Wikispecies

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Wikispecies

URL	http://species.wikimedia.org/
Commercial?	No
Type of site	Species directory
Registration	Optional
Owner	Wikimedia Foundation
Created by	Benedikt Mandl (proposed project in 2004); Jimmy Wales and the Wikimedia Community

Wikispecies is a project supported by the Wikimedia Foundation that anyone can edit with a great potential use to students and researchers. It is an open, free directory of species. This project will cover Animalia, Plantae, Fungi, Bacteria, Archaea, Protista and all other forms of life to the extent that our users allow us. As of January 2007 the project has over 85,000 [1] articles.

Contents 1 Typical species page 2 Community Portal 3 Other languages 4 External links

Typical species page

A typical species page would have sections called taxonavigation, vernacular names, alternative classifications, references, notes, and maybe a description of the species. Vernacular names are links to Wikipedia articles in many languages.

Community Portal

The Wikispecies Community Portal has many links to things which one would need in order to increase their knowledge about the Wikispecies procedures.

The Wikispecies Village Pump is an area of Wikispecies that discusses the project. It is like a Wikipedia article's talk page. Currently it is the largest page on Wikispecies.

The Wikispecies Charter is the basis of Wikispecies. The Charter was written by Jimbo Wales.

The Charter says:

"Note from Jimbo Wales...

As you know, the creation of this project was somewhat controversial in some quarters, and so I propose an early development of a strong non-forking policy guideline here, illustrating

Here are some of the key points that the board put forward when we approved this project:

We set up the WikiSpecies wiki for biologists to begin organizing the project.

We propose that as the software is developed, it should work to strongly support integration with wikipedia, to help avoid duplication of effort, i.e. to avoid forking.

We ask the participants on wikispecies to think particularly about how their work should differ from a generalist encyclopedia."

Other languages

Wikispecies is available in 131 different languages which are also licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.

External links

• Official site
• Species Community Portal
• Random Species Page

 

Projects of the Wikimedia Foundation
Wikibooks (Wikijunior) • Wikiversity • Wikimedia Commons • Wiktionary • Wikinews • Wikipedia • Wikiquote • Wikisource • Wikispecies