[Taxacom] CoL caught with its fly down!

[Chris Thompson]

Sorry, Stephen, but being cute and writing to Neal and the taxacomers 
generally is not helpful nor productive.

Address the producers and provide details. That way the problem may be more 
quickly resolved and the community can have better information (see *** 
below).

Sorry ALL, while I normally try to refrain from general criticism that is 
put on Taxacom, I feel the need to re-iterate what should be obvious to all.

Most in the online community expect everything should be free and perfect. 
That is, in this case, information about names of flies, specially horse 
flies, should be available for free and be perfect, current and without 
errors. BUT who should pay the costs of generating and serving this 
information?

For the last couple of years, no one has been paying much for fly names. 
Except for a small grant from the Schlinger Foundation and few bucks last 
year from Species2000, all work has been done by one retired entomologist 
and served online by Natural History Museum of Denmark as part of another 
entomologist’s research program. Less that a few thousand a year for 10% of 
the World's known biodiversity. [Remember they spend over $650 MILLION on 
the Census of Marine Life. Yes, more information but about the same number 
of species!]

[And I should say, while this project was started under USDA funding, they 
abandoned all funding when the economically importance fruit flies were 
completed back in late 1990s, and shortly thereafter forcing me into earlier 
retirement and abolish the research program. And, that is, the reason for 
the name change from BioSystematic Database of World Diptera to our new 
Systema Dipterorum.]

So, what does the community get from a program that runs virtually FREE?

So, yes, I messed up the data conversion and transfer from Systema 
Dipterorum last year. So, let’s check and see how “UNRELIABLE” the SD 
information is in the CoL2011 edition is.

***Your mentioned that your query was about Tabanidae, horse flies. I 
provided CoL  with the names of 4,406 valid species, of which you found 
problems with TWO (Bombylius apulus Cyrillus 1791, Dicranomyia convoluta 
Hancock 2006)! Yes, that is imperfect, but I am happy to rely on some thing 
that returns the right answer 99.99% of the time. And in fact, while not 
shown clearly, Bombylius apulus is a horse fly, currently of incertis sedis 
status! The other is a database checking error (there is also a horse fly 
genus, Dicranomyia (that is, Hunter 1900) preoccupied by Stephens 1828) and 
when that data record was created, it was incorrectly assigned to family due 
to that preoccupied name.

As for missing “valid” genera, you provided no information, so I do not know 
whether this is due to concurrency or different classifications or what. The 
horse fly classification is now under review and we have currently a two 
year backlog on new names (that is, we estimate there are some two thousand 
new names that need to be added to the online version).

So, yes, “CoL caught with its fly down,” but it remains pretty good for a 
“FREEBIE,”

Sincerely,

Chris Thompson

retired,
from home

-----Original Message----- 
From: Stephen Thorpe
Sent: Saturday, May 21, 2011 9:53 PM
To: neale at bishopmuseum.org
Cc: taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
Subject: [Taxacom] CoL caught with its fly down!

Hi Neale and Taxacomers,
I have just been trying to get a good list of genera for Wikispecies of the 
fly
family Tabanidae. I looked first at Catalogue of Life: 2011 Annual 
Checklist,
which attibutes its data to Systema Dipterorum, 2.0, Jan 2011
Now, I soon found the CoL list to be unreliable, missing valid genera, and
including spurious genera from other unrelated fly families (e.g. 
Dicranomyia
and Bombylia).
I then noted that the link that CoL gives to Systema Dipterorum leads to 
Systema
Dipterorum Version 1.0. Last updated: 10 August 2010, and this, as far as I 
can
tell, has the data all pretty much spot on correct!
So, wtf? What has gone wrong here?? One way or another, CoL has ended up 
with
unreliable data ...
Cheers,
Stephen
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