Re: Wiki Status

[Jeanne Plank <plankmail@aol.com>]

The Iris Encyclopedia (Wiki) is  a marvelous informational resource and a wondrous  creation.
	Happy, Happy birthday!
			Jeanne
On Jul 3, 2012, at 12:54 PM, Robert Pries wrote:

> 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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