Posting bulb photos elsewhere
Rodger Whitlock (Wed, 23 Jan 2013 11:14:48 PST)

I would say no, for several reasons.

First, if you resort to facebook, twitter, or "google groups" (really, usenet
newsgroups that have existed for decades), you are at the mercy of the host. I
remember when the alpine-L mailing list had an extensive photo library on
Yahoo. One dark night it simply disappeared, never to be seen again. Harry
Dewey, who was running alpine-L in those days, was (to put it mildly) beside
himself because there were no backups.

Second, the PBS wiki is quite easy to maintain. When I was actively
contributing to it, it posed no real problem. Mary Sue and her helpers have set
up a good system that's fairly easy to use, and it's OURS, not someone else's.

Third, to start using Facebook is a balkanization of "where to find bulb photos
on the web".

It's quite one thing for PBS to set up a Facebook account and point it to the
PBS wiki, but that's as far as I would go. Remember, Google indexes the PBS
wiki so someone searching for information on bulbs can find the PBS wiki easily
enough.

One thing that could be done to improve things is to make sure that Wikipedia
articles on specific bulbs include links to relevant articles on the PBS wiki.
Those who are easy with their photos going into the public domain can also beef
up Wikipedia with suitable photos; many articles lack good photos of the most
obvious subjects (though I think the horticultural articles are not the sinners
in chief).
--
Rodger Whitlock
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
Z. 7-8, cool Mediterranean climate