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Why can't we have $12.5 million for Wikispecies?
See
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2009/aug/21/encyclopedia-life-species
Where's the problem with Wikispecies?
Moreover, EOL received 33.000 images from individual contributors
(http://www.flickr.com/groups/encyclopedia_of_life), Wikispecies didn't.
So, why is EOL succeeding, and Wikispecies seemingly doesn't?
Is it useful to have two overlapping projects like these?

Nemo

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Re: Why can't we have $12.5 million for Wikispecies? [ In reply to ]
Very good question. I'd say two major factors:
1. Support from scientists. Founded by one of the best-known scientists
alive, the EOL automatically gained support from the biological sciences in
academia. Support from the scientific/academic community is the only reason
their largely single-author system has flourished in my opinion.

2. They have way more photos because they accept non-commercial licenses.
That alone garners way more possible submissions, since the vast majority of
CC work on Flickr is doesn't allow commercial use. (At least that's the way
it was the last time I looked at a breakdown.)

Steven Walling

On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 8:11 PM, Nemo_bis <nemowiki@gmail.com> wrote:

> See
>
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2009/aug/21/encyclopedia-life-species
> Where's the problem with Wikispecies?
> Moreover, EOL received 33.000 images from individual contributors
> (http://www.flickr.com/groups/encyclopedia_of_life), Wikispecies didn't.
> So, why is EOL succeeding, and Wikispecies seemingly doesn't?
> Is it useful to have two overlapping projects like these?
>
> Nemo
>
> _______________________________________________
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Re: Why can't we have $12.5 million for Wikispecies? [ In reply to ]
I would really like WikiSpecies to improve their visibility in the
community. Sadly enough, the interwiki-links from Wikispecies to other
projects are already insufficient. Given that we have all those
tax-box-templates I always think that it should be an easy task to write
bots to make links between the projects. I would also like to see folks
from WikiSpecies to present their projects on SignPost and Wikimania.

Ting

Steven Walling wrote:
> Very good question. I'd say two major factors:
> 1. Support from scientists. Founded by one of the best-known scientists
> alive, the EOL automatically gained support from the biological sciences in
> academia. Support from the scientific/academic community is the only reason
> their largely single-author system has flourished in my opinion.
>
> 2. They have way more photos because they accept non-commercial licenses.
> That alone garners way more possible submissions, since the vast majority of
> CC work on Flickr is doesn't allow commercial use. (At least that's the way
> it was the last time I looked at a breakdown.)
>
> Steven Walling
>
> On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 8:11 PM, Nemo_bis <nemowiki@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>> See
>>
>> http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2009/aug/21/encyclopedia-life-species
>> Where's the problem with Wikispecies?
>> Moreover, EOL received 33.000 images from individual contributors
>> (http://www.flickr.com/groups/encyclopedia_of_life), Wikispecies didn't.
>> So, why is EOL succeeding, and Wikispecies seemingly doesn't?
>> Is it useful to have two overlapping projects like these?
>>
>> Nemo
>>
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>>
>>
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--
Ting

Ting's Blog: http://wingphilopp.blogspot.com/


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Re: Why can't we have $12.5 million for Wikispecies? [ In reply to ]
On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 1:23 PM, Steven Walling<steven.walling@gmail.com> wrote:
> Very good question. I'd say two major factors:
> 1. Support from scientists. Founded by one of the best-known scientists
> alive, the EOL automatically gained support from the biological sciences in
> academia. Support from the scientific/academic community is the only reason
> their largely single-author system has flourished in my opinion.

Why cant we have this?

It would be nice to see board seats going to professional/academic
leaders in the fields for each of our smaller projects. This would
bring expertise, connections, focus, and funding.

--
John Vandenberg

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Re: Why can't we have $12.5 million for Wikispecies? [ In reply to ]
John Vandenberg, 26/08/2009 12:07:
> On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 1:23 PM, Steven Walling<steven.walling@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Very good question. I'd say two major factors:
>> 1. Support from scientists. Founded by one of the best-known scientists
>> alive, the EOL automatically gained support from the biological sciences in
>> academia. Support from the scientific/academic community is the only reason
>> their largely single-author system has flourished in my opinion.
>
> Why cant we have this?

I think that at this point we can't hope to do better than EOL, so «If
you can't beat them join them»: we should evaluate if and how much
Wikispecies (and Commons, which has great pictures of many species) can
contribute to EOL content (the main problem here can be that they're
mainly CC-BY while we are CC-BY-SA, but their licenses are very flexible
– even too much, indeed).
Wikispecies could benefit of a "jump on the bandwagon" effect.

