Speaking of Aspergillus ochraceus…
Yesterday while doing a little research for the post on Ochratoxin A in coffee, I discovered that although the subject is reasonably well addressed at Wikipedia, there was nothing for the fungus Aspergillus ochraceus. Myself, I don’t know a whole lot about that species. I could probably get something started on it, but couldn’t do it complete justice.
That also got me to wondering. How many of you have taken an active role in working on Wikipedia? I’ll be the first to admit, I haven’t—but I want to. In case you hadn’t noticed, I am a strong supporter of the open encyclopedia.
I’m trying to get a polling plugin working on MycoRant, but until then, if you’d leave a short comment about what you think of Wikipedia as a source of information about fungi, that would be great. More on this topic later…
Tags: Aspergillus, wikipedia
Hi Phil, I’ve done some editing at Wikipedia, mostly when I am suffering from insomnia. The fungi need a lot of work, but there’s an impressive group of regulars working on them, including several professional mycologists and a bunch of really good nonprofessionals. Plant pathogens have a dedicated group too. Where it exists at all, the information is usually high quality, IMO.
Wikipedia is a first source of information for lots of “normal” people. The more we contribute, the better it will get. If you have a little time to write some well-referenced prose, all of you MycoRant readers, do lend a hand–it’s easy and can reach a lot of people. You don’t have to complete a full entry, just what you can, and the articles develop nicely over time as others contribute.
Now that’s what I’m talking about Kathie. Is there any cooperation or planning that goes on among the active mycology editors?
WikiProject Fungi is a central collaboration site on wikipedia. But it’s ok to just find a page that needs work and work on it. In general we want succinct, factual prose that is appropriately referenced with good primary or secondary sources. Good, copyright-free photos are also needed for many fungi.
A competitor (??) of wikipedia is the Encyclopedia of Life, which has the potential to be much more authoritative. However, it’ll take a long time to catch up. Right now, most EoL fungus pages just pull info directly from wikipedia and other sites, and that info is not always what you’d hope for. See, for e.g., this typical contrast: Agaricus arvensis on EoL versus wikipedia. See what I mean?