University of Glasgow

Roderic Page

One response to the analysis I did of the [Google rank of mammal pages
in
Wikipedia](http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-wikipedia-and-eol.html)
is to suggest that Wikipedia does well for mammals because these are
charismatic. It\'s been suggested that for other groups of taxa
Wikipedia might not be so prominent in the search results.  
  
As a quick test I extracted the 1552 fungal species I could find in
Wikipedia and repeated the analysis. If anything, the results are more
dramatic:  

::: {style="text-align:center;"}
![Untitled
Image.png](http://lh6.ggpht.com/_Gct8lVAxKqQ/Sp5QKR1-8RI/AAAAAAAAAh8/3JYhXr4goSo/Untitled%20Image.png?imgmax=800){border="0"
width="400" height="374"}
:::

  
  
Once again, Wikipedia dominates the search rankings. Over 75% of the
pages are the top hit in Google. More specialist fungal sites, such as
[CAB Abstracts Plus](http://www.cababstractsplus.org/) and the [American
Phytopathological Society\'s online database](http://www.apsnet.org/) do
pretty well. EOL and the nomenclatural database [Index
Fungorum](http://www.indexfungorum.org) barely make an appearance.  
  
If fungi are less \"charismatic\" than mammals, the implication is that
the less charismatic the taxon, the better Wikipedia does (perhaps there
is less competition from other sites). Of course, Wikipedia is severely
underpopulated with fungal pages, so one could argue that for fungi not
in Wikipedia, sites like EOL may do better (relative to other sites),
but that would need to be tested. I suspect that sites that provide more
broadly useful information (such as [APSnet](http://www.apsnet.org/))
will continue to dominate the search rankings, followed by scientific
articles (for the fungi in Wikipedia the publishers Springer, Wiley, and
Elsevier all appear in the top of sites that appear in the Google
rankings).


One response to the analysis I did of the Google rank of mammal pages in Wikipedia is to suggest that Wikipedia does well for mammals because these are charismatic. It's been suggested that for other groups of taxa Wikipedia might not be so prominent in the search results.As a quick test I extracted the 1552 fungal species I could find in Wikipedia and repeated the analysis.

Rogue Scholar Beiträge

Fungi in Wikipedia