MTH suggestions

[kcranston]

Some minor edits from @mtholder , as well as some inline comments (grep 'MTH' in text).

[jar398]

Re

[MTH: wouldn't the previous answer: ((a,b)x,(c,d)y,?e)z also mean
that e is a proper child of z, but is just uncertain wrt x and y?]

That's exactly what incertae sedis means, as defined in the glossary. If we demote a child from non-IS to IS, we lose information that so far in Open Tree has been precious, i.e. it important to avoid losing taxa to IS even if it means a more granular classification. This has been considered OK since the lower priority sources are not so important or reliable anyhow. What should I say to make this clearer?

[kcranston]

Thanks for the examples, @jar398 . I am going to merge this (keeping MTH comments inline to be address in a subsequent PR).

[jar398]

Here's what was hard about getting examples:

• finding cases that reflected plausible differences in taxonomic opinion, and not artifacts or obvious errors in the sources,
• and where there was a clear yes answer and a clear no answer (as opposed to two yeses or two nos),
• and where the heuristic made the correct choice.

There are lots and lots of these three kinds of failures, perhaps affecting most, or almost all, of the choices made by the heuristics.

I was also trying to find cases where a heuristic was the only one able to make the discrimination, but eventually gave up on that. E.g. many Lineage cases would have been found by Proximity.

So the examples are by no means typical. But I think that's OK, as typicality is not claimed.