[Taxacom] Data quality in aggregated datasets

[David Campbell]

> Unlike (generally) the collector and the museum (and often the
knowledgeable end-user as well), the aggregators do not do their best to
ensure that the information they're passing on is correct. <

There are also a number of museum databases up online that conspicuously
relied on taxonomically untrained help to put lots of stuff into a
database.  Given museum funding, that may be the best they can do, but it's
often not good (major groups of snails identified as clams, for example).
Aggregators provide a very good opportunity to flag similar but discrepant
records, if that feature gets programmed into them.  But definitely the
fact that a record from a museum database exists online does not mean that
it has been examined to see if it is accurate.
Department of Natural Sciences
Gardner-Webb University
Boiling Springs NC 28017