Wikipedia:WikiProject Tree of Life/Newsletter/015/Story 2

Potential spotlight
Hi, I had a rough month IRL which has caused me to be late with this issue of the newsletter. I was wondering if you would be interested in answering some questions for this month's spotlight? I'm familiar with your essay on the subject of categorizing organisms by geography, and think that could be relevant. In case you're interested, I'll put some questions below:


 * How did you become interested in editing biodiversity topics on Wikipedia?
 * I'm a wikignome who tries to remove unnecessary complexity and confusion in wikipedia.  I specialise in categorization.  I've worked on categorization of several topic areas (e.g. military equipment) - anywhere where I see things like category tags on articles that the category text doesn't support.  Categorization of organisms is one area I'm currently looking at (my essay on this).


 * You seem to be particularly interested in geographic categorization of organisms. What are some issues in this area?
 * One issue is that there are several possible relationships between an organism and a region (i.e. what the "of" in a "Xs of Y" means) - the organism may be found throughout the region, somewhere in the region, only in the region (i.e. endemic to that region) - there are categories for each of these (and others) and some categories have been unclear about their exact meaning. Then there's introductions by man, locally extinct species, occasional visitors...
 * Another issue is that some editors have thought it's appropriate to create categories for very small areas ("Spiders of Vatican City" is only a slight exaggeration) and put a few articles in them. Thus creating a category that is both massively incomplete and non-defining for the articles in it.
 * There have been several (now blocked) editors who have been disruptive in this area, but a confusing sprawling categorization scheme is also partly due to editors from a particular background categorizing a particular article in a way that appears to make sense, but doesn't really make sense in the wider categorization scheme - for example if an article mentions the countries at the extremes of an animals distribution the animal is categorized just for those countries.


 * What potential solutions do you see for categorizing organisms by geography? How can other editors help address this issue, or at least, not make it worse?
 * We should have some guidelines that tell editors how to categorize any article about an organism (including any geographical categorization). I've started drafting guidelines at User:DexDor/BioCat. The guidelines are also a good way to ensure that the categorization of articles about organisms is aligned with categorization of other articles and may help us to identify where there are problems, inconsistencies etc in the categorization. I welcome suggestions for improvement of the guidelines (which should at some point be moved into WP:TOL).
 * Regarding geographical categorization of animals the main advice for editors would be to not create categories for any new areas and to only create a new category if you intend to populate it.


 * What have you learned from being a Wikipedia editor?
 * That lots of people (from varied backgrounds) each making (mostly) small improvements (like ants in an ants nest?) and only understanding some parts of Wikipedia can produce such a wonderful resource. But also, how that tends to result in ever-increasing complexity which negatively affects editors and readers.


 * Is there anything about your life outside Wikipedia that would surprise us?
 * Not sure - I'm a member of a band.

Thanks, Enwebb (talk) 20:09, 2 July 2020 (UTC)
 * I'll try to fill this in over the weekend. DexDor(talk) 19:05, 3 July 2020 (UTC)
 * , you about finished? I'm going to combine June and July into one newsletter so you can take your time. Enwebb (talk) 21:30, 14 July 2020 (UTC)