[Taxacom] Wikispecies is not a database

[Bob Mesibov]

Rod Page wrote:

"Why can it not be a case of data aggregation AND discovery?"

Well, that *is* the case, of course, so there's not much point in asking the question. Both happen. However, the two are connected asymmetrically. A data aggregator relies absolutely on the work of discoverers, but a discoverer doesn't need data aggregators.

On the next social level up, discoverer-taxonomists are embedded in knowledge communities with well-defined limits. If you ask a specialist who the knowledgeable people were and are in that specialist field, you'll almost certainly get a correct answer. Look again at that BBC story linked in your email. Harrington sent his fossil aphid to a fossil aphid expert. If none existed, Harrington - an entomologist and part of an aphid team - might have named the new amber species himself. There really are 'aphid people'. Their overlap with other taxonomic knowledge communities? Not much.

Taxonomic knowledge communities create their own online resources bottom-up, and these resources can be - and are - accessed and used by data aggregators. I don't think this happens the other way around, which is another asymmetry.

I won't go so far as to say the acronyms are parasites, since there's a degree of mutualism. I also wouldn't claim that the acronyms are hindering discovery. But you would have to make a very convincing argument, well supported by specific instances, to persuade me that the acronyms are *helping* discovery.

Which gets me back to your idea that if we don't have decent ways to access what we already know, then taxonomy is dead. Within a particular taxonomic knowledge community, that's true - or at least, the taxonomy goes rotten. But on the all-of-life level that the acronyms play games in, your idea doesn't hold water. The aphid people do not need access to chaetognath taxonomy, for example, if if all the acronyms disappeared tomorrow they'd go on doing very lively aphid taxonomy indefinitely.

(Readers and lurkers, *please* do not bring up homonymy. That's a special problem relevant to all specilist groups which was handled in print for decades by names compendia. Of course, we can do it better now digitally and with Web access, as a service to discoverer/documenters, who I would like to think support mandatory name registration and taxonomic data-banking. Now that *is* bottom-up.)
-- 
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