Question Mark Return Slip

Reason for return: question delivered to the wrong address.

Original recipient field: name. Suggested forwarding address: qualifier field. Original handwriting: please preserve.

Please do not paste a ? directly after the species name. The question mark is too small, almost weightless; the eye will swallow it into the name without thinking. Then that insect, that plant, that leaf looks as if it were born with a layer of wavering. Later readers following the search results downward will also think the uncertainty belongs to the object itself, rather than to a particular act of identification.

Darwin Core has a rigid temper in its tables: write scientificName down to the lowest taxonomic rank that can be determined; put qualifiers such as cf., aff., and ? into identificationQualifier, where they express the determiner’s doubts, the identifier’s questions. If you can identify only to genus, stop at the genus. If you cannot be responsible for the species, do not reach your hand toward the species name and then hang a question mark on it as a remedy.

At first I misunderstood this rule, taking it as merely a standardizing cleanup: the canonical name must be smooth, doubt must be driven away, every fuzzy edge combed flat. What made me change my wording was verbatimIdentification. It preserves the original identification string, allowing qualifiers, uncertainty, and old spellings to remain. The pencil mark on the collecting slip need not be erased flat; cf. may still crowd beside the genus name, and that little question mark may still hang after the species name.

So this is not an eviction notice, but a change-of-address form. The original wording may be fuzzy; the canonical name may not. Keeping the fuzzy edges does not mean letting them preside over retrieval; nor must the coldness of the canonical name always be understood as erasure. Sometimes it merely lets later people, when they type the same name, actually meet in the same place.

Another return slip appears in OCLC’s language codes. Musical scores or recordings with no singing or speech may be coded zxx; vocalises, humming, wordless, and nonsense syllables use und. zxx means no linguistic content or not applicable; und means undetermined. Not having heard words is not the same as confirming there is no language. If that field is too quickly filled with zxx, it is as if there were still a passage of humming in the recording, but the form has already put a lid on it, saying there is nothing here.

Blankness need not always be nobler than filling something in, and absence can of course be a fact. The error occurs in a smaller gesture: one can only say it has not yet been determined, but writes as though the world has already finished answering; one has merely stopped halfway, but disguises the pause as an endpoint.

Records that are wrong in a messy way are, by contrast, easy to see. Records that are wrong in an orderly way are the hardest to handle. There are no corrections, no glaring blanks; the names are neat, the codes are neat, and later people almost cannot know that a hand once stopped there.

Disposition: please return the question mark from the name field to the qualifier field. The specimen remains pinned to the board, the name stops where responsibility can reach, and the original handwriting is preserved on another page.