Ethnobotany has some of its earliest origins in economic botany, the study of plants with economic value. This later led to the study of plants for their medicinal and cultural value. This laboratory looks at some economically important plants which are or were once found in Micronesia.
The Internet has many sites with ethnobotanical information and products. Some of this information is accurate and correct. Some of this information is wrong and possibly dangerous. Sorting out the facts from the fictions is difficult even for experts.
One way to begin to assess fact from fiction is to look at the Universal Resource Locator (URL). The URL is simply the web address. The web address usually begins with www for World Wide Web. After a period is the domain name: the name of the web site. Following the domain name is a two or three letter domain category. The category might be com for COMmercial, edu for EDUcation, gov for GOVernment, net for NETwork, or a two-letter country code for sites located outside the United States such as FM for the Federated States of Micronesia.
Commercial sites are out to make money, and unfortunately in the world of ethnobotany there are sites that are selling "fiction" in order to make money. Commercial sites are rarely, if ever, going to inform you when a product does not work as advertised, nor are they likely to warn you of possible side-effects of a treatment. Information on commercial sites should be treated as "buyer beware."
Education sites may be more likely to contain accurate information, but one should attempt to verify the qualifications of the individuals posting the information to the web site.
Governmental sites, both United States and elsewhere, are likely to contain useful information including warnings on ethnobotanical products. There is a good likelihood of the information being accurate, although it might not be the most up-to-date information. Thus government information from 2002 on hepatic toxicity and kava is accurate but may be linked to the inclusion of aerial components of kava according to a 2003 study. Both academics and medical doctors have expressed doubts about the validity of studies in 2001. A group organized to promote kava based in Fiji also disputed the findings, as did a three-year study in Noumea. Thus any particular statement or study should be checked and cross-checked on the wild wild web!
A useful starting site is the Wikipedia. A search box is located in the left panel. Type in the term to search on, and a page of possible matches will be displayed or, in some cases, the Wikipedia will take you directly to an article. The URLs for many articles have a consistent pattern with the "front" staying the same and the article title on the "end": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chocolate. Each articles has many links to further information on specific related and subtopics.
Further down the main front page are links to the Wiktionary, a dictionary, and a quotations web site, Wikiquote. These are useful support sites for writing essays and composing speeches.
The word "wiki" is from a Hawaiian word. From the Wikipedia:
The first such software to be called a wiki, WikiWikiWeb, was named by Ward Cunningham. Cunningham remembered a Honolulu International Airport counter employee telling him to take the so-called "Wiki Wiki" Chance RT-52 shuttle bus line that runs between the airport's terminals. According to Cunningham, "I chose wiki-wiki as an alliterative substitute for 'quick' and thereby avoided naming this stuff quick-web." "Wiki Wiki" is a reduplication of "wiki", a Hawaiian-language word for fast. The word wiki is a shorter form of wiki wiki (weekie, weekie). The word is sometimes interpreted as the backronym for "what I know is", which describes the knowledge contribution, storage, and exchange function.
The most unusual thing about the Wikipedia is that you can edit articles and add material! That is how the Wikipedia was created and continues to grow. Articles such as Kapingamarangi are "stubs" and can be expanded by you!
Files that end in .html and .asp are web pages. Files that end in .pdf are in a format called "portable document format." Viewing PDF files requires special software from Adobe® called Adobe® Reader. The software is free, but on college computers you probably do not have the necessary administrative privileges to successfully install the software.
We will count off by fives and thus form five groups that will research the following topics. Gather together around a group of computers in the room to the extent that you can, have each person look for the answer to one or two of each of the questions. After an hour we will report our findings to each other.