Talk:FishBase

Fishes Start‑class

	Fish portal This article is part of WikiProject Fishes, an attempt to organise a detailed guide to all topics related to Fish taxa. To participate, you can edit the attached article, or contribute further at WikiProject Fishes. This project is an offshoot of the WikiProject Tree of Life.FishesWikipedia:WikiProject FishesTemplate:WikiProject FishesFishes
Start	This article has been rated as Start-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the project's importance scale.

Fisheries and Fishing Start‑class High‑importance

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Fisheries and Fishing, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of fisheries, aquaculture and fishing on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Fisheries and FishingWikipedia:WikiProject Fisheries and FishingTemplate:WikiProject Fisheries and FishingFishing
Start	This article has been rated as Start-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
High	This article has been rated as High-importance on the project's importance scale.

Template:WikiProject Computational Biology

FishBase reception and NPOV

If errors have been noted in FishBase by reliable sources, then inclusion is allowed per WP:NPOV. Is the citation mistaken? Were the errors noted in the citation somehow not really errors? Is there any rationale that is consistent with Wikipedia policy (rather than FishBase cheerleading) for not presenting a balanced view? Per WP:NOV, criticisms are not to be removed unless flawed. "I don't like it" is not a valid reason for removing properly sourced information. If you would like to show FishBase in a more positive light, then cite reliable sources that present more positive information, per Wikipedia policy.Math.geek3.1415926 (talk) 22:53, 9 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Reply from FishBase project

The problem in your posting is not that we are not happy with mistakes (see in the page the section I am adding).

The problem is that for a page that presents an information system in general with more than 200 tables, 32,000 species, dozens of topics, hundreds of fields, and millions of records, you make prominent an issue that concerns only 5% of records (according to our own assessment of global error-content in FishBase, and you are not demonstrating that it is more than that). In particular, displaying a large graph that concerns only a small part of the information system is irrelevant. We think there that you, you are not following any Wikipedia principles. If there are mistakes in FishBase, signal to FishBase, but you must respect the fact that we may disagree with your remarks.

We were not pretending that FishBase is 100% correct. In that case, the NPOV would apply. Or we were not pretending in that page that the information you were interested in was 100% correct. In that case again, NPOV would apply.

Note that we have not removed your remark, but that we have reduced its unjustified prominence.

And again, it would be better if we could talk directly:

to be sure that the errors you depicted are really errors or if there is a misunderstanding from one of us, and if relevant that it is corrected in the information system because it is where it is useful for users;
to present the error issue in FishBase (but that is general to any Biodiversity Information System) in a fair way, which is not the case the way you are doing it.

FishBaseProject (talk) 03:16, 10 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia policy prohibits inclusion of information that is not available in published, reliable sources. Several recent edits seem to include "inside" information: facts that may be well known to contributors to the FishBase project, but which have not been supported with in-line citations, per Wikipedia policy. Wikipedia is not a venue for institutions to publish information about themselves that is not independently verifiable. Claims about FishBase error rates, or the error detection and correction process must be verifiable. See WP:Verifiability. The material from Cole-Fletcher et al. is verifiable. Material that is not verifiable can be removed.Math.geek3.1415926 (talk) 12:28, 10 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]