Wiki Status

[Robert Pries <robertpries@embarqmail.com>]

Happy Birthday America! And next Month Happy Birthday Wiki! B  It is difficult
to decide where one should start counting. In August of 2009 Catherine Button
began giving me lessons in how to create a wiki. I think of Catherine as its
mother or perhaps godmother. By January 2010, we had created the
infra-structure and people began adding pages and images. Perhaps we should
think of it as a mere 2 B= years old but if you remove the 6 months we spent
restructuring you might say we have accomplished what is there now in only 2
years.



And what does this 2 year old look like? Well we have almost 47,000 names
entered. Although the front page says we are 57% finished this is not exactly
true. It was told to me early on that there are 80,000 names, including
botanical names, synonyms, cultivars and apocryphal names. But the Iris
Register only contains 65,000 entries and possibly 4,000 of these are repeats.
So in reality the Encyclopedia is over 75% complete. If we note that the
register does not have anything but a name for the 19,000, 1939 entries then
we can understand that it has about 41,000 entries with descriptions. But one
must also subtract 49 checklist entries that are not in 39, conservatively
about 2,000. B  So the Register has about 39,000 described names and the wiki
47,000. B  But the register and wiki have different subsets. It is now just as
likely that you will find a description in the wiki as in the register, but at
present the register is better in some areas and the wiki better in others. So
if you do not find what you want in one try the other. The last 25% is always
the hardest. but given our history, it seems likely that the Encyclopedia can
be completed to the present within a year.



But the Wiki is called the Iris Encyclopedia for good reason. It also contains
at present at least a 1,000 pages of other topic information. All of this is
being linked to appropriate cultivars. In working on an index to these pages
it dawned on me that The Encyclopedia will become the reference bThe World
of Irisb was in 1978. But unlike that text, that is now horribly out of
date, the wiki can continue to update and renew itself. Just as chapters and
topics were written in bThe World of Irisb by many individuals, I invite
Irisarians to claim a topic, do the research and write something for the wiki.
Only a few people have signed their work. But in doing so you become part of
Iris History, and others can respectfully build on what you create. If you
have thoughts on something you would like to be the expert on, contact me and
I will help you start.

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