[Taxacom] GBIF: perpetuating probably defunct unpublished names

[Jim Croft]

hoping they read taxacom... just waiting for the funds transfer to
come through... :)

as a reasonably bioinfo savvy kind of person, I do not expect anything
from a data aggregator, or a data provider, to be truthful, complete,
reliable, precise or accurate.  GBIF, EoL, ALA, AVH, Google, Bing,
Wolfram Alpha, Guardian, New York Times, Fox News, hey, even
WikiSpecies - they are all the same: indicative.  OK, some might point
and some may just wave in the general direction, but they are still
only indicative.

find a dataset, any dataset, and I am sure we will be able to find
something to fault and something to argue about.  It is such a
demoralising waste of time when, with a bit of duct tape and fencing
wire and a few chosen expletives we could just fix the damn thing...

jim

On Sat, May 22, 2010 at 2:40 PM, Stephen Thorpe
<stephen_thorpe at yahoo.co.nz> wrote:
> Jim: you should be BP's (Bigfoot-Print's) new PR guy! :)
>
> perhaps the tone of my email came across a tad too strong, but I do think
> that in the rare cases where the likes of GBIF do have content on their
> pages, it isn't so unreasonable to expect it to have been thoroughly checked
> out and validated FIRST ...
>
> Stephen
>
> ________________________________
> From: Jim Croft <jim.croft at gmail.com>
> To: Stephen Thorpe <stephen_thorpe at yahoo.co.nz>
> Cc: taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
> Sent: Sat, 22 May, 2010 4:29:14 PM
> Subject: Re: [Taxacom] GBIF: perpetuating probably defunct unpublished names
>
> isn't finding, accounting for and correcting these sorts of things
> what the business of nomenclature and taxonomy is all about?  no harm
> no foul?
>
> it is probably a bit unreasonable to expect everyone to get everything
> right every time, and it is no one person's (provider's)
> responsibility - we are all on the same side, and we all try to
> address the broken bits we see...
>
> in our collection we work hard to avoid focussing fault.  if there's a
> problem, it's everyone's problem, and everyone (which in reality
> usually means someone!) gets to fix it... taxonomy is a bit like
> that... :)
>
> jim
>
> On Sat, May 22, 2010 at 1:41 PM, Stephen Thorpe
> <stephen_thorpe at yahoo.co.nz> wrote:
>> this isn't very helpful:
>> http://species.wikimedia.org/wiki/Agalba_lawrencei
>> http://species.wikimedia.org/wiki/Agalba_storeyi
>>
>> at least my Wikispecies pages clearly indicate that they are unpublished
>> names
>>
>> they will probably never be published as the types were probably labelled
>> as such before Muona realised that Arisocephalus was a synonym of Agalba, so
>> these species probably already have names
>>
>> perhaps GBIF should ask its data providers to verify that the names have
>> been published???
>>
>> Stephen
>>
>>
>>
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>
>
>
> --
> _________________
> Jim Croft ~ jim.croft at gmail.com ~ +61-2-62509499 ~
> http://www.google.com/profiles/jim.croft
> 'A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point
> of doubtful sanity.'
> - Robert Frost, poet (1874-1963)
>
>



-- 
_________________
Jim Croft ~ jim.croft at gmail.com ~ +61-2-62509499 ~
http://www.google.com/profiles/jim.croft
'A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point
of doubtful sanity.'
 - Robert Frost, poet (1874-1963)