[Taxacom] Dirty data - WAS: i4Life Call for Pilot Projects

[Stephen Thorpe]

One of the many problems here is that most people only know enough to be able to spot a few errors/problems in any big biodiversity dataset. I don't care about error/problem rates <1% ... that ain't what I'm talking about! I'm talking about, for example, the data CoL currently has (from WTaxa) on Curculionidae (about 5000 genera). It is all a complete jumble. There is little or nothing useful in it. By contrast, the published versions of the generic catalogues by the same authors who created WTaxa are excellent (for genera)...
 
Stephen

From: Richard Zander <Richard.Zander at mobot.org>
To: Mike Sadka <M.Sadka at nhm.ac.uk>; TAXACOM <taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu> 
Sent: Wednesday, 25 July 2012 4:51 AM
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Dirty data - WAS: i4Life Call for Pilot Projects

Mike:

As a follow-up to your comment about improvement, Tropicos has indeed
improved. I've been checking publication info by other authors
intensively recently, and notice minor errors maybe once every 200 or
300 entries. So a quick means of feedback is important in a database,
plus someone who will check reports of errors and fix them. 

Richard



____________________________
Richard H. Zander
Missouri Botanical Garden, PO Box 299, St. Louis, MO 63166-0299 USA  
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-----Original Message-----
From: taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
[mailto:taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of Mike Sadka
Sent: Tuesday, July 24, 2012 11:18 AM
To: TAXACOM
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Dirty data - WAS: i4Life Call for Pilot Projects


Fair comment Richard.

I didn't intend to suggest that dirty data are always acceptable.  Only
that they should not be universally despised, as they are capable of
improvement.  In an ideal world, one ought to be able to know how much
confidence can be placed in any particular dataset, and use it
accordingly.

Cheerio, Mike


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