When taxonomists wage war in Wikipedia

Stumbled across Alex Wild's post Pyramica vs Strumigenys: why does it matter?, which takes as it's starting point a minor edit war on the Wikipedia page for Pyramica .

Alex gives the background to the argument about whether Pyramica is a synonym of Strumigenys, and investigates the issue using the surprisingly small about of data available in GenBank. The tree he found (shown below) suggests this issue will require some work to resolve:

For fun I constructed a history flow diagram for the edits to the Pyramica page in Wikipedia:

The diagram shows the two occasions when the page has been striped of content (and subsequently restored) as contributors dispute whether Pyramica is a synonym of Strumigenys. It would be useful to have one or more metrics of how controversial a page (and/or a contributor) was, to both identify controversial pages, and to see how controversial taxonomic pages were compared to other Wikipedia topics. The paper On Ranking Controversies in Wikipedia: Models and Evaluation by Ba-Quy Vuong et al. (doi:10.1145/1341531.1341556) would be a good place to start (a video of the presentation of this paper is available here).

PageRank for biodiversity

This will probably tempt fate, but I've an invited manuscript in review for Briefings in Bioinformatics on the topic of identifiers in biodiversity informatics. Readers of this blog will find much of it familiar (DOis, LSIDs, etc.). For fun I constructed a graph for three ant specimens of Probolomyrmex tani, and the images, DNA sequences, and publications that link to these specimens.

Based on this graph I computed the PageRank of each specimen. The motivation for this exercise is that AntWeb lists 43 specimens of this species, in alphabetical order. This is arbitrary. What if we could order them by their "importance"? One way to do this is based on how many times the specimens have been sequenced, photographed, or cited in scientific papers. This gives us a metric for ordering lists of specimens, as well as demonstrating the "value" of a collection (based on people actually using it in their work). I think there is considerable scope for applying PageRank-like ideas to questions in biodiversity informatics. Robert Huber has an intriguing post on TaxonRank that explores this idea further.