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

[Jim Croft]

On Sun, Aug 9, 2009 at 11:52 AM, Stephen Thorpe<s.thorpe at auckland.ac.nz> wrote:
> Put it another way, Wikispecies already contains better information on
> some taxa than any other available secondary source, i.e., certain
> things in other sources are outdated and/or simply incorrect, so
> looking at Wikispecies will give you information that is closer to the
> actual truth. This is quite independent of "standards".

And in some instances it contains worse; or worse than worse, nothing.
 This is a cheap shot, but so is the above.  It is easy to find
missing, incomplete, outdated or erroneous data in any data source of
substance.

> Also, even if there is money available in these so-called "troubled
> economic times", do we really want to pay for a huge paper chain of
> beauracrats to get a new name from a publication to an available
> database, when anybody can just spend 5 minutes to put it on
> Wikispecies?

And *anybody* can spend 5 minutes taking it away again on a whim.

Both of these counterpoints indicate, at least to me, that both
approaches, and possibly others not mentioned, are needed.

jim

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... in pursuit of the meaning of leaf ...
... 'All is leaf' ('Alles ist Blatt') - Goethe