Friday, June 22, 2007

Fingerprint in flood of Wikipedia

I have admired Wikipedia without contributing to it for some time. I love the idea of a grass roots encyclopedia of knowledge. I have used it almost as much as google in recent internet searches. Just the other day I was wondering if possums and opossums were the same thing and if they were really marsupials. Wikipedia had the answer. No they aren't the same. Yes they are both marsupials.

I have now joined up in the wikisociety by writing my first two articles. My first was on botanical keys, used to identify plant species. It has since been completely rewritten, merged with general identification keys and vastly improved. My second was on diallel mating schemes for quantitative genetics experiments. I am pretty sure it will have the same fate as my first post - evolving into something completely different than it started as. This is a powerful thing. Evolution meets knowledge.

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