[Taxacom] ZooBank reality check

[Bob Mesibov]

Interesting that other ZooBank testers haven't had the (so far) satisfactory 
results I've had with taxon names per se. Another question is lurking here, 
though: who will use ZooBank as an all-purpose name reference, and why?

I'd personally like to believe that working taxonomists will continue to 
take the trouble to check the original literature in their specialty group. 
They will only go to compilations prepared by the painstaking nit-pickers 
who preceded them in their specialty, and even then will be skeptical. 
"Taxonomic librarians" compiling vast databases of nomenclatural information 
cannot be expected to do this, whether they work for Thomson or the uBio 
effort or any other enetrprise.

The original "prospectus" for ZooBank argued that we needed a name registry 
for _current_ taxonomic effort. We also (in zoology) need an online Neave, 
simply so that we can try to avoid homonymy.

The idea that ZooBank would be an authoritative source for _past_ taxonomy 
was something for the future, yet this seems to be what some site visitors 
are expecting _now_, which is not only unfair, but misguided.
---
Dr Robert Mesibov
Honorary Research Associate, Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery
and School of Zoology, University of Tasmania
Home contact: PO Box 101, Penguin, Tasmania, Australia 7316
(03) 64371195; 61 3 64371195

Tasmanian Multipedes
http://www.qvmag.tas.gov.au/zoology/multipedes/mulintro.html
Spatial data basics for Tasmania
http://www.utas.edu.au/spatial/locations/index.html
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