Wikispecies

Last updated
Wikispecies
WikiSpecies.svg
Screenshot
Wikispecies screenshot.png
Screenshot of species.wikimedia.org home page on 3 May 2011
Type of site
Species directory
Owner Wikimedia Foundation
Created by Benedikt Mandl (proposed project in 2004); Jimmy Wales and the Wikimedia community
URL species.wikimedia.org
CommercialNo
RegistrationOptional
Launched2004

Wikispecies is a wiki-based online project supported by the Wikimedia Foundation. Its aim is to create a comprehensive open content catalogue of all species; the project is directed at scientists, rather than at the general public. Jimmy Wales stated that editors are not required to fax in their degrees, but that submissions will have to pass muster with a technical audience. [1] [2] Wikispecies is available under the GNU Free Documentation License and CC BY-SA 3.0.

Contents

Started in September 2004, with biologists around the world invited to contribute, [3] the project had grown to a framework encompassing the Linnaean taxonomy with links to Wikipedia articles on individual species by April 2005. [2]

History

Benedikt Mandl coordinated the efforts of several people who were interested in getting involved with the project and contacted potential supporters in the early summer of 2004. Databases were evaluated and the administrators contacted; some of them have agreed on providing their data for Wikispecies. Mandl defined two major tasks:

  1. Figure out how the contents of the data base would need to be presented—by asking experts, potential non-professional users and comparing that with existing databases
  2. Figure out how to do the software, which hardware is required and how to cover the costs—by asking experts, looking for fellow volunteers and potential sponsors

Advantages and disadvantages were widely discussed by the wikimedia-I mailing list. The board of directors of the Wikimedia Foundation voted by 4 to 0 in favor of the establishment of Wikispecies. The project was launched in August 2004 and is hosted at species.wikimedia.org. It was officially merged into a sister project of the Wikimedia Foundation on September 14, 2004.

As a database for taxonomy and nomenclature, Wikispecies comprises taxon pages, and additionally pages about synonyms, taxon authorities, taxonomical publications, type material, and institutions or repositories holding type specimen. [5]

Policies

Wikispecies has disabled local upload and asks users to use images from Wikimedia Commons. Wikispecies does not allow the use of content that does not conform to a free license.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of Wikipedia</span>

Wikipedia, a free-content online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, began with its first edit on 15 January 2001, two days after the domain was registered. It grew out of Nupedia, a more structured free encyclopedia, as a way to allow easier and faster drafting of articles and translations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">English Wikipedia</span> English-language edition of Wikipedia

The English Wikipedia is the primary English-language edition of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. It was created by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on January 15, 2001, as Wikipedia's first edition.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wikibooks</span> Free resource library of books hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation and edited by volunteers

Wikibooks is a wiki-based Wikimedia project hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation for the creation of free content digital textbooks and annotated texts that anyone can edit.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Memory Alpha</span> Wiki about Star Trek

Memory Alpha is a wiki encyclopedia for topics related to the Star Trek fictional universe. Conceived by Harry Doddema and Dan Carlson in September 2003 and officially launched on December 5 of that year, it uses the wiki model and is hosted by Fandom on the MediaWiki software. Doddema and Carlson retired from Memory Alpha in 2008 and 2005 respectively. As of September 2023, Memory Alpha contains over 56,000 articles and 62,000 images in its English edition alone, making it one of the largest wiki projects. The site is also available in several other languages, including Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, Esperanto, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish, and Ukrainian.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wikisource</span> Free online library on a wiki

Wikisource is an online digital library of free-content textual sources on a wiki, operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikisource is the name of the project as a whole and the name for each instance of that project ; multiple Wikisources make up the overall project of Wikisource. The project's aim is to host all forms of free text, in many languages, and translations. Originally conceived as an archive to store useful or important historical texts, it has expanded to become a general-content library. The project officially began on November 24, 2003 under the name Project Sourceberg, a play on the famous Project Gutenberg. The name Wikisource was adopted later that year and it received its own domain name.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">German Wikipedia</span> German language edition of Wikipedia

The German Wikipedia is the German-language edition of Wikipedia, a free and publicly editable online encyclopedia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Polish Wikipedia</span> Wikipedia in Polish language version

The Polish Wikipedia is the Polish-language edition of Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia. Founded on September 26, 2001, it now has more than 1,582,000 articles, making it the 11th-largest Wikipedia edition overall. It is also the second-largest edition in a Slavic language, after the Russian Wikipedia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wikimedia movement</span> Group of global contributors to Wikimedia projects

The Wikimedia movement is the global community of contributors to the Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia. This community directly builds and administers these projects with the commitment of achieving this using open standards and software.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses</span> International organisation that regulates classification and nomenclature of viruses

The International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) authorizes and organizes the taxonomic classification of and the nomenclatures for viruses. The ICTV has developed a universal taxonomic scheme for viruses, and thus has the means to appropriately describe, name, and classify every virus that affects living organisms. The members of the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses are considered expert virologists. The ICTV was formed from and is governed by the Virology Division of the International Union of Microbiological Societies. Detailed work, such as delimiting the boundaries of species within a family, typically is performed by study groups of experts in the families.

