Wikispecies:About

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Motivation

Biologists who classify new species normally publish in specialized journals, which has led to an overwhelming amount of information with nobody keeping an overview. Even experts in very specialized fields often don't notice if a species has been formally recorded twice, thrice or even more.

Therefore, the number of known species is unknown – and this is just as ridiculous as it sounds. We are not talking about all species that exist on earth, but simply about the total number of species that have already been recorded in scientific publications.

Nobody knows how many there are. Expert 'A' might think that there be 17 000 known annelids, but expert 'B' believes the number to be 20 000; that happens due to the inexistence of a central registration-process and of a database or reference directory whereby to browse information about the current state of knowledge on a particular species.

Vision

A central, extensive database for taxonomy is what Wikispecies should become: an open, extensive database for scientists and the public (including citizen scientists) to reflect upon the diversity of life on our planet Earth; because life is public domain.

There are an increasing number of large-scale, science-funded projects, all of which aim to achieve more or less the same thing. Examples include the Catalogue of Life (CoL) and the Encyclopedia of Life (EoL), among others. The main problem with most of those projects is that they are not open to editing, and so the inevitably many errors are "locked in" and difficult to fix.

Collaboration

If you want to add contents to Wikispecies, but don't know how, have a look at our Help:Contents section where we explain how simple it is to add data to Wikispecies.

Questions about our policy regarding Wikispecies? See the Wikispecies:Charter, which explains a bit more what this is about.