[Taxacom] taxacom NZ Inventory

[Stephen Thorpe]

you are an intriguing fellow, Geoff! On the one hand you criticise me for 
criticising something for which all the relevant facts may not at present be 
available to you and others, but on the other hand you rashly jump to 
conclusions without knowing all the relevant facts and criticise me for things 
that are WAY OFF THE MARK! Specifically:

> take it Stephen that you now disown authorship of the 2003 checklist I 
>mentioned which committed the same 'sins' you object to

It is WAY more complicated than that! I was not originally invited to contribute 
to that checklist, but I happened to see a late proof, and let's just say that I 
managed to convince the authors that it would be somewhat imprudent of them to 
publish without significant revisions that I offered to freely make, for the 
sake of the quality of the end product. I wouldn't have chosen to do it the way 
it was being done, but I was powerless to change that, so my somewhat reluctant 
late involvement was a damage limitation exercise, and any 'sins' therein were 
not really down to me. Do I "disown" it? In a way, yes, but at least we managed 
to make it a HUGE improvement over the previous effort:

	* Crosby, T.K.; Larochelle, A. 1994: List of the Coleoptera genera in the New 
Zealand Arthropod Collection (NZAC). Weta, 17(2): 44-69.
 
this list was compiled by reading the outside labels of store boxes in NZAC, 
until the funding run out. The list contains many unpublished generic names and 
many genera are implied to be present in N.Z. when in fact they were from New 
Caledonia or elsewhere, and no distinction was made between interceptions and 
established taxa, further adding to confusion. Amusingly, the fictitious genus 
Camiarina appears to have been included because the lid of the box was on upside 
down, and the lid had the terminal 'e' of subfamily Camiarinae on it!

Stephen

 

________________________________
From: Geoffrey Read <gread at actrix.gen.nz>
To: Taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
Sent: Wed, 17 November, 2010 11:10:10 PM
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] taxacom NZ Inventory



> On 16 Nov 2010 at 22:43, Stephen Thorpe wrote:

> The genus Paracymus DOES occur in N.Z., and I did neither say nor imply
> that it didn't.

I think you did imply that it didn't, but never mind. It just illustrates
the difficulty of responding to someone's criticism of an unpublished item
which only they have seen. Which is why I think it is unfair to make that
criticism public in a forum like this.

I take it Stephen that you now disown authorship of the 2003 checklist I
mentioned which committed the same 'sins' you object to. Namely new
generic records (in that case) quote, "derived from unpublished work by
the authors and the reviewers".

Is there an analogy here with former sinners being the most strict in
enforcing a new religion? I wonder.

Geoff


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