[Taxacom] Caveat emptor (raw taxanomic data)

[bti at dsmz.de]

Karl,
Interesting to know that this is also happening in other areas. You  
are not alone.
Brian


Quoting Karl Magnacca <kmagnacca at wesleyan.edu>:

>
> On Wed, August 25, 2010 11:36 am, Stephen Thorpe wrote:
>> well I guess that as a major contributor myself to a biodiversity
>> information source (Wikispecies) which attempts to be completely
>> open and honest about data quality, those others that trade on
>> spurious greater authority really annoy me...
>
> The problem is that you never know if a source is reliable until you
> actually check out the raw data (type specimens, sequence
> chromatograms, etc.) for yourself.  As an example - the last
> monograph on one of the groups I'm (trying to) work on was done by
> someone with a good reputation who has published many good papers
> over many years.  The key uses a lot of vague terms (e.g. "larger"
> vs. "smaller"), as was common at the time, so I looked at the types
> to figure out what he meant.  Turns out the terms aren't just vague,
> but have essentially no resemblance to the actual specimens.  Which
> means pretty much throwing out ~200 descriptions and starting from
> scratch.  Fun.
>
> Karl
> =====================
> Karl Magnacca
> Postdoctoral Researcher
> University of Hawaii-Hilo
>
>
> _______________________________________________
>
> Taxacom Mailing List
> Taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
> http://mailman.nhm.ku.edu/mailman/listinfo/taxacom
>
> The Taxacom archive going back to 1992 may be searched with either  
> of these methods:
>
> (1) http://taxacom.markmail.org
>
> Or (2) a Google search specified as:   
> site:mailman.nhm.ku.edu/pipermail/taxacom  your search terms here
>



Dr.B.J.Tindall
DSMZ-Deutsche Sammlung von Mikro-
organismen und Zellkulturen GmbH
Inhoffenstraße 7B
38124 Braunschweig
Germany
Tel. ++49 531-2616-224
Fax  ++49 531-2616-418
http://www.dsmz.de
Director: Prof. Dr. J. Overmann
Local court: Braunschweig HRB 2570
Chairman of the management board: MR Dr. Axel Kollatschny

DSMZ - A member of the Leibniz Association (WGL)