[Taxacom] Wikipedia vs. science [some wider issues]

[Stephen Thorpe]

small correction: I guess I mean that money is available to make aggregators, and if they do get any way?beyond the infrastructure?stage, they have difficulty finding suitable databases, because there is much less money available for making these ...

Stephen


From: Roderic Page <r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk>
To: taxacom <taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu> 
Cc: Stephen Thorpe <stephen_thorpe at yahoo.co.nz>; Jim Croft <jim.croft at gmail.com>; jacklongino at gmail.com 
Sent: Tuesday, 15 May 2012 7:17 PM
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Wikipedia vs. science [some wider issues]

A few quick comments.

Silos

"Silo" has a negative connotation, perhaps due to Al Gore's 1998 speech "The Digital Earth: Understanding our planet in the 21st Century" in which he noted that the vast majority of Landsat images hadn't ever been seen:

"Instead, they are stored in electronic silos of data. We used to have an agricultural policy where we stored grain in Midwestern silos and let it rot while millions of people starved to death. Now we have an insatiable hunger for knowledge. Yet a great deal of data remains unused."

Silo in this context is a set of data that is, either by accident or design, difficult to access, share and reuse. Obviously, one can use "silo" in any way you wish, but if you say "silos are great" don't be surprised if most people will assume you are arguing for restricting access to your data. 

Wikipedia

I've also had rather mixed experiences with Wikipedia. I suspect it's the nature of the beast. Anyone who reads Taxacom will see parallels between threads on this mailing lists and some of the discussions on Wikipedia. For some other thoughts on wikis and Wikipedia seen Jonathan Eisen's recent post http://phylogenomics.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/pluses-and-minuses-if-wikipediafying.html and the open access article "Making your database available through Wikipedia: the pros and cons" http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkr1195

Evidence

For me the take home message about the WoRMS/Wikipedia issue is not the personal foibles of Wikipedia contributors but the lack of access to the underlying primary literature. Most taxonomic databases are little more than digitised 5x3 index cards with no links to the literature (by which I mean digital links that take you to the actual publication). If you only have naked lists of names then you end up in a slanging match over which list is "authoritative". We all know that taxonomic databases have errors, these could be exposed and fixed much more quickly if we linked them to the underlying evidence. 

Databases

The notion that people make databases in order to get funding has it back to front. My sense is that most of the money available for biodiversity informatics is for infrastructure rather than content, hence the emphasis on developing networks, databases and tools. 

Certainly, I've not had any funding for projects like BioStor http://biostor.org or iPhylo Linkout http://iphylo.org/linkout. I build these because I want to be able to access taxonomic information and link that information together. In terms of the bigger picture, if information isn't online then effectively it doesn't exist. If we want taxonomic information to be relevant then it needs to be online, so the issue becomes how to do that most effectively.

Regards

Rod



---------------------------------------------------------
Roderic Page
Professor of Taxonomy
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