This article argues that a cooperatively-built, well-organized,
shared knowledge base is a new – and, from certain viewpoints, optimal –
kind of support (refining and integrating other kinds of supports) for three
complementary tasks: learning about living entities (and how to identify them),
supporting their identification, and sharing knowledge about them. This article
gives the ideas behind our prototype, and argues that knowledge providers
can be not solely specialists, but also amateurs. In essence, for these three
tasks, it argues for the (re-)use of much more semantically organized and
interconnected versions of semantic wikis or scratchpads.
