Sunday 1 September I visited the New York Botanical Garden to study and relax. There was an exhibit there called “Wild Medicine” which I wanted to see.
I walked as much of the garden as I could because I was eager to see it but then also I had some reading to do, and I had intended to find someplace peaceful and read. That hardly happened. There is a shuttle which travels around the park and I took that to understand the size of it. The park is too big and the shuttle, while it makes a good route, does not cover much of the park at all. I wish that I could spend days there.
I appreciate the efforts of the Wild Medicine exhibit to present medicinal herbs but I thought they did a poor execution. When I was at that open access conference in Switzerland some months ago Daniel and I visited the Botanical Garden in Lausanne. Daniel told me that they had attempted an instance of the QRPedia project.
QRPedia is a project to create infrastructure to create QR codes for Wikipedia articles. The idea is that when there is some meatspace object which is described by a Wikipedia article, and someone is responsible for explaining that object to large numbers of people continually, then providing access to the Wikipedia article as a default option is useful. Instances of the QRPedia project would be attempts to apply QR codes in a particular place, such as at a botanical garden or museum. John Cummings in 2011 conceived and managed the MonmouthpediA project, and John knows well what he is doing and that his idea is brilliant and the idea had to start somewhere, but parting with the city of Monmouth in Wales is no way to get the leverage out of QRPedia for which it was designed. If historical sites in Monmouth are tagged, then that is great for people visiting Monmouth. Outside of Monmouth it is less relevant, except that I can understand that the city of Monmouth would want this to increase tourism. I had never heard of the place before; it has a population of 9000.
I expect that the New York Botanical Garden gets a million visitors a year and tourists to New York speak every language. Also, places like botanical gardens, zoos, and science museums have internationally collected specimens, whereas in Monmouth, they have Monmouth attractions. If any botanical garden in the world used QR codes to link their specimens to Wikipedia, then as those Wikipedia articles are be shared with every botanical garden, if anyone in the world developed the articles then all botanical gardens would benefit. The utility of this explodes into radical accessibility when articles are translated, as a QR code would know what language a person uses on their phone so a single QR code applied to a plant, animal, or science museum exhibit could service speakers of every language in the world. I wish the best for Monmouth, but I cannot expect why tourism organizations in New York and Lausanne would find it in their own selfish interest to develop content on Wikipedia about Monmouth. I do feel that the most self-interested actions that those two and every other botanical garden could make would be to develop and translate articles on whatever popular specimens they have.
In the New York exhibit on Wild Medicine, near each plant was a sign with two paragraphs on the medicinal utility of each plant. This was done for perhaps forty plants and I expect that after showing this in New York they would like to sell the exhibit to tour to other gardens. When the exhibit is over the curation will be lost. Would it not have been better that instead of them hiring a botanist to spend lots of time writing unique transient non-interactive content in only English that they spent much less time making permanent sharable interactive content in every language and in partnership to make all botanical gardens in the world better? Open educational resources will have to come eventually.