Talk:Selina Wamucii

Selina Wamucii website as a source

When doing web searches for additional information about plants I will often see the Selina Wamucii website in the results. I first became aware of it in this archived WikiProject Plants discussion. My experience has matched that of User:Plantdrew where their website comes up high in the results and contains subtle to blatent errors in the description of the plant or its uses.

For example the Selina Wamucii entry for Elodea bifoliata says that "Elodea bifoliata (also called 'Two-Leaf Elodea', among many other common names) is a small, aquatic plant native to Southeast Asia." When later on in the same page lists it as native to North America. It also claims that the species, "It can be grown in both fresh and saltwater aquariums." This is total garbage as it is a freshwater species only growing in shallow waters and streams as reported by Jepson Herbarium.

The page on the website about data sources does not say how the data is combined or verified just that they use, "raw data from a wide range of relevant sources, which could be combined or used for data verification, depending on data availability, product, and geographical scope."

It is not known how they did this, but it seems likely that they used some sort of large language model AI to do this work in an automated fashion. Regardless of if it is AI generated or not, the frequent errors mean that Selina Wamucii should not be used as a reliable source on Wikipedia. 🌿MtBotany (talk) 20:12, 15 October 2024 (UTC)