[Taxacom] Wikispecies is not a database

[Bob Mesibov]

Sometimes when I try to be polite I don't get my meaning across, so I'll try again. Big smile:

I *like* WikiXXXX and what they do, and the fact that anyone with a Net connection can get to it. I *like* open-source, community-edited, online resources. I also like and support specialist online *closed* resources, built by taxonomic knowledge communities for their own special purposes. I also like and support mandatory name registration and tagging and/or semantic markup of names, authors, acts etc in current and future taxonomic publications.

All of these things are very good for taxonomy and for those who benefit from or make use of its results. So what am I whingeing about? Darkening frown, getting impolite:

In recent years there's been enormous growth in what I've dubbed 'the acronyms'. These are projects and people working in parallel with genuine taxonomic effort, with a top-down approach to how the whole of the world's taxonomic data should be organised, and some idiosyncratic ideas about who will use this information, and how. The acronyms are very confident that they know what they're doing, so confident that they've persuaded private and public sources to give them very substantial funding.

Whether or not that money could have been applied to real taxonomy isn't the point. The point is that neither of the gigantic current problems in  taxonomy - the decline in expertise and personnel, and the need to push taxonomy of disappearing biotas - has anything to do with the work of the acronyms.

I misstated something in an earlier email. The acronyms do not, in fact, need any living taxonomists. Try this as a thought experiment: all taxonomists disappear tomorrow, and all that's left of taxonomy is the vast corpus of taxonomic works from 1758 to 2009. Do the acronyms close up shop? Of course not. They happily continue working on more and more clever ways to link the existing taxonomic information, to make it machine-interpretable, to deliver it in efficient and targeted ways to clients. Years of interesting, well-paid work ahead.

Cui bono? Taxonomists? I don't think so. The acronyms have been positioning themselves to seem like the major players in the digitisation and Web-ification of taxonomy. They are no such thing. They are what governments and institutions dependent on government funding saw as the appropriate bureaucratic response to the call in Rio, 1992 for an improved inventory of the world's biota - for better conservation, better land management and a whole list of other sound purposes. In other words, instead of actually boosting taxonomy training, taxonomy jobs, collecting effort and collections, the global and state responses have been to organise existing taxonomic information. Much safer. This is the legacy of Rio - a plethora of acronyms playing games with data management, with the threat of YATD (great acronym) always present, while taxonomist numbers drop, collection management falters and whole ecosystems deteriorate unsampled.

What the acronyms do is an exciting intellectual challenge and I'm sure their employees are utterly sincere in believing their work is important. But important for taxonomy? Do we need a schism in Taxacom, with one list for taxonomists and another for those who do acronym work and see great bottom-up resources like Wikispecies as a challenge to their authority?

Much of this bile, incidentally, accumulated after reading Rod Page's memorable comment about kissing the field goodbye if we didn't have a decent aggregator of what we already know. Excuse me?
-- 
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