Rock,
I do not wish to criticise you or your fellow contributors because each work will stand alone as a beacon of education. I have read your introduction many times and just to be sure I have read it again.
This subject is hard to grab because of its size and complexity.So I have tried to break it down so you can understand my concern.
For example, I have found a nice piece of calcite at a site in the Pennines so I wish to decide how good it is.
I can look up the location on the mindat database and select finds from that location, Here I can find the best calcite from the site and then go further and find associated minerals from that site, This information is extractable without creating more data.
I may wish to go further and compare with other Pennine sites. Again I can get this information without creating any new data.
I can go further and do the same for UK and now I am starting to get into some large numbers of sites and minerals. Now I have reached the stage I need help. I need to be able to view a selection. I need to select sites and specimens. Now I see your exercise as being useful and if the sites chosen and the specimens chosen are given a marker, which could be anything individual, they could still be selected from the main database with an interrogation program.
Yes, a better way to interrogate best minerals and the other data in mindat is necessary, but setting up such a system is not a simple matter. I have talked to Jolyon and David von Bargen, our level 4 gurus, about this and they have several ideas about how this can and may eventually be accomplished. I would like to see the "data blocks" as I call them be put into some sort of database structure with the ability to tag each block with as may tags, keywords, or whatever you call them and then to be able to sort on species, parts of the locality string and any of the tags/keywords that have been attached to the datablocks (Species/locality/images of the species from that locality and the text relating to that datablock). There are other ways of doing this with automatic tag generators etc. about which I know just enough to make myself look stupid when I try and talk about them to people who more about them than I. However for the purposes of Best Minerals I really don't have to worry about that anytime soon because there is such a huge amount of work to be done before we even have articles on half the known minerals.
What shall we look for in selecting a specimen? Your guidelines start by suggesting the largest then the best. But we are told that is not what you really meant. At the same time you refer me back to what you said. Very confusing.
Its not as bad or as hard as you might think it might be. For Best Minerals we use the images that have been uploaded to the Mindat image gallery and it is really not that hard to pick out the images of the best specimens there for a particular mineral out of the gallery. If you asked 20 people from novices to very knowledgeable people to pick out the best 10% of the images for any given species you would most likely find that there would be an 80% + agreement on what the best specimens were. If you asked just knowledgeable people to make the selection, the agreement would most likely be even higher than that. In addition as the articles are being written the authors who usually know more about the mineral they are working on than most can solicit better pictures of that species from the localities they know about and they will know where the weaknesses are when it comes to substandard quality specimens in the mindat galleries. In addition to all of that, because of the Wikipedia nature of this project, other knowledgeable people will chip in with suggestions and the offers of better images as the article is being written. If there is some image that is borderline and it is not obvious if it should be included or not, we often just include it because we know that somewhere down the line a better image can be had, and it can be replaced. If we know that an image or images that we use are really not very good compared to what is out there, we can say that in the text and put in a plea for someone to give us better pictures.
I do not have a problem with your first stated ideas and they would make a fine work to refer to. But it has got to be limited. You did the maths yourself at the time. 16,000 sites and 7,500 pictures for calcite. My suggestion is ten per zone. A zone could be a mountain or county, or country or continent or the world.
I disagree It really does not need to be limited at this time. Even for quartz and calcite, though there are more than 10,000 localities for each and in reality the number of these localities is really many times that number. However the number of those localities for which people have uploaded pictures is vastly more limited. Just the effort of taking a picture of a specimen from a particular locality and uploading it to mindat is a very effective first filter on selecting what is considered a worthwhile locality. Probably the number of localities for calcite where images have been uploaded is substantially less than 10% of all the calcite localities listed in Mindat. Then when you go through all the images of calcite and select just those that produce decent specimens, the number of localities to contend with is cut down even further. When you beak down those localities of the "big" minerals like calcite and quartz into their individual countries, the mind numbing size of the project, that have you scared and initially myself as well becomes a much more practical thing to do. All the localities that I considered "worthwhile" for quartz and calcite turned out to represent only about 65 countries and many of those had only a few localities with decent specimens. There are about 200 countries total, so most of them are not represented on Mindat with pictures of calcite or quartz. So there are still plenty of places to dig for specimens that will supply the collecting community for years to come with new finds. For years I avoided quartz and calcite because of the daunting number of localities, but when I finally got into it and looked at it carefully, it was not nearly as bad as I thought it might be. In fact I recently finished the first draft of Quartz USA, although I had to break it into three topics in the Quartz forum because these fields only hold about 60K words each. I know that I must have missed including some localities that should have been included, but some of these were brought to my attention during the construction of the article, and I almost always included them along with images that were often provided the the people that brought them to my attention. This allows me a shot at recruiting them to help fill in information about the localities that I know little or nothing about. Some of these individuals have become moderates on Best Minerals and have gone on to write wonderful articles on their own and gone on to recute others to help with or write articles of their own.
