Encyclopedia of Life

[Pangloss]

Interesting project that's been underway for about a year, intended to take about ten years, which will eventually catalog 1.8 million species. It's not a wiki -- only qualified scientists will participate, and it's intended as an authoritative academic resource, but it's also intended to be friendly/easy to use, with lots of pictures, etc.

 

Article about it here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6638017.stm

 

Actual web site is here:

http://www.eol.org/

[Royston]

Cool...nothing more to add.

[YT2095]

Excellent idea, I wonder if Kew gardens will get on board too: http://www.kew.org/collections/index.html

[Pangloss]

Just to add a little more meat to the discussion, what do you all think about their decision to not make it a wiki, but instead focus on academic integrity? Doesn't that kinda make sense in a situation like this? You can kinda see where an open wiki approach might be a temptation because of the distribution of work, but the that approach would surely undermine academic integrity.

 

In a sense it's almost as if we're building a two-tiered approach to information on the Web. Because there's no particular reason why someone couldn't copy whatever's in the EOL for, say, the Lemur, and place it in the Lemur article in the Wikipedia. People could then add information there that's of a more cultural nature, like instances of Lemurs in pop culture, music videos, etc -- the kind of stuff that a scientist writing an academic article on Lemurs would ignore.

 

That two-tiers-of-information aspect is intriguing to me.

[YT2095]

*sigh* I Knew there would have to be a catch.

[Ophiolite]

In a sense it's almost as if we're building a two-tiered approach to information on the Web. .

Three tiered, if you include creationist websites.

[bascule]

So it's a Web 2.0 tolweb?

[geoguy]

There's no downside to such an undertaking. I wonder, however, what the value will be. In my field we rarely have interest in anything outside of a particular class, or even order of organisms. I don't know of any researchers who do either. We already have almost too much taxonomy to wade through as it is in even narrow fields.

 

I don't know anyone who studies 'organisms'. Not even invertebrates....not even 'arthropods'...not even 'insects....not even a whole order of insects. They study specific groups or ecogroups of taxa and use scientific publications that have been peer reviewed.

 

Sure, there's a million plus arthropods and they can all be listed. What's the value or use to whom? Anyone studying particular families of coeloptera already has the detailed resources of that group. Any entymologist can currently get details on the 200 plus species of long horned beetles in eastern North America and it's hard to figure out who else would care...if there was an issue they would have to speak to a specialist to get to first base for identification of an specimen or the organisms niche in the environment.

 

As I stated, there is no downside. Let the money be spent and the resources dedicated. It'll provide countless hours of employment for countless students and grads for years and equally as many hours in constant and never ending updates.

[Guest Giberelina]

This idea is great, I hope they complete it soon