[Taxacom] Wikispecies is not a database: part 2

[Doug Yanega]

A few comments:

First, I very much agree with Stephen, and some long-time 
list-readers may recall that in years gone by, I too have suggested 
that one of the most useful things a taxonomist can do is to "adopt" 
parts of Wikispecies and Wikipedia. If all of us did it, as part of 
our daily routine, then we wouldn't need all of these expensive, 
redundant cataloguing initiatives.

>In the real world (outside taxonomy) what are the primary tools used 
>by publishers, governments, banks, insurance companies, the retail 
>trade etc etc etc to store and manage content - it aint Wikis its 
>databases/datawarehouses ... I think there is a message there ... ;-)

When I come across a taxon name I don't recognize, I type it into 
Google, and a lot of times the top hit I get is Wikipedia. Other 
times it's ITIS. Wikispecies turns up rather often, but not as the 
top hit, and I assume that's a bit of a circular issue (Google 
ranking is boosted by visitation, and not nearly as many people use 
Wikispecies as use Wikipedia or ITIS).

>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.

Actually, you're forgetting another significant class of people: 
people like myself, who run natural history collections. I actually 
do NEED a single, definitive classification covering every taxon that 
could potentially be found in my collection. I have no use for 
competing classifications, because a unit tray can only have one 
label on it - and you don't put specimens of the same species in two 
or three different families within your collection. And I actually DO 
need all of the underlying taxonomic work (types, synonyms, 
publication dates, name/concept mismatches), because (1) the only way 
I'd ever be able to identify all of these specimens is if I have 
access to the accumulated published research - mostly the 
descriptions and keys - of essentially every entomologist who has 
ever lived, and (2) every collection in existence has a long and 
convoluted history of IDs behind its specimens, and when names 
change, or concepts change, there's no magic curatorial fairy (with 
hymenopteran wing venation, presumably) that's going to zap her wand 
and update the specimens in the collection FOR me.

"But -", you gasp... " - there are only a tiny handful of natural 
history museum curators in the world!"

EXACTLY!!!!

The entire edifice of taxonomic practice is built on a foundation of 
specimens housed in natural history collections around the world. 
Every time a taxonomist wants to do research, they cannot avoid (or 
should not, I suppose) making use of such collections - and the more 
out-of-date a collection is, the less likely it will be for a 
taxonomist to be able to extract *from* it all the material they need 
to see (I'm reminded of the recent request for information on the 
beetle family "Proterhinidae", for example).

Realistically, that tiny handful of museum curators is a "bottleneck" 
through which taxonomic information needs to pass in order for it to 
get applied to the billions of specimens that will never actually be 
seen by a revisionary taxonomist. Or, more to the point, specimens 
that won't be seen by a revisionary taxonomist UNLESS they are 
properly classified *first*.

For my purposes, resources like Wikispecies - with all the sorts of 
careful annotation that Stephen advocates - are more welcome and more 
beneficial than you might imagine. It's a shame, for example, that 
the Tree of Life website has so few authorities contributing to it, 
because it, too, has a lot going for it; many features that would be 
great if they were available in Wikispecies - and vice-versa. But to 
return to the point Bob was making, if you're a kinorhynch 
taxonomist, then there is no *problem* if all of that specialized 
information you need personally is held within a larger resource that 
ALSO contains equally detailed information on orchids and lizards. 
The trick is to ensure that all of the people who work on kinorhynch 
taxonomy all share in the development and editing of that *portion* 
of the resource. You don't NEED to work in isolation just because 
your interests are specialized.

The key is *participation*, and that's also what trumps all the 
arguments about how *bad* it is that Wikis are open to anyone to 
edit. If every time you log in you instantly receive an update 
telling you what changes have been made since your last viewing, then 
no one is going to be doing "ninja taxonomy" that escapes notice. The 
other thing people either don't know (or forget easily) is that 
people can, and do, get banned from Wikipedia and Wikispecies if they 
are intentionally disruptive. "Open access by default" is NOT the 
same as "completely open".

Stephen is correct about how wasteful it is to keep reinventing the 
wheel - to stretch the metaphor, what happens is that we get teams of 
people each with their own idea of what a wheel should be, and they 
are competing instead of settling on one wheel design that everyone 
thinks is promising, and inviting all the teams to help *refine* that 
design to everyone's mutual satisfaction. So, we have a lot of 
sub-optimal wheels, and none of them have a big enough team to push 
the resulting wagon up the hill. Wiki-style resources have the 
advantage in that regard, because they are inclusive rather than 
exclusive, and Wikispecies has the advantage in that it's trivially 
easy to contribute to it. There are worse "models" we could be 
working from. Can I suggest something *better*? YES! But it could 
still be easier for the taxonomic community to collaborate with the 
Wikimedia Foundation and redesign Wikispecies, than to just spend 
more money to create its own Wiki-taxonomy resource.

Sincerely,
-- 

Doug Yanega        Dept. of Entomology         Entomology Research Museum
Univ. of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0314        skype: dyanega
phone: (951) 827-4315 (standard disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)
              http://cache.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html
   "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
         is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82