Nemo

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Re: Why can't we have $12.5 million for Wikispecies? [ In reply to ]
On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 8:23 PM, Nemo_bis<nemowiki@gmail.com> wrote:
> John Vandenberg, 26/08/2009 12:07:
>> On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 1:23 PM, Steven Walling<steven.walling@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Very good question. I'd say two major factors:
>>> 1. Support from scientists. Founded by one of the best-known scientists
>>> alive, the EOL automatically gained support from the biological sciences in
>>> academia. Support from the scientific/academic community is the only reason
>>> their largely single-author system has flourished in my opinion.
>>
>> Why cant we have this?
>
> I think that at this point we can't hope to do better than EOL, so «If
> you can't beat them join them»: we should evaluate if and how much
> Wikispecies (and Commons, which has great pictures of many species) can
> contribute to EOL content (the main problem here can be that they're
> mainly CC-BY while we are CC-BY-SA, but their licenses are very flexible
> – even too much, indeed).
> Wikispecies could benefit of a "jump on the bandwagon" effect.

I agree; EOL has eclipsed WikiSpecies in many respects. They have
nearly caught up on the number of taxonomic entries, but their
experience is far better, primarily because they have links to
pagescans on [[Biodiversity Heritage Library]].

However most of the information in EOL is just facts, and there in the
public domain, and we should be able to syncronise the two sets of
data. As a result, the "wiki" will gradually become as complete as
the others, and time will tell whether a community will continue to
find the wiki useful.

I doubt that there is much that WikiSpecies can "give" to EOL, but it
would be good to hear from WikiSpecies people as there may be some
parts of the project which are especially detailed. (I couldnt quickly
find any "featured" content on WikiSpecies.) As you say, Commons can
provide current images, and Wikisource can organise proofread
transcriptions of the bibliographies.

--
John Vandenberg

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Re: Why can't we have $12.5 million for Wikispecies? [ In reply to ]
Nemo_bis <nemowiki@...> writes:
> See
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2009/aug/21/encyclopedia-life-species
> Where's the problem with Wikispecies?
> Moreover, EOL received 33.000 images from individual contributors
> (http://www.flickr.com/groups/encyclopedia_of_life), Wikispecies didn't.
> So, why is EOL succeeding, and Wikispecies seemingly doesn't?

EOL is an encyclopedia, Wikispecies is just a raw taxonomy, which is totally
useless to the average reader. It is also useless to most readers interested in
taxonomies, because it lacks the software features to extract that. It is in a
similar position to Wiktionary: a project about relations between things that
totally lacks the concept of relations on the software level. That is like
publishing text in the form of JPG files. If you are one of the few people
specifically interested in taxonomies, you will probably use something that
allows you to query and extract the relational data.


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Re: Why can't we have $12.5 million for Wikispecies? [ In reply to ]
On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 10:37 PM, Tisza Gergő<gtisza@gmail.com> wrote:
> Nemo_bis <nemowiki@...> writes:
>> See
>> http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2009/aug/21/encyclopedia-life-species
>> Where's the problem with Wikispecies?
>> Moreover, EOL received 33.000 images from individual contributors
>> (http://www.flickr.com/groups/encyclopedia_of_life), Wikispecies didn't.
>> So, why is EOL succeeding, and Wikispecies seemingly doesn't?
>
> EOL is an encyclopedia, Wikispecies is just a raw taxonomy, which is totally
> useless to the average reader. It is also useless to most readers interested in
> taxonomies, because it lacks the software features to extract that. It is in a
> similar position to Wiktionary: a project about relations between things that
> totally lacks the concept of relations on the software level. That is like
> publishing text in the form of JPG files. If you are one of the few people
> specifically interested in taxonomies, you will probably use something that
> allows you to query and extract the relational data.

While the wiki software layer is very basic, we have many complex
tools on our toolserver. Here is a small sample of the projects which
run on the toolserver.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Toolserver/Projects

If you can specify what queries you are most interested in, the
technical group may be able to write a tool to do this.

--
John Vandenberg

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Re: Why can't we have $12.5 million for Wikispecies? [ In reply to ]
On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 8:23 PM, Nemo_bis<nemowiki@gmail.com> wrote:
> John Vandenberg, 26/08/2009 12:07:
>> On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 1:23 PM, Steven Walling<steven.walling@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Very good question. I'd say two major factors:
>>> 1. Support from scientists. Founded by one of the best-known scientists
>>> alive, the EOL automatically gained support from the biological sciences in
>>> academia. Support from the scientific/academic community is the only reason
>>> their largely single-author system has flourished in my opinion.
>>
>> Why cant we have this?
>
> I think that at this point we can't hope to do better than EOL, so «If
> you can't beat them join them»: we should evaluate if and how much
> Wikispecies (and Commons, which has great pictures of many species) can
> contribute to EOL content (the main problem here can be that they're
> mainly CC-BY while we are CC-BY-SA, but their licenses are very flexible
> – even too much, indeed).
> Wikispecies could benefit of a "jump on the bandwagon" effect.

