Where do we share how to ID species?

Nature Talk
41

I was reminded that literally every internet fandom imaginable somehow has a whole wiki dedicated to it, which must involve some standardized process to be easy enough for anyone to do. Turns out yes, they’re all on a dedicated platform with a form to guide you through automatically creating a new wiki. Searching for a handful of common species brings up duplicate pages in multiple different biodiversity-based wikis (e.g. 2 bird wikis, 3 animal wikis… this inactive one might be most promising). This would be free and easy but this platform isn’t really intended for this and would look pretty unprofessional. Nothing on that platform comes across as looking very serious.

On the other hand while searching stuff I did find this database which looks interesting: Library of Identification Resources

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42

can be copypastaed to appear on the About tab for A, and for B. And again for the next taxon level up which they have in common.

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I agree, and a solution is to require everything to have a citation, but to allow “Even Dankowicz, unpublished observation 2025” to be a valid citation.

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44

At the risk of seeming curmudgeonly or just lazy, the various complexities, boundaries, and nuances of editing Wikipedia are precisely why I’ve never actually contributed content to the site. I’m a regular user and monthly contributor to the site, but I leave it to others with the energy to engage in the construction of that information repository.

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the Fandom site is definitely a no-go. Bad reputation and making a wiki here would be similar to creating a “subset of Wikipedia/Fandom/whatever”.

The only serious option would be to host your own wiki based on the same software as Wikipedia (=MediaWiki), or to create new web application from other templates or from scratch.

I’m currently making my own identification website from scratch (although only limited to one family of beetle) which would ideally be a library and a wiki/identification guide, and hopefully a unified taxonomic source (existing resources are biased and lacking). I always thought a wiki for everything would be an amazing idea, but there is a lot of maintaining efforts that would have to go into it because the scale is bigger, at least with the more complex implementation.

Anyways, I’m all for starting to act on this ourselves and making our own resource - we would need to gather all the efforts to figure it out. However, I still hoped that iNat would be the place where such resource could get implemented first and remain sustainable.

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