And the other thing to announce is that MtBotany will be at Cosine, the Colorado Springs Science Fiction Convention, in January. I will be presenting Citation Needed: Editing Wikipedia for Fun and No Profit for people interested in becoming one of the people who edit the encyclopedia.

Also, the picture from iNat is frickin' fantastic. Emily/ladyliatris took an awesome picture.

I made this article last year in December and it was about the time I really started to "get gud" at writing articles. When I checked over my work this week all I had to do was make sure all the common names were linked. It could use some additions, but largely complete. Still happy with it.

Everything I do is public, because Wikipedia, but I'm not going to point anyone at the articles I'm rewriting until I'm done and they all have pretty pictures from iNaturalist. Though I recently checked up on Castilleja scabrida, rough paintbrush.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castill...

But I continue to do work on Wikipedia. Going down the list of all plants that grow in Colorado and making sure they all have a basic taxonomy section and their NatureServe status. Plus rewriting some existing articles quite completely.

I did not know to look for trilliums in Colorado. I'll have to keep my eyes open next June.

Now I'm wondering if there are plants that pretend to be spiders camouflaging as plants.

In a garden or in the wild, any plant, skip the Latin names if they don't amuse you. Common or rare. Just a plant you've been exited to see at some point, for the first time or for the thousandth.

I got curious and, of course, there is a Wikipedia page with excessive detail and tables for why. Even the modernized 747-8 drinks kerosene like crazy compared to something like a A350-900 per passenger.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_ec...

Why would it need an entry? You'll be happy inside listening to your AI friend tell you AI stories... forever.

Delightful! Perfect! Literary, amusing, and also rejecting the need to actually lay out a beat down.

He who would pun would pick a pocket, sir.

;)

It has a learning curve, like all new things. I recommend starting with quiet factual pages, rather than politics or disputed history. Articles about small cities, dead scientists, plants, insects, small mammals, etc. Use archive.org to search for published books to cite.

I almost went with another insect, but salmon are so dang cool. But I definitely wanted to express my love of some of the smaller things.

And we need everything. Writers, photographers, spell checkers, arbitrators, etc. etc. etc.

From giving just a little to a lot, the project will take anyone who wants to help build an encyclopedia.

I'll mention, as I usually do in such discussions, that supporting Wikipedia with cash is good, but we need more editors as well. People willing to put aside opinions and work with verifiable facts. Wikipedia is amazing... and it also has giant gaps that need to be filled.

Going to get a lot of use out of lines from Terminator 2.

Though the tools we're creating are killers of the mind rather than of the physical life. And they're far less... interesting than real AI. They remind me of the people getting obsessed with the ELIZA chatbot in the 1990s.