Transcript of Questions for Greg Whitbread & Sally Hinchcliffe

John Mitchell:

You were talking about people being able to contribute or edit the database and how simple that would be. I was wondering if you had worked on any rules or codification of guidelines for those folks, other than what had been termed the appropriate level of education to do that.
 

Greg Whitbread:

We also brought a team of "question-answerers." I think initially it's the existing editors of Index Kewensis, and in the case of the pilot project, it will be the people that are handling the Brummit & Powell Index [of Plant Name Authors –ed.] at the moment.
 

Eimear Nic Lughadha:

We're talking about different levels of contribution. Obviously, the editors would have full control, and the editors at the moment would be the existing editors of the nomenclatural databases as Kew, Harvard, and Canberra (which doesn't have somebody in that position at the moment, but is recruiting). The next level would be a contributor, who would be somebody who made contributions on a regular basis and would be registered in some way and would have access. Their contributions would be immediately visible in the database so that other people could see contributions, could comment on them. A third level would be an ad hoc browser; somebody who just happened to find the site, and we wouldn't their contributions see as going directly in—to be visible immediately—because that would leave us open to getting swamped by hoax contributions. But we would look to having as broad as possible a base of that intermediate level of contributor, so that anybody who was a bona fide person with taxonomic nomenclatural interests could be a contributor at that level. We would also hope to broaden the editorial base, so that people with interests in particular groups would have full editorial control in those groups.
 

Sally Hinchcliffe:

One of the things you'll see when you look at contributions is who made the contribution, and if you know that person you'd be able to make a judgment as to the quality of that contribution.
 

Anon. (M):

Are the contributions dated in some form, so that future workers could actually refer back to them in some kind of citation format?
 

Sally Hinchcliffe:

Yes, you'll get the entire history of a contribution, including the first time a name was entered, and that will be available continuously, and dated.
 

Karen Calhoun:

What happens when a classification changes? I would expect that multiple records are effected, and you would have to manage to make changes to a group of records.
 

Eimear Nic Lughadha:

The Index Kewensis and the other databases are purely nomenclatural. We are not taking positions on classification. We are listing all the names that are in the running to be used. So it includes all validly published names, to the extent that we can, but we're not endorsing one classification over another. It's not a taxonomic framework, it's nomenclatural. So it has the pool of all the names that could be used legitimately, correctly, but it doesn't endorse one classification against another.
 

Stan Blum:

So when a new classification appears, it would just be the additions of the new combinations and the new names(?). [No further comment from ENL implies she probably nodded at that point. –ed.]
 

Frank Bisby:

I think it's a very exciting project, and I have just one question. I expect a large fraction of these names will also, of course, later on or now, be used in taxonomic databases that do have taxonomic opinions in them. But one big difference might be that, in the taxonomic databases, there are also names that are misspelled, orthographic variants... [ tape change ] ...because if they're in wide usage, they provide the link back to the correct spelling or the accepted names. So my question is, will you put wrong spellings and misapplications in your database eventually?
 

Eimear Nic Lughadha:

Wrong spellings are already in there, and no information is ever actually deleted. Yes it's all there, right from the beginning.
 

John Mitchell:

Do you have links to the misspellings?
 

Eimear Nic Lughadha:

When spellings are corrected, obviously there's a link to the correct spelling. We don't have links yet to taxonomic databases, but that's a possibility. We would be interested in making the thing as link-able as possible.
 

Sally Hinchcliffe:

One of the things I showed you was an interface that we'd written. We would ultimately like to publish the API [application programming interface] to the database, so that anyone could write their own interface to it—including linking their own database to it.
 

Greg Whitbread

I should add here that the Australian Plant Name Index and the Gray Card Index actually are creating these linkages. As far as the Plant Name Index goes, any name or synonym that's published will go in, but we're not applying any judgment to that.
 

Bill Eschmeyer:

One subject I'm interested in is: "How do you get good contributors?" Stan raised this in his application to NSF, because scientists are very busy. If they've already published on it, they might take some time and help you out. But I wanted to publish it [The Catalog of Fishes, in paper form –ed.] because I wanted to get the recognition; that's the way we're rewarded in this field. Many organizations like this are asking us, or botanists, or whatever, to cooperate without... Oh yes, they get their named cited as the authority person, but they aren't going to put in the dedicated time that's needed, I think. We're moving into a new area where we could publish electronically, and I'm very interested in whether that will change the way scientists produce their information. For example, I could do a CD-ROM on my area of specialty—scan in a lot of keys, scan in a lot of earlier work, have a whole bunch of pictures, and so forth—and have it as a CD, but it would not be publishable... but it would be a wonderful resource. So I'm interested in that transition, as we move from printed copy into some sort of electronic publishing where we could still get the credit that we want, and then help you out at the same time.
 

Greg Whitbread

Certainly in the system you'll be credited for contributing. In the work we've been doing to clean up the Australian Plant Name Index, we have found that botanists are only too willing to participate, because it's in their interests to have the information correct. In reality, they're the ones who are responsible for it. There might be a problem if you've been working for 50 years on groups that cover thousands of taxa, but most cases aren't like that. The idea is that we're not going to go all out and try and clean it up immediately. We'll have common lists of names that everyone can use, but as you, the experts, start to use them you'll say: "Well, that's not right, someone's transposed the digits of the page number," or "That's not the journal it was published in," or "I have an earlier reference." Most of the information will be there in some form or other, and you can contribute that.
 

Stan Blum:

One thing I would like to say is that because they're tagged with who did what, you could be a productive editor, from a remote site, and if you needed to, you could report back to your appointments and promotions committee—here's the volume of stuff that I've done.
 

Bill Eschmeyer:

That's the ideal, but I'm not sure it works that well.
 

Eimear Nic Lughadha:

Editors will be getting credit at that level. A typical contributor might be somebody who's revising a genus of a hundred species, which could mean—I think we have higher rates of names to species— they could be looking at three or four hundred names, and certainly if they were just looking at the Index Kewensis they would be finding ten, a dozen, twenty errors, which at the moment—if there were being very obliging—they might write to us at Kew, and say: "I was using the CD, found these errors..." But they get no feedback because the CD isn't regularly updated. We do try to enter all the corrections into our database, but they don't see that their contributions have been taken on board. So I see that that would be a positive feedback for contributors. Someone who was contributing at the level of editing thousands and thousands of records, would of course be getting full credit on the Web site.
 

Nancy Morin:

I think we could help turn some of this ethic and philosophy around if we didn't take these works for granted; if people would recognize —all the rest of us who use them would recognize—how much work goes into it, and would cite it when you've used it in a monograph; when you've used these lists as a resource. We need to talk—we need to find some way to tell our administrators up at the upper levels that the work the scientists do to improve the lists is really worthwhile.
 

Eimear Nic Lughadha:

I agree. I think if you compare, for instance, Index Herbariorum, there's a different tradition; people cite Index Herbariorum. They say: "The herbaria are abbreviated according to the Index Herbariorum acronyms," and I believe that the Holmgrens and Lisa Barnett have some of the highest citation indices in botany because of this. But hardly anybody cites the nomenclatural indices, so Rosemary Davis and Kathleen Challice aren't up there in the science citation index. It's similar information—collated secondary information—and we need to get some feedback on how people are using it, and we want to make it more available.