[Taxacom] The Evenhuis Nirvana

[Veldkamp, J.F. (Jan Frits)]

Want to rise in the Citation Index? Write an utterly horrible and
controversial book and see how the critical reviews jump up. What is
being said the compilers don't check, just the number of times you are
being cited.

JeF

-----Original Message-----
From: taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
[mailto:taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of Curtis Clark
Sent: Monday, April 09, 2007 5:03 PM
To: taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] The Evenhuis Nirvana

On 2007-04-08 18:39, Ken Kinman wrote:

>     Well, there is really no such thing as nirvana in the real world,

Ken, I didn't realize you did theology as well. :-)


> As for doubts 1 and 2,
> perhaps it would be better to go ahead and describe them and even name

> them, and if they get synonymized in the future, so be it.  In any 
> case, your descriptions and other data may well accelerate the 
> discovery [...]

There's an interesting phenomenon whereby the promulgation of incomplete
or inaccurate information will cause complete and accurate information
to be made available faster than it otherwise would. Three specific
examples: (1) a former student assistant once explained that asking a
programming question on a discussion board or IRC channel would usually
get no reply, but posting an intentionally incorrect answer to the
question would get a number of replies in short order; (2) it has been
my experience working in teams of faculty that some members are very
unlikely to contribute their portions of a proposal in a timely fashion,
but if I write an inadequate draft, they will be glad to correct it
quickly; (3) incorrect edits to Wikipedia articles are corrected at a
much higher rate than new information is added.

One might think that this phenomenon would carry across to taxonomy, and
in groups that are studied by many people, it often does, but
unfortunately there are far more groups that have little attention, and
an incomplete description or unnecessary species may stand for centuries
before someone else bothers to look.

Ken's suggestion is still a good one, though: Even in the worst case, an
incomplete description of a subsequently extirpated species is an
irritant ("Why couldn't they have done a better job?") precisely because
it provides more than the sublime ignorance of never knowing that the
species existed.

-- 
Curtis Clark            http://www.csupomona.edu/~jcclark/
Director, I&IT Web Development             +1 909 979 6371
University Web Coordinator, Cal Poly Pomona

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