[Taxacom] WoRMS fixes Kerguelenia ...

[Stephen Thorpe]

Well, Geoff, no doubt WoRMS does have a few tricks of its own, but surely a HUGE 
advantage of Wikispecies is having links to primary literature (whenever 
available), as opposed to just citing another database as source?? With more and 
more literature going online (both new and historical), any database that 
doesn't index and link to that literature is wasting all our time IMO. In that 
sense, Wikispecies is more like an electronic library (you could get the "books" 
elsewhere, but here they all are classified by taxon relevance) ...

Stephen




________________________________
From: Geoff Read <gread at actrix.gen.nz>
To: Taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
Sent: Sun, 5 September, 2010 8:47:18 PM
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] WoRMS fixes Kerguelenia ...

>>> On 4/09/2010 at 10:59 a.m., Stephen Thorpe  wrote:

> yes, but I was comparing the structure, not the content
> currently, there is very little on Wikispecies for your group, but
imagine equal content and ask which would be better then ...

Well WoRMS still obviously. There is much more capability to run logical
checks to identify possible erroneous records and inconsistencies, and to
extract precise datasets, and to be queried via various web protocols
automatically.

I somewhat hesitated to mention all that as I presume Stephen is thinking
for the direct end user over the net, where there might not be that much
of a visible difference, but I suspect WoRMS will be less work to keep the
taxonomy current and even now has a more flexible and precise search
capacity.  A drag and drop taxonomy tree for editors like in EOL lifedesks
and in Specify would be a nice feature update, but that very ease of
change has its dangers.

Geoff


_______________________________________________

Taxacom Mailing List
Taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
http://mailman.nhm.ku.edu/mailman/listinfo/taxacom

The Taxacom archive going back to 1992 may be searched with either of these 
methods:

(1) http://taxacom.markmail.org

Or (2) a Google search specified as:  site:mailman.nhm.ku.edu/pipermail/taxacom  
your search terms here