[Taxacom] FW: Red List of Insect Taxonomists in Europe

[Roderic Page]

I don’t want to always be “that person”, the one who constantly says, "this would be easy to do in x”, but it strikes me that instead of parochial efforts focussed on particular regions, using data of uncertain origin, a platform like Wikidata might be a place to develop some of these ideas further.

Already large numbers of taxonomists and their publications are in, or being added to, Wikidata (partly through the efforts of people editing Wikispecies). The connection between an author and their publications is not always present in Wikidata, but a community of editors is actively making those links. Wikidata often has affiliation data for authors, and for more recent publications it often has data on funding for individual papers.

No database is complete, but Wikidata is open, is growing, and benefits from contributions from people who have no interest in taxonomy, but nevertheless end up contributing valuable data. By having a shared, global resource, it means we can do analyses any time we want, rather than rely on a frozen-in-time report. There are interesting studies such as "Biodiversity, Taxonomic Infrastructure, International Collaboration, and New Species Discovery” https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biu035  that would be so much more useful if the data was available and being actively built upon.

I’m not saying that Wikidata is in a position to answer all the kinds of questions being asked in this particular survey, but I think there is a case to be made for it being a place where we could tackle these sorts of questions. We’ve already seen what David has been able to achieve linking Wikidata to GBIF in https://bionomia.net , and my recent toy https://species-cite.herokuapp.com scratches the surface of linking taxonomists to their publications and taxa.  A couple of years ago I did a query to find the citizenship of people who had published on the taxonomy of Australian animals, using data in Wikidata. I found the  result interesting (much of the knowledge of Australian taxonomy came from people who weren’t Australian). You can run the query here https://w.wiki/6PX, or see a bubble chart here https://pasteboard.co/KeMSqEo.png This is but one of many kinds of queries we could explore.

If we expanded our horizons a little we might be able to create something that lasts and is useful beyond a particular question being asked at particular time.

Regards,

Rod


On 6 Aug 2021, at 17:59, Shorthouse, David via Taxacom <taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu<mailto:taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu>> wrote:

All -

I assume the ultimate end-game with such a Red List of Taxonomists is
to in fact examine trends not merely raw, incomplete, point-in-time
snapshots. The goal may be to marry numbers of active taxonomists &
their productivity (however measured) to available money contributed
by nations / funding agencies. The assumption is that national monies
have dried-up, local numbers of taxonomists have dwindled, recruitment
is poor, attrition is rampant, productivity has crashed, and decision
makers will react by responding in kind. And, whosoever compiles such
a list will have the necessary ammunition to celebrate successful
nations / funding agencies & embarrass laggard nations, which are
perhaps further categorized using a capitalistic, conservation-defying
metric like GDP that decision makers understand. It doesn't take much
to realize that this has big, big problems, the least of which is the
possibility that global taxonomic productivity has not crashed despite
the assumed dwindling number of local taxonomists because the slack is
taken-up by other nations. That possibility may lead to a declaration
of success by national funding agencies, even for the delinquent
nations, no? Would we ever be sufficiently compelling to elicit a
comparably competitive race for space, the moon, or Mars? The allure
for those endeavours (besides the contract monies and new jobs to make
gadgets) is that no one nation owns nor claims any political
responsibility for the frontier of space, the moon, or Mars. It is
also a quirk of pride for nations and funding agencies to declare that
races were won despite their meagre means. This is not a game we want
to play.

Does this Red List of Taxonomists (EU focused for now, correct?) help
the discipline compete for attention, receive committed funds, and
sway hiring committees? Would it make more sense to find a way to
eliminate our language of institutions or nations altogether
throughout the building of the list – make it global from the outset –
& let decision makers fulfil their own visions of pride?

David

On Fri, Aug 6, 2021 at 11:46 AM Frank T. Krell via Taxacom
<taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu<mailto:taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu>> wrote:

Dan Janzen wrote me and Lyubo following our quibble about town and institution in Lyubo's taxonomists survey:
" Frank, Lyubo, what is this “institution” stuff?  As you  both know very well, a huge portion of the taxasphere work from home.Those of us users very much need those people as well as those in institutions, as well as we need ALL for our efforts to open the taxasphere silo to the wider world."

Yes, the role of non-institutional taxonomists is paramount, will likely grow, and is rather neglected by the increasing legal red tape. I am lucky to be in an institution and can do taxonomy as one of my duties, but it took me leaving my country twice and moving to another continent to continue to afford it.
Lyubo, one of the important outcome of your efforts would be to determine what percentage of active taxonomists are not paid by an institution for their taxonomic work. This is probably not so easy to determine, particularly if you have people with an institutional address, but the institute wants them to do other things and they do their taxonomy in their free time. We might also have to reach out to local listservers or regional societies to reach people outside the Anglosaxon sphere. I would be very interested in hard data on this.

Anyway, all taxonomists should do this little survey https://red-list-taxonomists.eu/ I hope that nor all Americans will be at the University of Hawai'I by default 😊.

Cheers

Frank
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