[Taxacom] LSID versus names

[Stephen Thorpe]

>There are estimated to be roughly 2 million named *species*<
There are many estimates ... all of them different, and largely grounded in ignorance!

You forgot to add in generic and higher names (up to superfamily, above which the ICZN stops regulating) ...

I don't mind if my order of magnitude guesstimate was an underestimate ... the more names that there are helps to illustrate my point even more ...

Stephen




________________________________
 From: Richard Pyle <deepreef at bishopmuseum.org>
To: 'Stephen Thorpe' <stephen_thorpe at yahoo.co.nz>; 'Paul Kirk' <p.kirk at cabi.org>; 'Dr.B.J.Tindall' <bti at dsmz.de>; 'Jim Croft' <jim.croft at gmail.com> 
Cc: 'TAXACOM' <taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu> 
Sent: Friday, 22 June 2012 8:21 PM
Subject: RE: [Taxacom] LSID versus names
 
> It would be interesting to know how long it took to "do" 80,000 fungal
names
> (out of 460,000, i.e., approx one fifth)? In zoology, there are maybe 2
million
> names, as a rough order of magnitude ...

This underestimates the task in Zoology.  There are estimated to be roughly
2 million named *species*.  This doesn't count heterotypic synonyms -- which
may bump up the total names to somewhere in the range of 1.2 - 3x that
number.  Then, you also have to consider when the ICNafp crowd talks about
numbers of "names", they're including all the different combinations, plus
in some cases a good number of orthographic variants, etc.  If you scaled up
zoological "names" to include these combinations and variants, you'd be up
to....well....your guess is as good as mine.

And one more thing:  will you all PLEASE stop dragging your finger nails
across the informatics chalkboard and stop using "LSID" when in most cases
you probably really mean "GUID"?

Thanks.

Rich

P.S. Stephen:

> There are far more important things to be done first, like
> just sorting out and linking together names and literature,

This is precisely what GNUB is intended to do (ZooBank being a subset of
GNUB, which is prioritizing the sorting out and linking together of names
and literature when Code-governed nomenclatural acts are at play).




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