pcplantdb

["Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lfl@intrex.net>]

Richard Archer wrote:

> > The thing about references is that most of our authorship from this
> > point forth will not be accompanied references other than an allusion
> > to personal experience.  I also do not find a reference to a book I do
> > not own to be particularly helpful in anyway.  Online references could
> > be helpful in the way you suggest, but I think that peer reputation
> > will be the most widely used mechanism of ensuring authority.  I'm ok
> > including references, but I suspect they will be unused.  What do
> > other folks think?
>
>
> This raises an interesting point, which Lawrence with his experience
> with wikis might be able to shed some light on.

That could get interesting . I see a permaculture.info wiki containing a 
freeform group of individual user wikipages
wherein users conform to some predefined format for organizing their informaion. As Rich suggested thew database should be able to suck this 
data into its search routines and data infrastructure so that it could be an external dataset for the db. Much of this anecdotal 
information, peer reviewed, would be accessable to the database and easily appended to or otherwise updated by each user in his own 
wikispace; easier to maintain than his own website and especially useful to valued contributors around the globe who won't be doing their 
own website - this may be the only way to get info from some of these folks; some may not want to enter data formally into the database.
This is whi I like the wiki concept. Of course we will have to make such a 
wiki easy to use with good instructions.

> What happens if someone enters some data, for example plant X grows to
> height 10 metres in locality A. Someone else then comes along and
> enters that plant X grows to 15 metres in locality B.

Another benefit of having aa companion wiki is that the data that some provide via their wikispace may become very valuable to us and we may 
want to enter itt into the db ourselves in thise users do not, of course clearing the process through the licensing agreement.

How practical is it to have valuable info intended for the in some cases sitting in wikipages - Rich says that XML may make this possible 
even easy. Is this true?

> Does the initial data get overwritten? Is there some meaningful way
> of storing and using both data points? Do we just look at which author
> has the highest reputation and discard the other author's data?

Throwing away data isn't a good idea, probably. Maybe some users will want to 
walk before they run, i.e. Wiki B4 DB'ing.
> If the second author's data gets discarded then how does their reputation
> ever increase?

Very true. With use of a wiki this problem can be avoided but you still have 
to get the desired data into the db.
Maybe the DB can do a google like search engine spider nightly to scan and index the wiki to see what's there/what's new and results could 
be posted to some location in the DB to be reviewed by the user base. Maybe Rich's plan to create a button to click if you want to receive 
comments in email to stay current with specific activity in the db - maybe the wiki could alert the db as to new material available and 
under development.

LL
--
L.F.London
lfl@intrex.net
http://market-farming.com
http://www.ibiblio.org/ecolandtech