[Taxacom] GBIF progress

[Dr. David Campbell]

Quoting John Irish <jirish at mweb.com.na>:

> I think GBIF is great, but it is suffering from a bad case of GIGO.

There seems to be a common pattern in large online systematics 
initiatives for funding to be dedicated to electronic infrastructure 
but not to systematics or systematists.  How can we better market the 
fact that we need salaries for people who know about the organisms, 
rather than expecting all the data to be supplied on a volunteer 
basis?  Much data entry is done by people who obviously don't know 
about the organisms (this is not a new problem; I recall reading a 
complaint regarding the students assigned to compile specimen 
catalogues decades ago).   

-- 
Dr. David Campbell
425 Scientific Collections Building
Department of Biological Sciences
Biodiversity and Systematics
University of Alabama, Box 870345
Tuscaloosa AL 35487-0345  USA