In the taxonomy of microorganisms, the Methanomicrobiales are an order of the Methanomicrobia. Methanomicrobiales are strictly carbon dioxide reducing methanogens, using hydrogen or formate as the reducing agent. As seen from the phylogenetic tree based on 'The All-Species Living Tree' Project the family Methanomicrobiaceae is highly polyphyletic within the Methanomicrobiales.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wikivoyage</span> Free travel guide that anyone can edit

Wikivoyage is a free web-based travel guide for travel destinations and travel topics written by volunteer authors. It is a sister project of Wikipedia and supported and hosted by the same non-profit Wikimedia Foundation (WMF). Wikivoyage has been called the "Wikipedia of travel guides".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of wikis</span> History of wiki collaborative platforms

The history of wikis began in 1994, when Ward Cunningham gave the name "WikiWikiWeb" to the knowledge base, which ran on his company's website at c2.com, and the wiki software that powered it. The wiki went public in March 1995, the date used in anniversary celebrations of the wiki's origins. c2.com is thus the first true wiki, or a website with pages and links that can be easily edited via the browser, with a reliable version history for each page. He chose "WikiWikiWeb" as the name based on his memories of the "Wiki Wiki Shuttle" at Honolulu International Airport, and because "wiki" is the Hawaiian word for "quick".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wikimedia Foundation</span> American charitable organization

The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. (WMF) is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, and registered as a charitable foundation under local laws. Best known as the hosting platform for Wikipedia, a crowdsourced online encyclopedia, it also hosts other related projects and MediaWiki, a wiki software.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Swedish Wikipedia</span> Swedish language edition of Wikipedia

The Swedish Wikipedia is the Swedish-language edition of Wikipedia and was started on the 23 of May 2001. It is currently the fourth largest Wikipedia by article count with its 2,571,722 current articles, it has a Wikipedia article depth of 17.27. A majority were generated by Lsjbot, a bot, or software application. The administrators on the Swedish Wikipedia are elected for a fixed-term period of one year and have to be re-elected after that time.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wikimedia Commons</span> Online media repository of free-use images, sounds and other media files

Wikimedia Commons is a media repository of free-to-use images, sounds, videos and other media. It is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Uzbek Wikipedia</span> Uzbek language edition of Wikipedia

The Uzbek Wikipedia is the Uzbek-language edition of the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia. It was founded in December 2003. Articles in the Uzbek-language edition are written in the Latin script. In August 2012, a Latin-to-Cyrillic converter was added to allow users to view Uzbek Wikipedia's pages in both the Latin and Cyrillic scripts.

AnimalBase is a project brought to life in 2004 and is maintained by the University of Göttingen, Germany. The goal of the AnimalBase project is to digitize early zoological literature, provide copyright-free open access to zoological works, and provide manually verified lists of names of zoological genera and species as a free resource for the public. AnimalBase contributed to opening up the classical taxonomic literature, which is considered as useful because access to early literature can be difficult for researchers who need the old sources for their taxonomic research.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Outline of Wikipedia</span> Overview of and topical guide to Wikipedia

The following outline is provided as an overview of and a topical guide to Wikipedia:

A WikiProject, or Wikiproject, is an affinity group for contributors with shared goals within the Wikimedia movement. WikiProjects are prevalent within the largest wiki, Wikipedia, and exist to varying degrees within sibling projects such as Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikidata, and Wikisource. They also exist in different languages, and translation of articles is a form of their collaboration.

References

  1. ↑ "Calling all taxonomists". Science . 307 (5712): 1021. 2005. doi: 10.1126/science.307.5712.1021a .
  2. 1 2 "WikiSpecies". American Scientist Online . Sigma Xi. 25 April 2005. Archived from the original on 30 April 2005. Retrieved 3 February 2014.
  3. ↑ Peplow, Mark (15 March 2005). "Species list reaches half-million mark". Nature . doi: 10.1038/news050314-6 .
  4. ↑ "Wikispecies_milestones". Wikispecies. Retrieved 2023-09-18.
  5. ↑ "Wikispecies:Page types". Wikispecies. Archived from the original on 2018-07-30. Retrieved 2018-11-01.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.