[Taxacom] Wikispecies is not a database: part 3 (after thinking about it!)

[Mike Sadka]

Hi Stephen
 
And bravo Evgeniy !
 
[You wrote...]
Everybody won't just adopt them [standards] - we are even constantly having to defend ourselves against factions who want rid of traditional biological nomenclature altogether! 
 
But technological standards are not for "everybody" - they are for machines. Taxonomists don't need even to know that they exist, but machines will not be able to serve taxonomy to their full potential without them.
 
[and...]
... instead of just sitting down at a computer online and typing in taxonomic information,...
 
This attitude worries me a lot because it seems not to ask where that taxonomic information is going or whether best use is made of it, and I feel it sells the data short.
 
Where does "just ... typing in taxonomic information" get you?  Without an underlying standard, typing just makes more pages of taxonomic information.  They may be very useful but they might as well be on paper except that they are easier to update and distribute.  
 
ICT has the potential to search, sort, aggregate and integrate data from a range of sources - thereby generating new information, and giving those "experienced and knowledgeable" people more and novel opportunities to make discoveries - not to replace fieldwork (or closetwork), but to maximise the information derived from the data it generates.   If data are entered willy-nilly into numerous different systems without care for their fate, their usefulness is limited and maybe shortlived.  
 
Obviously this isn't an argument against wikispecies, or for numerous different OLs.  It's an argument for both using common standards.
 
 
[And...]
...so we don't need working taxonomists to help build our databases...
 
I agree - there's been quite enough of that already!   You need IT people to buld your databases.  ;-) 
 
Cheerio, Mike