User:Arp/P4b about

About P4b_pages and categories

You're brobably here because you've stumbled on one of my pages or categories that start with a "P4b_" prefix in the name. So what are these all about?

Well, basically these are just my very personal testing effort to see if I can find a structure to organize Tree of Life (ToL) related media that would otherwise go into the main "Galleries" and/or Categories. The prefix "P4b", of course, stands for Pudding4brains - my alias here.

Why?

In the summer of 2006 I discovered that the cheap(ish) digital camera (Olympus, C-480 zoom) I'd bought some time before with "macro" pictures of electronic parts in mind (I'm a bit of a computer hardware geek) also works somewhat nicely on insects and the like. Really great or beautifull photos are out of the question, but my snapshots are sometimes quite good enough to provide some recognizable image of a certain species (or family) to provide illustrations of the critters for wikipedia.

So, I've taken to shooting snapshots of these critters whenever I get a chance and many usable images are beginning to flood my harddisk. The next step is to find out what the heck I've 'captured'. This is a fun part, but it takes a lot of time, so progress isn't always what I would like it to be. Once I know what I've got however, I can look in commons to see if we already have images of the species and if mine might show details or situations that might be a welcome addition to the collection (even if the visual quality isn't always 'nice').

Of course, in the process I read and learn a bit about the critters too, so often I might even be able to start or enhance related wikipedia articles, and would preferably do so in at least dutch, english, german and possibly spanish.

While I'm working on this I'd rather make a little extra effort and do things 'right' the first time, so at some point I decided that while I'm learning about a family or species it would be a good idea to organize the information I found in such a way that my uploads to Wikimedia Commons would be a good repository of info on the critters and as comfortable a help to myself and other wikipedia editors as I'm able to create (see explanation below).

Unfortunatelly, some other contributors to Wikimedia Commons did not allow me to upload my work in the informative and well structured manner I had cooked up as a first test or step toward what it should or could be in my mind. This has caused me to participate in discussions on the subject at the "Village pump" and/or the ToL discussion page, but these discusions seem to go on forever without any usable results and meanwhile, strangely the ideas of some seem to be enforced on the main namespace even while there is no consensus on the way 'we' want to do things. This was stopping me from contributing my snapshots and organizational efforts to Commons, so I've decided to forget about the discussions and instead just go ahead and roll my own structure of pages in a way that these are not obstrusive to others. At least that way I can continue uploading and in the process create my own repository of "resource" pages for my work on the wikipedias.

Structure

The structure I'm trying to create includes the following ideas (and maybe some I've forgotten to mention):

• Create pages as species-level that include as much re-usable resources as I can create (or find). This includes:
  • Correct scientific name and references to the discovering entomologist(s)
  • History of naming, including at least known synonyms and possibly a short history of the chanches in naming the species has undergone (including, maybe doubts and critisism)
  • As many vernacular (or even regional) names as I can easily find, possibly linking to existing wikipedia articles if thes exist (or creating broken links for those I plan to create myself).
  • A taxobox that can be easily re-used by me or others in the creation of wikipedia articles.
  • Well organized galleries that show the genders or variations of the critters in different stages of their lifes.
  • Possibly a list of resources I have used or found and plan to use in the creation of wikipedia articles, such as books and links to websites or other (internet) publications
• Create categories at species level and other categories (such as categoeries of nature by country etc or special situations such as copula) and organize the media into these categories at upload.
• Create pages for higher taxa that are structured in such a way that these provide:
  • Correct scientific name and references to the autor(s) and/or history of naming
  • Info I can find such as lists of lower taxa and their autors
  • A taxobox to be re-usued by wikipedia editors who care to create articles for higher taxa
  • A nice visual index to the pages for lower taxa such as species pages, maybe at some stage in a structered form that can also be re-used for wikipedia genera- or family pages.

.. etc (break)