Re: Wiki Status

[andi rivarola <andinsky@gmail.com>]

Congratulations and a big thank you, Bob, for all the work you've done.

The Encyclopedia is an amazing tool and appreciated by many.

Andi Rivarola


On Tue, Jul 3, 2012 at 12:54 PM, Robert Pries <robertpries@embarqmail.com>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 b The 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 b The 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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-- 
*"Seek to do brave and lovely things that are left undone by the majority
of people. Give gifts of love and peace to those whom others pass by."* --
Paramahansa Yogananda

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