Animal Diversity Web (ADW) Time to delink?

Curators
1

Today on a taxonomic flag (for a very recently jumping spider in genus Naphrys), an iNat user asked a more general question about “resources linked under the “More Info” section”. Curators can of course go search out the specifics.

Amongst those links presented to all users, i want to highlight my concerns about the top link for Animal Diversity Web
From backend, that was "created by bobby23 on April 10, 2019 @bobby23
As i see, it’s applied to all animals (at species level) and all geographic locations.

On enwiki the summary of the initiative says “As of June 2022, the site contained records for approximately 2,150 animal species, represented by 11,500 images and 725 sounds.[5]”. (The hyperlink [5] is on the enwiki page, then onto the source website where the same the statistcs blurb is said - so it hasn’t changed since cited on wiki in June 2022)

Point is, if their stated 2022 version “contained records for approximately 2,150 animal species.” By quick calculation that’s only 0.12% (rounded up) of animal biodiversity by species counts. Here, i used the comparative number on Catalog of Life (July 2026) of over 1.800,000 animal species. Let’s be clear, i think their own latter number is still an under-estimate of described animal biodiversity, but it puts the tiny count of “2,150 animal species” from ADW into context.

So, my question. I’m biased towards arthropods. I see essentially nothing for any arthropods on ADW, and i expect same lack of content for molluscs, annelids etc. Infact, i expect it’s mostly zero data for anything that isn’t the select few furry or feathered things - or rather, humanities beloved “Charismatic megafauna”.

Around this time last year, i wrote on the links back-page saying “I’m not sure this rather small initiative has value to be cross-linked in this way. I’ve seen links to it on many taxon pages, and so many fail as nothing at the ADW end. The initiative seems one of so many i’ve seen as spin-offs from grants which last a few years, they populate a few taxa before the grant review then the initiative stalls, then the website dies and others replace it doing the same basics.” another curator followed saying “I feel exactly the same way. This link adds no information, provides no benefit to iNaturalist. It is also not a data source and should be removed from iNaturalist.”

So, in general, the obvious placement of mostly empty links are detrimental to iNat user experience. In the rare cases they function i don’t think they add significant value (i.e. caution needed as often written by a single student without review). I’d welcome opinions. I don’t think there’s anything myself or other volunteer curators can do to deactivate links to ADW entirely, but that would be my preference. Any of us could however just limit the display to where there is some higher percentage of content such “vertebrates” or even just one of those lineages like “mammals”.

2

I would recommend the following: If you find a handful of useful descriptions create specific links for those and delete the general link.

I am a keen collector of useful online resources. ADW didn’t make into my list because I never found something that I considered really useful.

3

Followed my proposal and did it.

https://www.inaturalist.org/taxon_links/5497/edit#activity_comment_e292b26a-898f-4336-b1bd-ff7623601b11

4

@ misumeta
Thank-you. Yes, i think this is a good solution. I had missed that ‘delink’ option. People can add independent (new) links to any selected taxa.

6

Can we link SENP to search COL and https://verifier.globalnames.org

7

Link rot, or links to dead/non-extant external pages are a minor annoyance and it’s very understandable it’s not top priority.

Also, the resources are listed alphabetically. That’s why the one that starts with “A” is at the top.

In any case - as long as ADW contains correct information, I don’t see how it harms the community to leave the existing links up.

Curators are volunteers, and each one has her own priorities. If you are tired of waiting for specific tasks to be completed, I suggest you work to attract more Curators who are interested in that kind of task.

8

This link would appear on every animal’s taxon page and 99.9% of the time it would contain no information at all on the species in question, but there is no way for a new user to know that without clicking said link so I imagine it ended up wasting quite a bit of time in aggregate. I think that’s reason enough for its removal. If any of the specific ADW pages were useful, they can be added to the corresponding taxa.

9

I agreed the solution to add ADW specifically to whichever select taxon pages a volunteer curator found useful was a good one. As said, with that prior setup then somewhere in region of 99.9% of links were non-functional, which was not ‘link rot’ and such but rather that no taxon page had been created. Given what seems like minimal casual efforts about updates and additions on ADW, then i had zero expectation they would ever be created. Hence indeed, as now just well said above [edit: the vast multitude of non-functional links are] a potential huge time waster for users who then want external links to information, yet they were initially faced with a pointer to a website with almost no content.
Above, it’s said “as long as ADW contains correct information, I don’t see how it harms the community to leave the existing links up”. I’d further add then in reply that i felt the little content on their select subset was poorly done in many cases. Even if content were factually correct, i would not consider most of those i check as having ‘useful resource’ in terms of quality of information, quite the opposite. Others might choose to view them differently and say some pages do have merit, if so fair enough. Now however, any links to that website can be carefully done on an individual basis, which i feel is a much better approach than the previous way of just blindly linking all.

The forum post was in response to a flag on a taxon by a user as mentioned at outset. The concern about ADW had been also raised prior to that. The outset were user concerns, for which then community view and those of us volunteers added in and moved the issue forward to resolution. I’m tired of any lack of centralised support on such issues where i absolutely disagree that adding more of the same (i.e. volunteers with the same limited capacity) is not the answer.

@ astra_the_dragon Feel free to drop me a private message

10

Tried out the link but didn’t find it very useful.