Wikispecies talk:PR

How about adding an explanation/litteral translation of the latin names in the suggested content? --Circeus 06:02, 7 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Extinct/Fossil Taxa?

This site should include extinct/fossil taxa! — The preceding unsigned comment was added by Ortelius (talk • contribs) 17:36, 11 February 2005.

It does have some. See taxa marked with a "†" like Archaeopteryx --Georgeryp 15:25, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Publicize on wikipedia

Simply adding links to appropriate pages from wikipedia will quickly turn wikispecies into a valuable resoiurce.

Ready for Release?

I am not sure wether it is a good idea to announce WikiSpecies project at this early stage. There is much justified criticism. Why not call it WikiSpecies beta, to make people understand that it's future is not yet clear and pronounce it later. --84.140.143.125 21:03, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

This page is misleading and obsolete

I would just like to point out that pretty much everything on this page is obsolete.

The current philosophy for Wikispecies seems to be best summarized by this comment from the main page discussion (22 July 2005): "Wikispecies is not intended to have any prose, whatsoever. It is not a content fork, simply a directory for use by all Wikipedias and interlinking."

This view is factually supported by the removal of all explanatory text from the Plantae page on 28 Mar 2005, with the comment "content on hold for move to wikipedia".

So apparently the Morphology, Genetics, Physioloy, Behavior, Resilience, Phylogeny, Habitat, Economic significance, Distribution, Conservation, and Other information are now actively discouraged from being put on this site. It will never be "a teaching tool for middleschool teachers", or anything else other than a sterilized list of obscure scientific terms lacking definitions.

--Sharkey 20:01, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

Sharkey said: "...Morphology, Genetics, Physioloy[sic], ... are now actively discouraged from being put on this site...". Very true, because such content would require translations and therefore is better placed on each language-specific Wikipedia. Wikispecies attempts to be as language-neutral as possible (similar to Wikimedia Commons) so the information that can be covered here is necessarily limited. However, Wikispecies has the potential to become the common source for Latin-based taxon hierarchies (at least for Wikimedia Foundation projects) and therefore, could serve as the backbone of any "teaching tool" that centers around organism classification, taxonomy, phylogenetic relationships, etc. --Georgeryp 15:00, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Feature Suggestions

One feature which would be really useful and wouldn't depart greatly from the general mission of the Wiki, but would take either a lot of elbow grease or some slick robot work would be an entry at each taxonomic level that shows how many taxa of each level below it (or, at least, how many species) are below it.

So, for example, the entry for mammals might show 3,000 species accounted for, and ideally, also a entry from the literature stating that as of "June 23, 2007" there are 4,056 species of mammals in the literature.

This feature has several virtues. One is that it would allow a quick assessment on a regular basis of how complete the Wiki is. Do we have 10% or 30% or 90% of arachnid species listed? Another is that it would allow for easier identification of biodiversity.

A second issue is what formatting issues apply in cases of disputed or unresolved taxonomies. Is there a way to, at least, flag taxonomies that are currently not nearly unanimous? The dates of the cited authority helps some -- but, there are some recent taxonomies say, from the 1990s, that are never the less nearly unanimous (e.g. some of the new vertebrate species discovered), and others that are very much disputed and in transition.

Ohwilleke 13:59, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

I agree. Some counts, calculated automatically maybe through changes to the MediaWiki software itself (see "What links here" below), could go a long way to determine where the largest gaps are. Although, since this site currently covers less than 6% of known species (Given 100,000 pages here - many of which aren't even species-level, compared to the 1.8 million species on Earth), one could just assume most branches are incomplete ;-)

You can get an idea of the number of species documented under a given taxon by using the "What links here" link on the left margin on either a taxon page or the template page for that taxon (e.g. Template:Canis) assuming all the species pages use the template. Just paste the list of links on the "What links here" page into a text editor that gives a line number count and exclude items outside the main namespace (e.g. Pages that begin with "User:", "Talk:", "Template:", etc).

As for disputed taxonomy, I'd guess those can be tagged with {{NSF}} --Georgeryp 23:15, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

Idea...

Why don't we all add a link to our signatures in different websites? Sort of like that stupid Rick Roll thing, but for Wikispecies!

I'm totally insane. I know.

208.108.145.30 13:51, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

PR?

What does "PR" stand for? :/ ANDROBETA (talk) 16:37, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

I know it's a bit late, but PR stands for Public Relations. Habstinat (talk) 01:17, 19 May 2012 (UTC)