[Taxacom] Data quality in aggregated datasets

[Geoff Read]

"my experience in sending corrections to WoRMS is quite positive, although
it would be more convenient to have a direct link from the page"

I think WoRMS does that. There's a contact email hot link to the database
team bottom right on every page of the WoRMS plain interface.  They'll
forward your email to the right person.  If you use one of the GSD
interfaces to WoRMS such as mine for Polychaeta, the template is for the
lead taxa editor name to be in the same bottom right location, either just
as the name or clickable.  And "report an error" is rather negative - you
might also want to contribute information, ask a question or request a
clarification as to why something is so.

Geoff

On Tue, April 23, 2013 5:33 am, David Campbell wrote:
> All too often, there is an additional step, namely "interested third party
> hunts around trying to find how to contact the data provider".  Given that
> error checking is not being funded, this means that errors are largely
> noticed when an interested user is trying to make use of the data set for
> some other project.  I'm not a database programmer, but I would think it
> would be relatively straightforward to have a "report an error with this
> record" button that automatically supplies the provider with the
> information they need to identify which record is problematic.  As is,
> the user often becomes disinterested in bothering if the provider seems
> uninterested in correcting.  Also, in far too many cases, the data quality
> is so spectacularly bad as to discourage the prospective users.
> I would note that my experience in sending corrections to WoRMS is quite
> positive, although it would be more convenient to have a direct link from
> the page rather than looking up the contact email.  On the other hand,
> when
> I found that a BOLD record had a completely wrong photo, I was told that
> the information in GenBank was not the information they needed to identify
> the record.
> On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 6:04 PM, Robert Mesibov
> <mesibov at southcom.com.au>wrote: