[Taxacom] [Taxacom' Wikispecies is not a database

[Bob Mesibov]

Following Richard Zander's call to deviant arms I'm going to stick my neck out here and say that an underlying assumption in this exchange is just plain foolishness, namely this one:

"A single, complete, online resource for all taxonomic information is desirable."

The only people I know who want access to all-of-life taxonomy in all its detail are people working for acronyms. Real-world students, naturalists and others just want a reasonably up-to-date classification, and couldn't care less about types, synonyms, publication dates, name/concept mismatches and all the rest of the Taxonomist's Burden.

So what do taxonomists want? With the exception of the walking encyclopedia Ken Kinman, taxonomists are deliberately narrow specialists. If I study kinorhynchs, I just don't care who published what about orchids or lizards. What I want to know and have handy is the complete kinorhynch literature and related resources, because it's that information that I as a kinorhynch taxonomist will be using in kinorhynch taxonomy.

Furthermore, these deliberately narrow taxonomists have been quietly ignoring the debates raging at acronym level and have been compiling their own, bottom-up and solidly authoritative online resources. Some are in database form, other aren't. It seems to be largely a matter of taste, because compared to the content managed by megacorporations and governments, the content of these resources is tiny.

Other taxonomists, bless 'em, are building up content in both Wikipedia and Wikispecies, both for their own and for more general use. To say that could be done more flexibly begs the question, flexible for whom?

Like Stephen Thorpe, I'd like to see a lot more money put into real taxonomy, and less into the data-wrangling that keeps the acronyms busy. The more support at the bottom, the better those bottom-up resources will be.

And no, I don't have any hope - not a smidgen - that the work of the grand-scale aggregations and data manipulations will encourage anyone to do taxonomy. Not one. You either love kinorhynchs or you don't.
-- 
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
Website: http://www.qvmag.tas.gov.au/mesibov.html