Without taking that thought into its full depths I am coming back to my starting point. I have found a nice specimen in the Pennines of calcite. I may be asking myself the questions you suggest but the route I have taken up to now is only helpful if I have found something sensational. I should be making comparisons with ordinary specimens and this is set out in your text. Who wants to show off or select their ordinary pieces especially as the initial guidelines indicate largest and best?
Jolyon thinks Mindat should be able to accommodate images of even very modest specimens like the image of the one you include here in your post. Others complain that the database is getting too full of rubbish and want to go in and clean out a lot of stuff, perhaps including things like the specimen you show here. I think there should be a way to include both modest specimens and exceptional ones. You know from looking at the calcites in the Mindat gallery that your specimen is not very exceptional and if you were writing the article on calcite or quartz you would probably not include it in a Best Minerals article. For minerals like quartz and calcite we have to have more stringent standards of what to include because if we did not it would quickly become not manageable. It seemed to me that the only way to effectively show what the good specimens from a particular locality looked like was to do something like best minerals where a variety of a particular species from a particular locality were shown together and then talked about (the ten questions). I include where possible information about the largest because that kind of information can be useful to material scientists who might want to know if they should look for samples of natural materials or head to the synthesis lab for what they need. We all know that biggest is almost always not the best.
A good example is the contributions from Belgium for calcite. A really good and interesting piece of work that I spent some time enjoying. But those specimens are not the ordinary example I have from the Pennines. This information could be kept on the main database and extracted, again using a marker. The information about the sites including anecdotes could also be part of the write up on the main database.for each site, thus reducing the overall size of mindat database.
Good point. Before we put Best Minerals sight wide it was a single forum that only the managers could access and they let me work away on that for some months and during that time other managers started to chip in with their ideas, not only about what localities and images should be included but discussions about just where and how Best Minerals should be placed and accommodated on Mindat. I eventually convinced the managers in general that it should be placed in the message board because there it could easily be accessed by all those visiting Mindat and function as a sort of Wikipedia project and solicit help from a broad spectrum of the mineral community. Without the active participitation of many contributors, like Mindat in general, the site would not ever become what we would eventually like to see it become.
I think I know what you are aiming at. I have collected thousands of items from British sites. Each one has something significant that drew my attention in the first place. Like everyone else I want to identify what I have found. I tend not to use chemicals, hardness tests, or any of those other tests suggested although I have known about them for years. The reason is simply that I have another life and a science lab is not part of it. I therefore look into my very large collection of books to find out if I can identify a specific item.
I too have a lot of books, at least a couple thousand of them relating to minerals in one way or another. A two car garage full of them actually, but I bet that you are using them less and less and Mindat more and more. If so, then your experience parallels mine as well.
There are limitations and that can be illustrated by one sample:
It is clear to me that haematite samples bear similarity to the specimen. There was an unbroken quartz crystal that fell out of the centre. That leaves a lot of questions. There is a lot of other stuff here, and some strange habits. can I identify any of them? Quartz crystals in classic shapes are there but what about the crystalline material that does not follow the classic shape etc etc etc.
Most books would not give me any more useful information as they all concentrate on good and not ordinary. That is the gap in information for newcomers and not so new. Knowing this comes from Cligga in Cornwall is helpful for I can look it up in mindat. But I may need information from other parts of the database.
The specimen you show here is not the kind of thing that we will likely show or address in Best Minerals. But that does not mean that Mindat will not address those questions you have about it. For me the specimen is in the leaveright category. You know the old joke about leaverite? Right after you picked it up you should have put it down again and just leave it right there. The reason for this is that the quartz crystals are obvious and undistinguished (I regularly buy and import them by the ton) and the "hematite", though it could be interesting, is not something easy to characterize and since I don't have the sophisticated analytical equipment needed to analyze it, and unwilling to impose on friends who are real mineralogists the work needed to analyse what will almost certainly turn out to be a very pedestrian suite of minerals, I accept that I will never really know what the stuff is. However, if I suspect for some reason that there might be something really unusual about the specimen, might request a proper analysis. But all that does not mean that you don't have friends and resources here on Mindat. You can show pictures of what you find here on Mindat in several places including the identification forum. You can upload the Image to the Mindat galleries. The people that answer your post will just be taking a guess, sometimes an accurate guesses as to what you have found, but better than that you may be able to find kindred souls that you can collect with or those with a particular interest in specimens from that locality and already know a lot about it. That is I think the true value of Mindat.
If that is the sort of information you intend giving then your contributors do not all understand this. and therein lies my confusion.
Malcolm Chapman
England
Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 10/26/2009 08:58AM by Rock Currier.
