[Taxacom] Finding your species in Mendeley

Wed Dec 7 17:59:53 CST 2011

post-2000 new names are also problematic, due in part to vagueness in some crucial articles of the current Code of Zoo. Nom. (don't know about Bot.)
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in fact, almost nothing is completely straightforward, and everything is subject to revision
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local biotic inventories (e.g., NZOR) also pose big problems with their apparently simple present/absent classification (relative to the region covered, e.g. N.Z.) Many taxa have been reported from N.Z., for example, almost certainly erroneously, but although they may have been dropped from subsequent checklists, often there has been no direct challenge of the record published. Do we include these as present or absent? There are a continnum of cases from clearly present to clearly absent.
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so, the most important thing with all these projects is to treat everything as a *theory*, subject to confirmation or refutation, and it is therefore the *evidence* which is important, so just dogmatically stating a name/author/date, or an alleged presence in an area of a taxon, without the associated evidence being discussed, but rather based on "trust",?is completely meaningless ...
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for example, NZOR has this record: http://demo.nzor.org.nz/names/413a92a1-656e-4859-80b0-409d7c1f692c
telling us that Ligia exotica is present (indigenous, in fact!) in the "wild" in N.Z. In fact, it isn't here, and has never been here, but some old records got published somehow, based either on misidentifications or mislabellings. NZOR *does not tell us the basis (evidence) for this record*, which makes it strictly irrefutable ...
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Stephen
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________________________________
From: Francisco Welter-Schultes <fwelter at gwdg.de>
To: Jim Croft <jim.croft at gmail.com> 
Cc: taxacom <taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu> 
Sent: Thursday, 8 December 2011 12:38 PM
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Finding your species in Mendeley

Linking names to their original description in zoology must be done
manually. The most important names were stablished before 1900. These were
the most frequent animals. Sherborn and others have too many mistakes and
are outdated. It would certainly be extremely useful to get Sherborn's
names linked to the sources as cited by Sherborn, but this will not
produce reliable data up to date with present-day nomenclature. The link
to the digitised original source must be checked manually, entries must
contain 'verified' flags and it must be possible to see in such a flag who
exactly verified the original source and when.

In AnimalBase we have tried to do that with 50,000 names established
before 1800. Even if Sherborn is used the task is impossible without
trained students with relatively profound knowledge of present-day
nomenclatural rules. I agree with Jim that the task is doable and finite,
but I learned a lot of how difficult the task is, and how expensive and
how long it would take until it would be done. It is definitely not a
5-years or 10-years job of a voluntarily working community.

If nobody is paid to do it, it will definitely take longer. It is not a
comfortable job. 80-90 % of the names might be easy to find. But it is
really weird in 10-15 % of the cases (and the last 5 % you need to find
and verify might take you more than 50 % of the time you are paid to do
the entire job).

Sherborn tried to escape the danger of losing too much time with a
strategy that I have called careless research. If works were too difficult
and time-consuming for understanding and extracting the new names,
Sherborn simply solved the problem by not doing it thoroughly. He seemed
to have thought, well, others can do this later. He did not understand
German, French, Danish, Swedish, Dutch and Italian, and did not take the
time to translate descriptive texts, and by consequence came to wrong
conclusions and produced many mistakes.
This was a solution that we are not allowed to take into consideration.
Someone has to do the entire job. We have to get along with all the
difficult and chaotically arranged works published before 1900.

If we don't get the links to the original sources of the first one million
animal species, then all the rest will just be a drop on a hot stone, as
we say in German.

After 1920 we have the problem that most sources are in-copyright without
free online access. Any estimations how many thousands of original species
descriptions are locked for this reason?

Two more problems with links to original sources.

We identified a big problem in that many names of important taxa are
currently attributed to sources in which the names were not correctly
established. We found many original sources showing us that the name had
actually been mentioned a nomen nudum, not made available under the Code.
But the names are used and important. Providing links to the original
sources will not only result in smiling faces. In many cases careless work
by previous generations of experts in zoological disciplines will show up
and come to daylight.

Names first published in synonymy are a major problem. Synonyms have never
been recorded in nomenclators, they just pop up suddenly in a modern paper
or internet source like Fauna Europaea where you just see that the author
and date of a well-known species is suddenly changed and you are asking
yourself why. And then, after some really hard literature research you see
that someone discovered that the name had previously been mentioned as a
synonym, often without description or even referring to a different taxon,
but regarded as having been made available under the unfortunate ICZN
Article 11.6.1. These are the most difficult "original descriptions" to be
found in zoology, because no previous nomenclator had ever recorded them.
Nearly 2 % of the European mollusc species have these problems, and this
proportion is steadily increasing. If a name was not established in 1758
you can never be sure if it has not been mentioned as a synonym in a
previous source.

My experience, of course, refers only to names established before 1900.

Francisco

F. Welter-Schultes
University of Goettingen, Germany
http://www.animalbase.org

> +1 on the 'manually'. It will take years, in fact we have already
> spent years on it, but it is a finite and doable task.
>
> The key issue is one of trust. We might use an item or link a computer
> found but we will check it. Entries by competent humans, on the other
> hand, are 'trusted' and considered verified, i.e. the link has been
> followed and the right thing is at the end of it. If we are going the
> do the 'let the computer find an add stuff' thing, a 'verified flag is
> critically important.
>
> Nomenclators are the foundation of everythng we do and as such they
> are not allowed to be wrong. They can be incomplete as a work in
> progress, even ambiguous if the ambiguity is explained, but they are
> not allowed to be wrong.
>
> Find a mistake in APNI, if we can't convince ourselves it is not a
> mistake, a pleasant and sentient human WILL fix it... Find something
> missing and we will unmiss it, but this might take a little longer...
> :)
>
> jim
>
> On Wed, Dec 7, 2011 at 12:15 PM, Geoffrey Read <gread at actrix.gen.nz>
> wrote:
>> I'm all for adding good live links to the primary literature. Best done
>> manually, but that will take years for WoRMS, and auto matching is worth
>> developing, as long as the resultant links are identified as unverified
>> &
>> user beware, and I don't need to spend my days removing the real duds
>> from
>> my area. Sorry if that sounds a bit pessimistic, and I'm eager to see
>> how
>> itaxon develops, but of course.
>>
>>
>> Geoff
> --
> _________________
> Jim Croft ~ jim.croft at gmail.com ~ +61-2-62509499 ~ http://about.me/jrc
> 'A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point
> of doubtful sanity.'
>? - Robert Frost, poet (1874-1963)
>
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