[Taxacom] a serious question regarding NZOR

[Stephen Thorpe]

Dear David,

Please could you answer the following general questions, and allow me to FW the 
answer to Taxacom?

Have you considered the possibility of checklists published without any 
supporting evidence, but passed by the usual "peer review" processes, from 
your trusted data providers, could actually contain a significant proportion of 
bad data? Are there quality control measures in place to deal with this? If so, 
then how do they work, given that the lack of supporting evidence surely makes 
it strictly speaking impossible to either verify or refute the data? Do you 
consider the usual processes of peer review to be a good substitute for 
verifiability/falsifiability? In other words, is NZOR entirely dependent on 
trust? If so, do you think that this could pose a serious problem, 
possibly undermining the utility of NZOR for serious purposes like biosecurity 
or conservation management? What proportion of bad data do you consider to be 
"significant", and will there be a way to fix or flag bad data if discovered?

Cheers,

Stephen