that matter, I encourage you to register Wikispecies as a content partner -- go to http://www.eol.org/content_partner -- then we can set up to harvest the Wikispecies hierarchy so that users can use that to navigate EOL. It shouldn't be hard. --Csparr (talk) 19:19, 23 March 2010 (UTC)

An update on harvesting Wikispecies. I've been interested in this for a while and recently there have been a couple of programmers trying to do this in a large scale, repeatable way. They've run into some inconsistencies that make the data a bit messy. I am sure that the problems are fixable so I'm hoping that experienced Wikispecies editors can spread the word on what needs to be done. There are still many names which are not organism names, or names which are not entered in a consistent fashion (for example names which could not be parsed -- http://betula.mbl.edu/gna_test/wikispecies/problematic_names.csv). Also several thousand entries are at the root of the hierarchy because the script was not able to find their placement http://betula.mbl.edu/gna_test/wikispecies/wikispecies_roots.txt. Ideas for how to fix the script or the pages are welcome. Csparr (talk) 13:35, 20 February 2012 (UTC)