Wikipedia:WikiProject Tree of Life/Newsletter/012/Story 1

Hey here are some questions for you. If you could get to this in the next week that would be great.
 * How did you come to be interested in systematics? Are you interested in systematics broadly, or is there a particular group you're most fond of?
 * What's the background behind Cladogram requests? I see that it isn't a very old part of the Tree of Life
 * What advice would you have for an editor who wants to learn how to make cladograms?
 * Do you have any personal projects or goals you're working towards on Wikipedia?
 * What would surprise your fellow editors to learn about your life off-Wikipedia?
 * Anything else you'd like us to know?

Side note--what's an example of a cladogram you're particularly proud of? I'll include it as a graphic with your interview. I poked around your userspace and thought these were really visually interesting with the different colors and the side-by-side comparisons (also the advantage of not being too large). Thanks for your time. Enwebb (talk) 14:17, 24 March 2020 (UTC)
 * if you're around then the questions are ready. If I don't hear from you in the next couple days we can do next month's issue instead. Enwebb (talk) 16:32, 1 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Here are some answers, although I think this is too long winded. —  Jts1882 &#124; talk 10:21, 17 May 2020 (UTC)

First draft
''How did you come to be interested in systematics? Are you interested in systematics broadly, or is there a particular group you're most fond of?''

As long as I can remember I’ve being interested in nature, starting with the animals and plants in the garden, school grounds, and local wood, and then more general wildlife worldwide. An interest in how things are classified grew from this. I like things to be organised and understanding the relationships between things and systems (not just living things) is a big part of that. Biology was always my favourite subject in school and took up a disproportionate apart of my time. My interest in systematics is broad as I’d like to comprehend the whole tree of life, but the cat family is my favourite group.

''What's the background behind Cladogram requests? I see that it isn't a very old part of the Tree of Life''

Well I can’t take any credit for the cladogram requests page, although I help out there sometimes. It was created by User:IJReid and there are several people who have helped there more than me. I think the motivation is that creating cladograms requires a knowledge of the templates that is daunting for many editors. It was one way of helping people who want to focus on content creation.

My main contribution to the cladograms is converting the clade template to use a Lua module. The template code was extremely difficult to follow and had to be repetitive (I can only admire the efforts of those who got the thing to work in the first place). The conversion to Lua made it more efficient, allowed larger and deeper cladograms, plus facilitating the introduction of new features. The cladogram request page was recently the venue for discussion on making time calibrated cladograms, which is now possible, if not particularly user friendly.

What advice would you have for an editor who wants to learn how to make cladograms?

The same advice I would give to someone facing any computer problem, just try it out. Start by taking existing code for a cladogram and make changes youself. The main advice would be to format it properly so indents match the brackets vertically. Of course, not everyone wants to learn and if someone prefers to focus on article content there is the cladogram request page.

Do you have any personal projects or goals you're working towards on Wikipedia?

As I said I like organisation and systems. So I find efforts like the automated taxobox system and taxonbar appealing. I would like to see more reuse of the major phylogenetic trees on Wikipedia with more use of consenus trees on the higher taxa. Too often they get edited based on one recent report and/or without proper citation. Animals and bilateria are examples where this is a problem.

Towards this I have been working on a system of phylogeny templates that can be reused flexibly. The (Clade transclude) template allows selective transclusion, so the phylogenetic trees on one page can be reused with modifications, i.e. can be pruned and grafted, used with or without images, with or without collapsible elements, etc. I have an example for the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group classification (see Phylogeny/APG IV) and one for squamates that also includes collapsible elements (see Phylogeny/Squamata).

A second project is to have a modular reference system for taxonomic resources. I have made some progress along this lines with the BioRef template. This started off simply as a way of hardlinking to Catalog of Fishes pages and I’ve gradually expanded it to cover other groups (e..g. FishBase, AmphibiaWeb and Amphibian Species of the World, Reptile Database, the Mammalian Diversity Database). The modular nature is still rudimentary and needs a rewrite before it is ready for wider use.

What would surprise your fellow editors to learn about your life off-Wikipedia?

I don’t think there is anything particularly surprising or interesting about my life. I’ve had an academic career as a research scientist but I don't think anyone could guess the area from my Wikipedia edits. I prefer to work on areas where I am learning at the same time. This why I spend more time with neglected topics (e.g. mosses at the moment). I start reading and then find that I’m not getting the information I want.

Anything else you'd like us to know?

My interest in the classification of things goes beyond biology. I am fascinated by mediaeval attempts to classify knowledge, such as Bacon in his The Advancement of Learning and Diderot and d’Alembert in their Encyclopédie. They were trying to come up with a universal scheme of knowledge just as the printing press was allowing greater dissemination of knowledege.

With the internet we are seeing a new revolution in knowledge dissemination. Just look at how we could read research papers on the covid virus within weeks of its discovery. With an open internet, everyone has access, not just those with the luxury of books at home or good libaries. Sites like the Biodiversity Heritage Library allow you to read old scientific works without having to visit dusty university library stack rooms, while the taxonomic and checklist databases provide instant information on millions of living species. In principle, the whole world can now find out about anything, even if Douglas Adams warned we might be disinclined to do so.

This is why I like Wikipedia, with all its warts, it’s a means of organising the knowledge on the internet. In just two decades it’s become a first stop for knowledge and hopefully a gateway to more specialised sources. Perhaps developing this latter aspect, beyond providing good sources for what we say, is the next challenge for Wikipedia.