[Taxacom] CoL caught with its fly down!

[Stephen Thorpe]

Well Chris, et al.,

It has been an enormously time consuming task to work out which of the 
genus-group names included in Tabanidae by Systema Dipterorum were considered to 
be valid genera by Systema Dipterorum! I had to look at each record, one by one! 
The problem is heightened by rather a lot of subgenera in this family. Oh, if it 
could just have spat out an alphabetical list of valid genera!

Anyway, my results are here: http://species.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tabanidae, and I 
shall point out the most relevant bits below: 


Systema Dipterorum appears to have made two bigish blunders: 

(1)  the following 3 genera were described in Rhagionidae by Ren (1998), and it 
is very unclear why Systema Dipterorum Version 1.0. Last updated: 10 August 2010 
has them as Tabanidae: †Oiobrachyceron - †Orsobrachyceron - †Pauromyia
... see the genus pages on Wikispecies for very recent refs which still treat 
them as Rhagionidae;

(2)  I have followed González (1999) in treating above the following as full 
genera: Agelanius - Haematopotina - Nubiloides - Scaptiodes, as it is very 
unclear why this has not been followed by Systema Dipterorum Version 1.0. Last 
updated: 10 August 2010
... again, I can find no subsequent refs which dispute González (1999) .

so, some blunders, but for a "freebie" still not bad ... but more interesting is 
how this data has been harvested by CoL 2011 checklist: 


the CoL list differs from the source database* as follows: 

(1)  Bombylius and Dicranomyia are not listed as valid genera of Tabanidae by 
the source database (and are not valid genera of Tabanidae) 


(2)  the following are listed as valid genera in the source database, but are 
not listed by CoL: 

Acellomyia - Bouvieromyia - Caenopangonia - Chaetopalpus - Cydistomorpha - 
Nothosilvius - Olsufievotabanus - Phorcotabanus - Pseudocanthocera - 
Thaumastomyia
 
the source database is stated to be Systema Dipterorum, 2.0, Jan 2011, but I can 
find no trace of a version 2.0 ... is there one? I assume the data is the same 
as Systema Dipterorum Version 1.0. Last updated: 10 August 2010 ... is it?

So, I guess my only take home message is that Systema Dipterorum could be a lot 
more user friendly, at least when it comes to lists of valid taxa at say the 
genus as opposed to subgenus level, and beware of harvesting errors if you use 
CoL as a substitute for the source databases. The number of errors may be small, 
but noticing them can significantly diminish confidence in the rest of the data 
...

Stephen


________________________________
From: Chris Thompson <xelaalex at cox.net>
To: Stephen Thorpe <stephen_thorpe at yahoo.co.nz>; neale at bishopmuseum.org
Cc: taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
Sent: Mon, 23 May, 2011 2:54:42 AM
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] CoL caught with its fly down!

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
_______________________________________________

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) by visiting http://taxacom.markmail.org

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