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Why does this exist?

There's a Wikipedia page for all species and this would be no longer useful if you could go on Wikipedia. — The preceding unsigned comment was added by Contribiter423 (talk • contribs) 17:57, 5 December 2021‎.

"There's a Wikipedia page for all species" False. Though all the data should eventually be in Wikidata. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 20:32, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

Well there should be a page for all species. 166.109.26.70 18:28, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

It's also important to recognize that even though Wikipedia may have an article about a species (or genus, family etc.), those articles often lack even the most basic references regarding the taxonomy and nomenclature. This is one of the core elements of Wikispecies, and an area where we excel. Let's for example have a look at the Wikipedia page for one of the planets most common species, Homo sapiens i.e. humans. The Wikipedia page about that taxon does a fairly good job describing the species' physiology, habitat, diet, geographical distribution and social systems etc., but it doesn't give any reference to the actual scientific description of the species as such. I find that odd, considering the Homo sapiens species have been known to humans for a very long time, and that the Wikipedia article was created as early as October 2001. Surely the most basic data about the human's status as a species should have had time to find its way into the article by now?

The same lack of references is common in a surprising number of Wikipedia articles about many very common species, for example domesticated cattle, domesticated sheep, rice, turkey, common wheat, apple, maize and corn, etc, etc. Wikispecies will serve you all of that data and it's almost always correct, verifiable, and up to date. –Tommy Kronkvist (talk), 22:18, 11 February 2022 (UTC).

Information about human taxonomy may be found at w:Human taxonomy. That article has been around since 2005. Esculenta (talk) 15:16, 27 June 2022 (UTC)

IRC links on main page

Hi, it wouldn't hurt to change the IRC links on the front page. Channels on Freenode has migrated to Libera Chat; the link in Libera Chat opens an extension in browsers, which doesn't make it comfortable for people, and the link in "connect" directs to Freenode. In Libera there is already a wikispecies channel that, although there are not many people in it, it is better to place it than not the Freenode channel, where there is no one. -Alabama- (talk) 00:39, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

Wikispecies:Requests for Comment#Migrate Main Page translations to use Special:Translate or not?

Any inputs on it? Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 02:20, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

Font in Taxon Navigation

Can we please not use a nonstandard font for the Taxon Navigation in the top-right of the Main Page? It's making the text harder to read (in my desktop Firefox 113.0.1 for Ubuntu, anyway). The letters look more blocky and squished together than usual. Apparently this is coming from Template:MP/styles.css. - dcljr (talk) 02:00, 22 May 2023 (UTC)

Hello Dcljr, and thank you for your note. The only fonts specified in {{Template:MP/styles.css}} are Verdana, Geneva and Kalimati, then lastly a fallback to any generic sans-serif font. The fonts are supposed to be automatically used in that order, and the system should automatically chose the next one in the list if the prior isn't installed. The first two of them are readily available for more or less all operating systems, but perhaps not installed in your Ubuntu?

That being said, I can't see why we should specify any particular font for that particular part of the Main Page, since we use standard Wikimedia fonts for all the other sections. I'm the Interface Administrator here at Wikispecies and will be happy to remove that font-family property from the CSS file, however would like to notify our other administrators first, should any one of them have an alternative idea, suggestion or objection:

Attention fellow administrators 1234qwer1234qwer4—Accassidy—AlvaroMolina—Andyboorman—Burmeister—Circeus—Dan Koehl—DannyS712—EncycloPetey—Faendalimas– Floscuculi—Geni—Hector Bottai—Kaganer—Keith Edkins—Koavf—MKOliver—MPF—Mariusm—Neferkheperre– OhanaUnited—PeterR—Pigsonthewing—RLJ—Thiotrix.

For reference, Kalimati is a Nepali typeface but I see no reason why it should be included in our Main Page CSS file. It's probably a cut-and-paste error from when the CSS file was first created back in 2022. Nothing wrong with Nepali of course, but it's far too language specific for our Main Page.
–Best regards, Tommy Kronkvist (talk), 17:28, 22 May 2023 (UTC).

No objection. Dan Koehl (talk) 19:17, 22 May 2023 (UTC)

I would suggest replacing Kalimati with Arial. Any reasonable browser would contain Arial font type. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 20:45, 22 May 2023 (UTC)

No objection. Kaganer (talk) 23:29, 22 May 2023 (UTC)

I am fine with this agree with OhanaUnited that arial would be a suitable alternative. Cheers Scott Thomson (Faendalimas) ^talk 23:34, 22 May 2023 (UTC)

​​​Hello @Scott, always nice to hear from you. I don't have a problem with replacing Kalimati with Arial as such: as @OhanaUnited points out it would most likely work very well. However I wonder why we should set the typeface for the "Taxon Navigation" section at all? None of the other sections on Main Page have any particular typefaces set in the CSS; this includes for example the "Welcome to Wikispecies", "Explore Wikispecies" and "Collaboration with ZooKeys and PhytoKeys" sections. There are some font size-, colour- and bold type settings for some of the other section's (sub)headings, but no extra actual typefaces (e.g. Times New Roman, Helvetica, Courier). What makes the "Taxon Navigation" section so different that it needs non-Wikistandard typefaces in the first place, whether it's Verdana or Arial? Here on my Mac the current version of the "Taxon Navigation" section looks great, but isn't a core set of editorial standards better (and more platform independent) than mixing in nonstandard stuff?

