RE: Wiki Status

["Susan Grigg" <irismom@nc.rr.com>]

Happy Birthday Wiki! Thanks to you, Bob, and to all your Wiki Angels who
have created such a marvelous tool for the gardening world.

Susan Grigg 

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-aisdiscuss@aisboard.org [mailto:owner-aisdiscuss@aisboard.org]
On Behalf Of Robert Pries
Sent: Tuesday, July 03, 2012 3:54 PM
To: AISdiscuss
Subject: [AISdiscuss] Wiki Status

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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