[Taxacom] Rocket science, not?

[Bob Mesibov]

David Patterson wrote:

"If all players register and contribute and players 'watch', then we can achieve the currency that is being  sought and do so with a communal infrastructure rather than rely on individual projects and the vicissitudes of their funding."

Back to top-down and bottom-up. More and more active taxa these days have online communities working to sort out nomenclature and other taxonomic issues and make the tentative, regularly updated results universally available. These folks are the active players who could potentially help EoL and other top-down efforts. The inactive taxa don't have players, so EoL will either have to hire someone to sort out those taxa or leave them muddled.

The question is, why would the bottom-up, active-taxon, online communities want to help a top-down effort? Why do the same job twice? If you want to build a house on your own land, why would you join an organisation that wants to build thousands of houses on thousands of blocks of land using volunteer effort? Which will get your house built first? And to what standard?

Which raises the issue of volunteer vs paid effort, something some posters keep mentioning to the top-down folk without getting a serious response. If EoL is concerned about the vicissitudes of funding large, top-down projects, it should spare a moment to sympathise with taxonomists and institutions working with inadequate funding or no funding at all for taxonomy. Those of here at the bottom are putting in a lot of volunteer time and effort on bottom-up projects focussed on particular taxa. Charity can only be spread so thin, and it is still far from clear who, exactly, will use all-taxon resources that mirror (variably well) single-taxon resources developed by keen online communities, and for what purposes.

The all-taxon, all-record projects are the encyclopedias of the early Web era. To carry the historical analogy further, they will be uneven and variably up-to-date efforts which will be ignored by serious students in favour of specialist efforts. There are already many online communities 'nucleating' in the Web to maintain these specialist resources. Ther will never be a single, collaborative online community maintaining an encyclopedia, especially if there is zero funding for that maintenance.
-- 
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