Sunday, October 21, 2007

My Wikipedia "Good Deed" for the Day

Was browsing through some of the pics I had taken while visiting the Monterrey Bay Aquarium with the family back in April, I ran across a nice pic I had of a giant jellyfish, its long arms extending several meters from its large, bulbous bell. Whenever I take pics at museums (or aquariums) I make a point of also taking a pic of the accompanying plaque or board describing the thing I have taken a pic of. Turns out this beastie was the Black sea nettle, a rarish Pacific coast jellyfish, which has the Latin name "Chrysaora achlyos".

So I looked it up in Wikipedia, in order to see whether or not there was a pic of it already. But not only was there no pics, but there was no article—just a "red link" from the genus page for that species, indicating a link to a "hole" in the encyclopedia.

So I spent an hour researching the creature and managed to pull together, in about an hour, a fairly decent, substantive article on it. Jellyfish are definitely not my specialty, but I was able to find some good online resources that I referenced in the article, and managed to pull the formatting (and some generic jellyfish info) from the related Sea nettle article. Voilą!, instant semi-decent and substantive article.

I threw in a nomination to make it a "Did you know?" article, which is a summary of a major point from new articles recently posted to Wikipedia that appears on its main page.

And I uploaded the pic to Wikimedia Commons, which is what started the whole process in the first place.

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