[Zoobank-list] Re: [iczn-list] Zoogle [was Homo sapiens lectotype]

[Neal Evenhuis]

>Dear All,
>
>I thought I would write to Carol Yoon, author of the offending NYT 
>article, to gently tell her off about her "mistake".  It seems that 
>she has excellent evidence for the Linnaeus-as-type point of view: a 
>TAXACOM discussion dated 1996 that involves the same Gary Rosenberg 
>who posted yesterday!  That post also mentions that a certain Spamer 
>(who crops up in Geoff Read's and Martin Spies' recent postings) put 
>the matter to rest once and for all  -- but of course, we now know 
>that it popped up again, and probably will once every 10 years or so!
>
>Really, if we can't get this species' type designation sorted out, 
>is there any hope for the other 3+ million names?  At least it's a 
>good demonstration of the need for a central database for each name, 
>as a single-stop shop for this kind of query!  And this is quite 
>independent of the mandatory registration question.

The problem we had here was a reporter writing an article and 
probably (I'm not sure but just assuming here) not using a database 
to verify data. Most of us normally use a web search engine to obtain 
background info or verify data when writing an article. When doing 
scientific work, we taxonomists often check databases online as well. 
I have a hunch reporters and others of the general (non-scientist) 
community don't use databases -- and no doubt would not know where 
they reside anyway -- to write their articles on taxa. Tyhis is a 
problem from the standpoint of accuracy. Similar to getting "truth" 
from Wikipedia. Non-vetted material on the web will get into 
mainstream media and the public will think it is correct.

When you Google "Homo sapiens" and "lectotype", you get the list 
postings and web pages that deal with the subject (including that 
1996 posting) -- and all the different contentions on who or what is 
the lectotype of Homo sapiens, but you DO NOT get the results of what 
is in a database. Why? Web crawlers do not access the data within a 
database, only existing web pages they have access to, so googling 
something will hardly ever give you the results of what is in a 
database (exceptions are some databases that post results of queries 
-- bookseller searches do this but I've not seen very many 
taxon-based databases that do).

If we as taxonomists want more accuracy in mainstream media articles 
dealing with taxonomy and have the data in our databases to be 
totally transparent, we need to 1). get those databases to turn up in 
a Google Search [perhaps Rich's idea of Zoogle?] and 2). develop the 
same sorts of web-based databases that the booksellers do that do 
give results from a book query and use that for taxon-based queries 
in search engines.

Will ZooBank do this? And give the status of the taxon (i.e., 
"lectotype selected by Smith, 1900")?

--Neal