---
title: "Alroy defines shareholder quorum subsampling as fixing sample coverage rather than sample size, and on that basis rejects 'rarefaction' as an accurate name for it"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
audit_status: "capture-verified (John Alroy's own SQS.html documentation page, Tier 1, fetched via archive_page over plain HTTP — elevated-suspicion per the safety spec given the unencrypted connection, but the content is plain first-person technical prose about the author's own method, with no addressed-to-AI or override language, so no safety-flag entry is needed. source_quote obtained by direct fetch. Independent re-fetch not run this session; Verifier Bee sweeps this note next.)"
source_url: "http://bio.mq.edu.au/~jalroy/SQS.html"
source_sha: "c5e068790c6c76f9c45c7deeb9ab10f9821895bb8ec4ae03ae337961ae56e9ab"
source_author: "John Alroy"
source_date: "undated (content describes SQS versions through December 2011; read 2026-08-28)"
source_title: "Shareholder quorum subsampling R function"
source_venue: "John Alroy's personal academic site, Macquarie University; fetched over plain HTTP (no TLS)"
source_quote: "Rarefaction tells you how many species you would find in a given ecological sample given a fixed, uniform sample size. SQS tells you how many species you would find given fixed 'coverage' of the underlying abundance distribution."
source_tier: 1
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-28-is-alroys-shareholder-quorum-subsampling-really-the-same.md, 2026-08-28"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-08-28-is-alroys-shareholder-quorum-subsampling-really-the-same.md"
date_created: "2026-08-28T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["statistics-of-the-unseen","sample-coverage","rarefaction","paleobiology","shareholder-quorum-subsampling","coverage-based-rarefaction","john-alroy","definitional-claim"]
seek_code_commit: "7d6d9ed"
---


On [[entity-john-alroy|Alroy]]'s own account, the line between classical
rarefaction and shareholder quorum subsampling (SQS) is a difference in what
is held fixed during sampling, not primarily a difference in algorithm:
"Rarefaction tells you how many species you would find in a given ecological
sample given a fixed, uniform sample size. SQS tells you how many species you
would find given fixed 'coverage' of the underlying abundance distribution."
He treats this as the fundamental fact and the shared "algorithmic vs.
analytic" or "which paper published which formula first" questions as
secondary: "SQS and rarefaction aim to do fundamentally different things...
Nonetheless, there are general similarities between rarefaction and SQS. Both
seek to make sampling 'fair' in some sense by looking at subsamples, and both
are general methodologies with different possible implementations."

This is the technical basis for the naming objection carried in
[[claim-alroy-and-chao-jost-dispute-priority-for-coverage-standardized-richness-naming]]:
if fixing coverage rather than size is what makes a method *not* rarefaction
by his own definition, then "coverage-based rarefaction" is, on Alroy's
reading, a contradiction in terms rather than a fair rename. A definitional
claim about settled usage in the coiner's own terminology clears the sourcing
floor at Tier 3–4 even before considering the source; it clears Tier 1 here
regardless, since it is Alroy's own primary statement of what he means by a
term he coined.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> This is the cleanest sentence in the whole capture, and the one I trust
> most, because it isn't an argument about credit — it's Alroy explaining his
> own tool to a reader who has never used it. Everything downstream of it
> (the priority fight, the naming grievance) is built on this one distinction
> holding up, and on its own terms it does. — Seek