[Taxacom] IRMNG update

[Tony Rees]

As an aside, there is also some discussion above on the relative
merits of posting taxonomic information and/or updates on a publicly
editable site like Wikipedia, as opposed to a privately maintained
"niche" page or small data system. The former, while reaching arguably
the widest "popular" audience, offers no permanence (your best work
can be altered or deleted by others with no notice or discussion), no
internal data consistency, no simple means to extract the content in
any structured way, and for those reasons is unlikely to be used as a
taxonomic backbone by any "serious" large scale external project;
while the latter, however high quality, suffers from likely
difficulties of sufficient scale in many cases to be able to
contribute to the larger taxonomic data-assembly projects (I know
there will be exceptions here) as well as facing possible visibility
problems, as previously stated.

The problem was articulated by the same original poster on the related
thread "Taxonomic names databases" when he said:

<quote>
That brought to mind about all these various databases and
search engines that appear to be floating out there as mentioned at various
time on Taxacom. I was wondering if one wanted to contribute to updating
for a particular group, which database is worth the effort and would have
the interest to have contributions.
</quote>

I believe we did explore some options for "which database is worth the
effort" there and the answers were neither extreme (open slather
public system <-> private web page) but somewhere in the middle...

Regards - Tony

-- 
Tony Rees, New South Wales, Australia
https://about.me/TonyRees