"We aim, in the next five to 10 years, to include information on at least 80 percent of species that can only be found in Taiwan," he said, adding that some of the information has been previously collected through the National Digital Archive Program of the National Science Council.
Like Huang, Lai said that creating a platform similar to Wikipedia has the potential to draw a broad range of contributors and generate more page views. The large number of "wikipedians" who have been active in regulating the quality of new entries also assures Lai that Taiwan's biodiversity will be accurately presented in cyberspace.
Founded in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, Wikipedia has been welcomed by some techno-savvy people as well as criticized by others. It claimed in its own introduction that as of last Wednesday, it has about 7.9 million articles in 253 languages. Approximately 1.9 million articles are composed in English.
John Seigenthaler, administrative assistant to late attorney general Robert Kennedy, has demanded in his editorial published in the Nov. 29, 2005, edition of USA Today that Wikipedia remove the "false content" about him, as he found an online entry saying that "for a brief time, he [Seigenthaler] was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby."
And while Wikipedia staff immediately changed the content upon Seigenthaler's request, they also found that the person who wrote this entry is simply a guy who "works in the office, just goofing around on the Internet."
Comedian Stephen Colbert has also ridiculed Wikipedia a few times on his show The Colbert Report. He once said that he has helped triple the population of elephants in the past 10 years by going to Wikipedia and simply changing the entry for elephants.
"Lord proves what happens when you bring democracy to information," he once said in his show.
The New Yorker ran an article in July last year saying that members of Congress were caught tampering with their own introductions on Wikipedia, such as deleting an entry about a broken campaign promise.
Another most recent example was the death of the Anna Nicole Smith in February. While other wire stories merely reported on Feb. 8 that the model collapsed in a Florida hotel room, Wikipedia had already listed Feb. 8 as the day of her death. The entry merely cited a broadcast from the CBS Evening News as a source.
In response to these anomalies, Wales said in an interview with National Public Radio in April that Wikipedia has beefed up its quality-control mechanism and set guidelines for biographical entries, but he added that the job of fact-checking and editing are really in the hands of online community members.
"Anyone can participate in the editing process of a new entry as well as an old entry; they will then debate, discuss and decide which one is the good source, it's a vibrant community process," he said.
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