The following is a guest post by Bob Mesibov. Do you know the party game "Telephone", also known as "Chinese Whispers"? The first player whispers a message in the ear of the next player, who passes the message in the same way to a third player, and so on. When the last player has heard the whispered message, the starting and finishing versions of the message are spoken out loud. The two versions are rarely the same.

I'm adding more charts to the GBIF Chart tool, including some to explore the type status of specimens from the Solomon Islands. There are nearly 500 holotypes from this region, so quite a few new species have been discovered in this region.

I know I'm starting to sound like a broken record, but the more I look, the more taxonomic databases seem to be full of garbage. Databases such as the Catalogue of life, which states that it is a "quality-assured checklist" have records that are patently wrong. Here's yet another example.

Anyone who works with taxonomic databases is aware of the fact that they have errors. Some taxonomic databases are restricted in scope to a particular taxon in which one or more people have expertise, these then get aggregated into larger databases, which may in turn be aggregated by databases whose scope is global. One consequence of this is that errors in one database can be propagated through many other databases.