Re: VMs: 1006184 & 1006185

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

At 19:10 09/06/2004 +0100, William Edmondson wrote:
> My comment on the strawberries is that the morphology in the VMS
> drawing is hopelessly wrong in so many respects.  I'm looking for more
> than just impressions.  Is that wrong?

It's really not a matter of right or wrong: it's just that there has been a 
*great deal* proposed about nearly every page on-list, as just about every 
VMs plant is notably curious in one respect or another. It is as though we 
simply cannot read the visual language the herbal is written in - until 
such time as we can, impressions / similiarities / analogies are all we 
have. :-o

Practically, the biggest problem is that the amount of research required to 
properly back up even a single rough identification - such as the 
strawberries match - can be extremely significant (weeks, if not months), 
and just about nobody has that kind of time to invest in an endeavour which 
has as yet born no obvious fruits (sorry). IMHO, Dana Scott has worked 
terrifically hard over a long period of time at finding "least worst" 
matches, and deserves our praise and encouragement: we all know the VMs' 
raw material is poor and/or misleading in this respect, so don't shoot the 
messenger!

> I may come across as tetchy, rude, opinionated.... but I try not to be
> (and apols to all if I fail there).  If we are going to establish a
> wiki site on the basis of the new images we should be careful about the
> quality of the ideas/information we put there.

IMO, the first sensible step should be to put together (semi-)automated 
ways of Wikifying existing data and placing it all on the Wikibook site. 
Sources include:-
* the interlinear file (but probably not all the transcriptions)
* links to threads/posts on the mailing list archive (ie, Dana's suggested 
identification[s], etc)
* page thumbnails from Seth's site
* links to Beinecke image pages (or to Seth's mirror)

Collating this quantity of information will be a significant technical task 
- and editing it will be a huge task as well, which will need dividing 
amongst the whole list. Even just reading every mailing list post on 
individual pages could take days in some cases!...

...but we'll get there! :-)

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling..... 

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