Looking at Encyclopedia of Life differently

There has been a lot of comments on the Encyclopedia of Life in the Wiki community lately. All of them miss the most important point. The point is made by the Encyclopedia of Life itself; it will provide "aggregation and will use mash-up technology and Wiki style editing and accumulation of content".

Key in all this is that the Encyclopedia of life is not only Wiki style editing, it also provides for aggregation and mash up technology. It is the one thing that Wikipedia and Citizendium alike are incapable of. With the functionality MediaWiki provides, you are restricted to copying data into the article and having done that, it loses the connection with its origin in a practical way. This reduces these projects to sources of information because of the functionality.

When you look at the examples on the Encyclopedia of Life website, you find that they have information from many sources and present them together. In this way they provide a composite view on the subject that is considered. The data can remain fresh because once data is changed in the sources it consists of, this can be reflected because of the methodology.

One of the exiting things they provide in their mash up is the connection to old literature. This literature is extremely relevant to taxonomy as the oldest name that described a taxon is the one to be used to describe it. The consequence is that many names that were valid once are not valid anymore. It is interesting to learn how they will manage the linking of old valid names to the newer names. This has other applications as well, when an old paper mentions aspects of a species, it may mean that there is no mapping. It is then of relevance to consider the mapping to a subspecies or a different species that is referred to in the old literature.

Mapping the historical names of taxons in time is a hell of a job but an important job because it opens up the understanding of the old literature. For plants, the IPNI resource is of immense value. If anything, I hope that IPNI will be or become part of the mash-up.

Thanks,
GerardM

Citizendium and licensing

In yet another diatribe Dr Sanger informs us about the differences between Wikipedia and Citizendium.

The thing that struck me most are two things; contributors have to give a non-exclusive license to Citizendium AND the license is now to be the Creative Commons CC-by-nc license. The consequence is that only the Citizendium organisation can license commercial use, obviously for a price. They assume that as it is to be written by experts it will have value. It also means that once licensed, the licensee can do whatever.

When you compare Citizendium with Wikipedia, you have an English only versus a multi-lingual project. You have a project that covers almost everything and a project with a few thousand articles. You have a Free project and a project that is increasingly restrictive. You have a project that informs the world with NPOV information and a project that is to be written by experts.

Really I think Dr Sanger is doing a great job promoting Wikipedia by increasing the differences.

Thanks,
GerardM

NIH Wiki Fair

The National Institutes of Health organised a Wiki fair today. There have been great presentations; the line-up of speakers and subjects was impressive, many of the presentations are on line and the whole presentation can be seen as a video as well ... all 5:41 hours off it...

For Wiki aficionados particularly interesting are a presentation of Dr Larry Sanger, and Dr Barend Mons. Larry is part of the Wikipedia history and Barend is part of the OmegaWiki presence.

Larry's presentation is self serving; he gives a selly presentation about Citizendium and he urges the people from the NIH to join in his project. That is in and off itself OK as he just what he has to do. As the raison d'être of Citizendium is in doing a better job than Wikipedia there are loads of comparisons with Wikipedia.. It is not surprising that you find no nicks when that is your policy, it can not be considered something that is "good" in comparison. Given that Larry finds it relevant to be known as Dr Sanger, I would expect a more scientific approach to his presentation. Given the small size of the project, it is not so strange to find that there is a lot of harmony around. This is very much the experience of all Wiki projects. It has been well documented in many scientific papers and, I am sure is Dr Sanger aware of this.

Being part of the history of Wikipedia and having created Citizendium as a reaction to what is considered "wrong" in Wikipedia means that Citizendium will always be compared to Wikipedia. I think that having started from scratch is daring.. It is the right thing to do. There are certainly more scientists working on Wikipedia, and given that Wikipedia has more than 1000 times more articles, it will be interesting to see what kind of attention this project will get.

Thanks,
GerardM