[Taxacom] WoRMS fixes Kerguelenia ...

[Stephen Thorpe]

>For arguing over who did what - yes.  For efficient updating of information - 
>no.  :-). I totally take your point that going back in time
to view a previous state is possible in Wikis without the forethought that would 
necessary in WoRMS. Just don't know how often one would need to

I think it is very important, not just for arguing over who did what, but 
because of the dynamic nature of biodiversity information. It is important in 
just the same way as citing a publication is important, i.e., what you cite must 
be archived in the form that it was in when you cited it, or else it means 
little or nothing. The Wiki system provides the most efficient way possible to 
do that - otherwise you have to take a screen shot or download and publish it if 
you want your work to be verifiable by your readers (and we all do want that, 
don't we???)

Again, if we look at the edit history for the Kerguelenia genus page:

Edit
history   Date
   action
   by
2004-12-21 15:54:05Z   created   Bellan-Santini, Denise 
2004-12-21 15:54:05Z   checked   Costello, Mark 
2005-07-25 06:54:52Z   changed   Espinel, Nadjejda 
2007-02-08 07:55:58Z   changed   De Broyer, Claude 
2010-07-22 08:44:07Z   changed   Lowry, Jim 
2010-08-26 13:28:30Z   changed   Lowry, Jim  
I still fail to see anything of use here! The entries don't link to archived 
documents, and you don't know it what way the page was changed or checked by 
these editors. It looks good, but is completely pointless ...

If someone cited this Kerguelenia page on 2010-08-27, just before the recent 
problem was fixed, if you try to verify what they did, you come to the 
conclusion that they misread the page, because now when you look at their cited 
link, you see different info and no indication of subsequent changes...

Stephen


________________________________
From: Geoffrey Read <gread at actrix.gen.nz>
To: Stephen Thorpe <stephen_thorpe at yahoo.co.nz>
Cc: taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
Sent: Fri, 3 September, 2010 4:11:27 PM
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] WoRMS fixes Kerguelenia ...




On Fri, September 3, 2010 1:57 pm, Stephen Thorpe wrote:
> Yep, got it Geoff ... but don't you think that the Wiki system, with
> stable URLs
> to every previous version of a page, is better?

For arguing over who did what - yes.  For efficient updating of
information - no.  :-). I totally take your point that going back in time
to view a previous state is possible in Wikis without the forethought that
would necessary in WoRMS. Just don't know how often one would need to.


> So, how should we interpret the "edit history" on a WoRMS genus page like
> Kerguelenia? What does it tell us?

Each date indicates that the taxon Xus was edited on that day by the said
person for any of taxon name, authority, rank, parent taxon, status,
accepted name, type, type designation, environment, fossil range. Mostly
all things relating to the nomenclature of the name. The edit might be
really trivial but the edit history will still update.

Updating or linking sources in WoRMS does not create a new edit date for
the taxon record, nor does adding various notes. But you can look at the
details of notes to see their individual edit histories.

One nifty thing you can do in WoRMS is to click on a source details link
and see all the taxa linked to that publication. Very handy sometimes -
including for spotting errors such as two variant entries in the
literature tables.

Geoff