Wikispecies has recently built a partnership with the open access
academic journal ZooKeys, which has a partnership with EOL and GBIF.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/ZooKeys
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/species/wiki/Wikispecies:Collaboration_with_ZooKeys
http://pensoftonline.net/zookeys/index.php/journal/announcement/view/6
http://www.gbif.org/News/NEWS1243931673

The partnership with ZooKeys results in images of new discoveries
being uploaded by the journal to Commons!

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Images_from_ZooKeys

This is _very_cool_.

Sadly there are no reliable sources picking up this story, and I can't
see any blogging about it either.

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John Vandenberg

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Re: Why can't we have $12.5 million for Wikispecies? [ In reply to ]
2009/8/26 John Vandenberg <jayvdb@gmail.com>:
> On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 10:37 PM, Tisza Gergő<gtisza@gmail.com> wrote:
>> EOL is an encyclopedia, Wikispecies is just a raw taxonomy, which is totally
>> useless to the average reader. It is also useless to most readers interested in
>> taxonomies, because it lacks the software features to extract that. It is in a
>> similar position to Wiktionary: a project about relations between things that
>> totally lacks the concept of relations on the software level. That is like
>> publishing text in the form of JPG files. If you are one of the few people
>> specifically interested in taxonomies, you will probably use something that
>> allows you to query and extract the relational data.
>
> While the wiki software layer is very basic, we have many complex
> tools on our toolserver.  Here is a small sample of the projects which
> run on the toolserver.
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Toolserver/Projects
>
> If you can specify what queries you are most interested in, the
> technical group may be able to write a tool to do this.

I think the point is that the fundamental design of MediaWiki - around
a single block of unstructured information - is not useful for a
semantic project like WSp; there are much better ways of doing it.
Toolserver projects cannot add functionality to the core in a proper
way. Extensions like Semantic MediaWiki try, but in the end we are
trying to 'fix' it, I'm afraid.

J.
--
James D. Forrester
jdforrester@wikimedia.org | jdforrester@gmail.com
[[Wikipedia:User:Jdforrester|James F.]]

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Re: Why can't we have $12.5 million for Wikispecies? [ In reply to ]
On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 12:41 AM, James Forrester<james@jdforrester.org> wrote:
> 2009/8/26 John Vandenberg <jayvdb@gmail.com>:
>> On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 10:37 PM, Tisza Gergő<gtisza@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> EOL is an encyclopedia, Wikispecies is just a raw taxonomy, which is totally
>>> useless to the average reader. It is also useless to most readers interested in
>>> taxonomies, because it lacks the software features to extract that. It is in a
>>> similar position to Wiktionary: a project about relations between things that
>>> totally lacks the concept of relations on the software level. That is like
>>> publishing text in the form of JPG files. If you are one of the few people
>>> specifically interested in taxonomies, you will probably use something that
>>> allows you to query and extract the relational data.
>>
>> While the wiki software layer is very basic, we have many complex
>> tools on our toolserver.  Here is a small sample of the projects which
>> run on the toolserver.
>>
>> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Toolserver/Projects
>>
>> If you can specify what queries you are most interested in, the
>> technical group may be able to write a tool to do this.
>
> I think the point is that the fundamental design of MediaWiki - around
> a single block of unstructured information - is not useful for a
> semantic project like WSp; there are much better ways of doing it.
> Toolserver projects cannot add functionality to the core in a proper
> way. Extensions like Semantic MediaWiki try, but in the end we are
> trying to 'fix' it, I'm afraid.

Wikis are not unstructured. The structure is not defined, but it is
added as needed. Here is a tool that relies on the added structure of
the Wikisource bibles.

http://toolserver.org/~Magnus/biblebay.php?bookname=Genesis&booknumber=1&range=1

And here is the code for that tool:

https://fisheye.toolserver.org/browse/Magnus/biblebay.php?r=1

The more structure provided by the wiki, the better the tools can query it.

