AntWiki:About

A home page for every ant
The goal of Antwiki is to provide a home page for every ant. A place on the Web where everything known about every species of ant can be assembled. Images, specimens, text, data, it's all here, contributed by experts and open to everyone. And as our knowledge grows, so does Antwiki. Every day brings new understanding and every day Antwiki is updated and expanded. This information comes from both local as well as global studies, assembled into a single picture. "Antwiki provides a place for everyone to contribute local knowledge in pursuit of a global understanding of the world’s ant fauna."

Building a global picture of the world's ants
But Antwiki is much more than just species home pages. Antwiki provides a place to document local faunas, collate notes on life history traits, discuss broad ecological processes and phenomena, and to assemble image gallaries and distribution information. This information isn't forced into predefined styles but is presented in the format that most suits the data being reported. While guidelines are suggested to encourage uniform presentation across pages there are no firm rules. And there are not limits on the information that can be included. If it relates to ants and it is of interest to others, then it can be part of Antwiki.

Authoritative information provided by experts
Antwiki content is provided ant experts. These experts have spent considerable time gaining knowledge of the world's ant fauna and are happy to share this knowledge through Antwiki. Existing information is continually being checked, updated and expanded and new information added. In addition, anyone can comment on the information within Antwiki by adding to each page's Discussion page. In this way brief notes, casual observations and unconfirmed thoughts can be captured and made available to the broader community which complements robust expert-vetted information.

Antwiki management
Antwiki has a minimal management group and even this group spends most of its time studying ants and not running Antwiki. This group mainly deals with setting broad directions, making sure the Antwiki infrastructure is safe and secure, interacting with editors and anticpating future needs and opportunities. Our guiding philosophy is to provide a rich, flexible environment with a light editorial touch which lets experts get on with what interests them.

Getting started with Antwiki

 * For general information on editing Antwiki content see Help:Contents
 * Antwiki uses the Mediawiki software, the same software platform used by Wikipeadia. For information on this software see www.mediawiki.org.