By the way the entire Main Page uses the same Template:MP/styles.css CSS file, with the exception of the section at the very bottom with links to our sister projects. It uses Template:Sisterprojects/style.css instead, but no typefaces are listed there either. (Both of those CSS files have only been edited by user @Nux, who also created them.) The transcluded templates for "Distinguished author" and "Species of the month" etc. don't refer to any CSS files at all: some of them use inline CSS code, but again without specifying any typefaces. Tommy Kronkvist (talk) 08:38, 23 May 2023 (UTC).

The font was in both versions English[1] and Polish[2] version main page in HTML. I just moved this to CSS. My goal was to add support for mobile devices and add better structure. I specifically didn't want to change the design, especially on PC, so I kept the fonts.

In general, using multiple font sizes and families is bad for the readability of your design (there are exceptions if, for example, you want to scream with your design). So you might want to remove the font declaration instead of changing it to something else. More uniform fonts are usually more pleasing to the eye. Nux (talk) 20:27, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

┌────────────┘ @Dan Koehl, Dcljr, Kaganer, Nux, OhanaUnited, and Scott:  Done. I've replaced Kalimati with Arial, per OhanaUnited's suggestion. –Tommy Kronkvist (talk), 00:20, 7 January 2024 (UTC).

Excellent! Dan Koehl (talk) 11:29, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

On a related matter, why are "Taxon Navigation" and "Collaboration with ZooKeys" green while all the other section headings are black? That just looks weird. - dcljr (talk) 15:58, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

Why (only) Twitter/X account?

Have you considered setting up something like @Wikispecies for alternatives to Twitter/X like the free open source Mastodon and Bluesky? It varies a lot by community, but my sense is a significant fraction of activity, especially for many academic sub-communities, has moved off Twitter/X. Crust10 (talk) 17:27, 6 January 2024 (UTC)

Hello, Crust10, and welcome to Wikispecies. Good question! I'm the custodian of the @Wikispecies X account, and brought this same question to light on some of our Wikimedia sister projects already in 2022 and early 2023. I wanted to ask for their opinions since I felt it would be a bit odd if only Wikispecies opted for the Twitter alternatives, while our sister projects such as Wikidata, Commons and Wikipedia stayed behind. Back then our discussions mostly revolved around Mastodon and Discord as alternatives, since Bluesky was only about one year old and still fairly unknown. (And yes, I know there's been some criticism and controversy surrounding select Discord servers and their subgroups, but I feel we (i.e. the Wikimedia Community) should alway have an open mind and try to stay objective when discussing things like this.)

So, what was the outcome of these discussions? No dice, I'm afraid. The interest from more or less all of the other Wikimedia projects was luke warm, at best. My guess is that it's still a bit early, and that the current system with a multitude of Mastodon and Discord servers scattered more or less all over the globe might be confusing for some of the users. Sure, the different servers/communities all talk to each other seamlessly and without problems, but it's easier to "understand" Twitter's system which only use one single hub as a central for the whole service. Hopefully the situation will clear up fairly soon, because I recognise the same problem as you: many X users are jumping ship, becoming ex users instead... Kind regards, Tommy Kronkvist (talk), 21:49, 6 January 2024 (UTC).

Tommy, thank you for the fulsome, prompt, generous and humorous (X to ex, lol) reply.

Discord is also a natural venue in my opinion.

That's disappointing that other Wikimedia projects were lukewarm on the last go round a year ago. I can see the value of coordinating on this. But I wonder if there might also be value in one of the custodians boldly giving it a go. I suspect a lot of the hesitation comes from being unsure of best/efficient practices, so questions like: "What is the easiest way to post to multiple platforms?"; "How do I / do I need to monitor comments on multiple platforms?"; "How much do I need to worry about idiosyncrasies of different platforms (formatting, treatment of links, norms about appropriate posts)?"; etc. So if you personally have the enthusiasm and others (still) don't but also don't have objections to you trying (e.g. on reputational grounds or whatever), you might try forging the way and working out best practices. One hopes others would follow! Of course this is all easy for me to say. Just a possible suggestion. Crust10 (talk) 22:43, 6 January 2024 (UTC)