--
John Vandenberg

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Re: Why can't we have $12.5 million for Wikispecies? [ In reply to ]
2009/8/26 John Vandenberg <jayvdb@gmail.com>:
> On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 12:41 AM, James Forrester<james@jdforrester.org> wrote:
>> I think the point is that the fundamental design of MediaWiki - around
>> a single block of unstructured information - is not useful for a
>> semantic project like WSp; there are much better ways of doing it.
>> Toolserver projects cannot add functionality to the core in a proper
>> way. Extensions like Semantic MediaWiki try, but in the end we are
>> trying to 'fix' it, I'm afraid.
>
> Wikis are not unstructured.

Wikis aren't in general; MediaWiki is. Writing into an unstructured
wiki in a structured, regulated way is a lot of work, and punishes the
humans for our failure to provide the right tools.

> The structure is not defined, but it is
> added as needed.  Here is a tool that relies on the added structure of
> the Wikisource bibles.
>
> http://toolserver.org/~Magnus/biblebay.php?bookname=Genesis&booknumber=1&range=1
>
> And here is the code for that tool:
>
> https://fisheye.toolserver.org/browse/Magnus/biblebay.php?r=1
>
> The more structure provided by the wiki, the better the tools can query it.

Asking users to expend a huge level of effort to make their changes
"proper" when a proper system would do it for them is not respectful
and (as shown) not effective. It's impressive that people can edit in
such a well-regulated way that we can programmatically extract
semantic information, but it's not a stable, easy-to-use way of doing
it. It's also fundamentally "anti-wiki", as new users will often make
mistakes that make things worse, not better; biting the newbies built
into the very code.

J.
--
James D. Forrester
jdforrester@wikimedia.org | jdforrester@gmail.com
[[Wikipedia:User:Jdforrester|James F.]]

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Re: Why can't we have $12.5 million for Wikispecies? [ In reply to ]
On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 1:01 AM, James Forrester<james@jdforrester.org> wrote:
> 2009/8/26 John Vandenberg <jayvdb@gmail.com>:
>> On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 12:41 AM, James Forrester<james@jdforrester.org> wrote:
>>> I think the point is that the fundamental design of MediaWiki - around
>>> a single block of unstructured information - is not useful for a
>>> semantic project like WSp; there are much better ways of doing it.
>>> Toolserver projects cannot add functionality to the core in a proper
>>> way. Extensions like Semantic MediaWiki try, but in the end we are
>>> trying to 'fix' it, I'm afraid.
>>
>> Wikis are not unstructured.
>
> Wikis aren't in general; MediaWiki is. Writing into an unstructured
> wiki in a structured, regulated way is a lot of work, and punishes the
> humans for our failure to provide the right tools.

And yet ... this is what every successful wiki does. Wikipedia is
extremely structured. The writers are not always expected to know the
structure; gnomes do the tidying up.

I would love to see the mediawiki software improved, especially
merging in semantic functionality, but the ability to add semantics is
available.

>> The structure is not defined, but it is
>> added as needed.  Here is a tool that relies on the added structure of
>> the Wikisource bibles.
>>
>> http://toolserver.org/~Magnus/biblebay.php?bookname=Genesis&booknumber=1&range=1
>>
>> And here is the code for that tool:
>>
>> https://fisheye.toolserver.org/browse/Magnus/biblebay.php?r=1
>>
>> The more structure provided by the wiki, the better the tools can query it.
>
> Asking users to expend a huge level of effort to make their changes
> "proper" when a proper system would do it for them is not respectful
> and (as shown) not effective. It's impressive that people can edit in
> such a well-regulated way that we can programmatically extract
> semantic information, but it's not a stable, easy-to-use way of doing
> it. It's also fundamentally "anti-wiki", as new users will often make
> mistakes that make things worse, not better; biting the newbies built
> into the very code.

The Wikisource Bible projects were structured this way by the users.
Magnus surprised us by creating a tool which used the structure which
we had already put in place.

Likewise the templates on Wikispecies are great time savers. The
existing structure is quite good. They just need tools to mine it.

--
John Vandenberg

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Re: Why can't we have $12.5 million for Wikispecies? [ In reply to ]
On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 9:30 PM, John Vandenberg<jayvdb@gmail.com> wrote:
> And yet ... this is what every successful wiki does.  Wikipedia is
> extremely structured.  The writers are not always expected to know the
> structure; gnomes do the tidying up.

You must have an enormously different idea of extremely structured
than I do. I once created software to extract lat/long from Wikitext
on enwp and gave up when I got to the 100th or so distinct template
invocation which did almost but not quite exactly the same thing.

Go search the archives for some of my example bat-shit category linkage maps.

