[Taxacom] IRMNG update

[Stephen Thorpe]

Tony,
One major potential problem which you didn't mention with "closed" sites is that they often become a platform for the site owner to force on the rest of us their own, possibly biased, judgements (favouring their own taxonomic opinions, etc.), and it can be very difficult or impossible to get them to fix errors. On the other hand, "open" sites, like Wikimedia, are controlled by community "consensus", but this can easily devolve into mob rule, and is more likely to attract poorly educated people who make badly informed decisions and/or people with sociopathic disorders who cannot think or behave rationally.
Cheers,
Stephen

--------------------------------------------
On Wed, 31/8/16, Tony Rees <tonyrees49 at gmail.com> wrote:

 Subject: Re: [Taxacom] IRMNG update
 To: "John Grehan" <calabar.john at gmail.com>
 Cc: "Stephen Thorpe" <stephen_thorpe at yahoo.co.nz>, "taxacom" <taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu>
 Received: Wednesday, 31 August, 2016, 7:16 AM
 
 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