I did a little audit of the current Taxon Frameworks with Taxon Curators (these are the branches of the tree that are off limits to ‘normal’ curators).
They are (remember that overlapping downstream taxon frameworks take priority - eg the Bird taxon framework referencing Clements takes priority over the Chordata taxon framework referencing WoRMs where they overlap):
Life down to phylum (Catalog of Life)
Animalia down to order (WoRMs)
Mollusca down to family (WoRMs)
Cephalopoda down to ssp (WoRMs)
Ocypodidae down to ssp (WoRMs)
Araneae down to ssp (World Spider Catalogue)
Lepidoptera down to family (van Nieukerken et al., 2011)
Odonata down to sp (World Odonata List)
Chordata down to ssp (WoRMs)
Mammals down to sp (MDD)
Amphibians down to sp (ASW)
Reptile down to ssp (RD)
Birds down to ssp (Clements)
the 6 Fish classes down to ssp (Fishbase)
Tracheophyta down to Class (Catalogue of Life)
the 4 gymnosperm classes down to ssp (POWO)
Hypericaceae down to ssp (POWO)
In my opinion, the majority of these are working well. The major problems with these that I’m aware of seem to be:
-
Life down to phylum (Catalog of Life)
people don’t like CoL’s Fungi phyla but no once can propose alternatives (similar with Virus phlya) so there’s some open flags and weird stuff here. But this isn’t a curation issue as much as a community consensus issue. -
Anything referencing POWO (e.g. gymnosperms)
POWO isn’t quite ready for show time. As folks have mentioned, its missing a lot and has a lot of errors. In this case, it seems less of a curation issue and more of an issue of the reference maybe being a bridge to far from what the community will tolerate/ -
Anything referencing Fishbase (e.g. fish classes)
Fishbase also isn’t quite ready for show time. As folks have mentioned, its missing a lot and has a lot of errors. The community seems to prefer Catalogue of Fishes which doesn’t have an API, but maybe we should switch anyway and try to do the best with regular exports. Again more of an issue of an inadequate reference than a curation bottleneck. -
Birds, Mammals, Amphibians, and Reptiles
Of these, mammals is working well. The problem with the remaining 3 is that each change usually involves a complicated split that touches lots of other taxa. The main purpose of my doc was to try to make handling frameworks like these for ‘well known taxa’ easier where there’s lots of observations and distribution content involved.
Aside from hybrids, extinct taxa, and additional nodes (tribes, subgenera etc) which I guess are both unbounded, all of these frameworks should have all the species already added, so the bottle neck isn’t having curators graft taxa which in these cases will introduce lots of duplication, but rather do the tricky work of figuring out what the arrival of taxon X means for existing taxa Y, Z, etc. (e.g. ‘oh X was split from Y’).
So I guess I agree that more hands could help keep up with the hybrid, extinct taxa, and additional node demand. But there is a tree bloat cost of adding all these. I kind of wouldn’t mind new policies about what our plan here is exactly before unleashing the floodgates (is our plan to have every extinct taxon in the tree - I hope not)
One other quick option would be to release Fungi and Virus phyla, Fishes, and Gymnosperms from curated taxon frameworks (e.g. make it so all curators can edit them) if the references are a bridge to far unless we can come up with an easier process for agreeing on and crafting deviations.
As for Birds, Reptiles, Amphibians, and Mammals - with mammals we have a great duo of taxon curators (bobby23 & jwidness) who are doing awesome work. I’d love to recreate this with larger groups of curators for Birds, Reptiles, and Amphibans, but I think we do need better materials (if not tools) on how to do curation in these ‘well known’ branches with lots of observations, associated content and few ‘wholly new’ taxa (e.g. lots of splits) before we can get more taxon curators working on them. Anyway that was my main thinking behind the doc I pasted last week
We sort of have a spectrum here now with branches with no reference on one extreme (e.g. lepidoptera below family), branches with a reference but no taxon curators in the middle (e.g. most of plants), and branches with a reference and taxon curators on the other end (e.g. birds, reptiles, mammals, amphibians). I’d be curious about what folks think about the pros and cons of each of these approaches. We certainly could move in either direction, ie move more branches to one end of the spectrum or the other. My vision is to move more towards the end of the spectrum with good references and larger teams of taxon curators - but IMO this direction requires the materials (if not tools) I mentioned above.