[Taxacom] ICZN procedure question

[Francisco Welter-Schultes]

Rich,
bringing the Code more to the point is a good idea. Many passages are 
unnecessarily vaguely defined. There are expressions in the Code such 
as "not consistently binominal" for which you do not find anything 
down to the point what that exactly means. And this is absolutely 
unnecessary because it is well possible to put in words what 
zoologists understand under such a term. Same with a minimum number 
of paper copies in Art. 8.

The problem I see is much less that an electronic copy could be 
destroyed, as it has not been a major problem for taxonomic science 
in the past 400 years that paper is a material that can very easily 
be destroyed. One of the major problems will be developing methods to 
find electronic copies again after long time. In many years 
libraries have developed means to store and find printed books, and 
scientists took a long time to learn how to cite book metadata in a 
way that others will be able to find them in libraries. 

The other problem that will arise after a file would have been 
found, is how to read it. This is a problem the books don't have, 
with which we have very little experience and can only hope that 
someone will help us some day, preferrably someone who will not be 
paid by us.

Francisco
University of Goettingen, Germany
www.animalbase.org