It's extremely structures compared to complete anarchy, or perhaps
"extremely structured" compared to the human body. It's not structured
compared to normal sources of data. Not at all.

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Re: Why can't we have $12.5 million for Wikispecies? [ In reply to ]
On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 9:11 PM, Nemo_bis <nemowiki@gmail.com> wrote:

> See
>
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2009/aug/21/encyclopedia-life-species
> Where's the problem with Wikispecies?
> Moreover, EOL received 33.000 images from individual contributors
> (http://www.flickr.com/groups/encyclopedia_of_life), Wikispecies didn't.
> So, why is EOL succeeding, and Wikispecies seemingly doesn't?
> Is it useful to have two overlapping projects like these?
>
> Nemo
>
>
Encyclopedia of life has a much larger vision that WikiSpecies. They
envision a day when autonomous robots scour the earth, collecting and
documenting specimens, including full genome scans, for all creatures that
remain, uploading the data to the encyclopedia automatically. And they plan
to be part of making that happen. Having such an inspiring vision guiding
your project is essential for success over competing projects. Additionally,
EOL has entered the public consciousness, its most recent jumpstart being a
Ted wish. That wish means that some of the worlds leading thinkers are
aware of EOL, and some of the worlds biggest funders as well.
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Re: Why can't we have $12.5 million for Wikispecies? [ In reply to ]
On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 11:35 AM, Gregory Maxwell<gmaxwell@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 9:30 PM, John Vandenberg<jayvdb@gmail.com> wrote:
>> And yet ... this is what every successful wiki does.  Wikipedia is
>> extremely structured.  The writers are not always expected to know the
>> structure; gnomes do the tidying up.
>
> You must have an enormously different idea of extremely structured
> than I do. I once created software to extract lat/long from Wikitext
> on enwp and gave up when I got to the 100th or so distinct template
> invocation which did almost but not quite exactly the same thing.
>
> Go search the archives for some of my example bat-shit category linkage maps.
>
> It's extremely structures compared to complete anarchy, or perhaps
> "extremely structured" compared to the human body. It's not structured
> compared to normal sources of data. Not at all.

English Wikipedia is not "well" structured for many data mining tasks.
The problem domain is much larger and the content more dynamic, but
there are also too many cooks and partially implemented ideas, and not
enough concern about consistency and re-use.

The Creator & Author namespace on Commons & Wikisource respectively
are a better example of structured information that can be mined.

Wikispecies pages have a limited amount of information on them, and it
is quite sensibly structured. And I'd bet that the Wikispecies
community is also going to be more accommodating of any proposals to
increase standardisation of the content in order to allow mining.

--
John Vandenberg

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Re: Why can't we have $12.5 million for Wikispecies? [ In reply to ]
I don't mind repeating again. EOL boasts to have large amount of images, but do you know that according to some of EOL's partner projects, EOL has not handled any data submitted by its partners for over a year ago? Yes, they do have lots and lots of images but many are simply sitting in a hard drive waiting for the page to be created so the images can be incorporated.

We're an active community, making progress and edging towards 200,000 articles very soon. What we need is not a proposal for deleting this project, but more publicity and contributors.

P.S. We're constantly looking for bot owners to retrieve data from various databases and create articles automatically (e.g. http://species.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&dir=prev&target=MonoBot)

Andrew

"Fill the world with children who care and things start looking up."




> From: Brian.Mingus@colorado.edu
> Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2009 19:48:45 -0600
> To: nemowiki@gmail.com; foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Why can't we have $12.5 million for Wikispecies?
>
> On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 9:11 PM, Nemo_bis <nemowiki@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > See
> >
> > http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2009/aug/21/encyclopedia-life-species
> > Where's the problem with Wikispecies?
> > Moreover, EOL received 33.000 images from individual contributors
> > (http://www.flickr.com/groups/encyclopedia_of_life), Wikispecies didn't.
> > So, why is EOL succeeding, and Wikispecies seemingly doesn't?
> > Is it useful to have two overlapping projects like these?
> >
> > Nemo
> >
> >
> Encyclopedia of life has a much larger vision that WikiSpecies. They
> envision a day when autonomous robots scour the earth, collecting and
> documenting specimens, including full genome scans, for all creatures that
> remain, uploading the data to the encyclopedia automatically. And they plan
> to be part of making that happen. Having such an inspiring vision guiding
> your project is essential for success over competing projects. Additionally,
> EOL has entered the public consciousness, its most recent jumpstart being a
> Ted wish. That wish means that some of the worlds leading thinkers are
> aware of EOL, and some of the worlds biggest funders as well.
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