[Taxacom] [TAXACOM] Systematists as holists

[tyler]

On Tue, Apr 08, 2008 at 10:00:50AM +0200, Paul van Rijckevorsel wrote:
> From: "tyler" <tyler.smith at mail.mcgill.ca>
> > The work of one dedicated, competent individual can often be far more
> > productive than that of a dozen individuals without the training or
> > time to devote to a single issue.
> 
> ***
> In the field I am familiar with, this is quite true. There is a mass of
> publications, but the quality work has been done by surprisingly few
> individuals, belonging in only a handful of institutions. Outside those
> institutions, even moderately reputable professionals can be found to make
> remarkably silly errors.

[...]

> Wikipedia looks to work rather well, for topics that a critical mass
> of people know about and care about,

This is key. For marginal taxa, and most taxa probably are, the
possibility for a few strong-minded individuals to present a decidedly
'non-neutral' analysis is very real in such a system. On the other
hand, it's hard to imagine ever reaching any semblance of consensus
among the 7 billion odd people who profess to be experts on the
taxonomy of the sparrows that visit their feeders.

> There is no basic reason why on-line mentoring of a dispersed network of
> various people for distributed taxonomy research cannot work. 

[...]

> However, the results will depend on a great number of conditions,
> starting with the persons doing the mentoring and the special environment
> set up for it. A basic requirement is to have observant and educable
> participants, 

Indeed. My main concern is that another basic requirement is that
there be trained professionals with institutional support to provide
the mentorship, supporting infrastructure (collections, reference
material, equipment, etc.) and, perhaps most importantly, continuity
for such a project.

> Needless to say, organizing such a project would add yet another set of
> skills, for the much-besieged "embedded taxonomist" to master.

Ultimately, such a project could be a great boon for taxonomy. But it
would be irresponsible to presume that such a system could replace the
work of dedicated career professionals. Wikipedia is fine for a first
approximation, but when you need to really understand the state of the
science you still have to go to the peer-reviewed literature. 

Tyler

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