The joy of ignorance

Or why do I love Wikimedia Commons (the Wikipedia-style media repository). It's not only because I can upload my high resolution, sometimes a bit crappy images :) It's not only because the images can be displayed on Wikipedia. It's because they will be near perfectly categorized - time, place, type... and if I don't know how to categorize them - I can just wait and see how somebody will categorize in in the future. Now, I know little about life sciences: animals, plants, etc. But I still take photos of them... and what happens?

I upload a picture that in my vast knowledge I name "Black bird on grass" :) and categorize it in "unidentified birds". A month later, somebody else updates it to "Unidentified Passeriformes". Few months later, we have the bird narrowed down to "Turdus merula".

Watching this happen to all of my images, from mushrooms to strange parts of machinery, is really fun :)

Feeling like testing your visual knowledge? Try the "Category:Unidentified subject". I think I see a camel...

PS. In other news: my Wikipedia adventures were blogged about by Durova.