Earth's Species To Be Cataloged On the Web

Matt clues us in to a project to compile everything known about all of Earth's 1.8 million known species and put it all on one Web site, open to the world. The effort is called the Encyclopedia of Life. It will include species descriptions, pictures, maps, videos, sound, sightings by amateurs, and links to entire genomes and scientific journal papers. The site was unveiled today in Washington where the massive effort was announced by some of the world's leading institutions. The project is expected to take about 10 years to complete; it starts out with committed funding for 1/4 of that."

Isn't it already a part of Wikipedia?

Wikimedia Foundation already has a project called WikiSpecies -- http://species.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page [wikimedia.org] . Not sure how different that project will be.

in EOL, not just anybody can edit it

Wikipedia is great and all, but its stated intent to not validate its data (unlike Citizendium, for example) means it has a limited usefulness.

thanks for metamoderators...

And the grandparent wasn't a WikiTroll? I had mod-points but decided to post instead of moderate.

Do people really believe that "anybody can edit" and "accurate information suitable for reference" are one and the same?

Look at the question the grandparent asked -- it exposes a hidden assumption that liberal editing and accuracy are identical.

Citizendium still allows liberal editing, but on top of it they have a peer-review system in place to approve snapshots of articles. They aren't mutually exclusive. However, Wikipedia has a policy of not having any process to gain any modicum of authority.

Citizendium has its issues too, like that it hasn't fully articulated its desire to have authoritative processes in concrete terms that aren't couched in Larry Sanger's own degree-oriented biases, but at least it's trying.

My whole point was that the Encyclopedia of Life has a reason of existence outside of the no-holds-barred lack of authority that Wikipedia provides.

References and Echo Chambers are entirely two different things.

For making that distinction, I'm modded as a troll. Whatever. /., echo away.

Both have a reason to exist.

If anything else, Wikipedia's way of doing things has also proved a couple of things :

- YES, you can find trolls, vandals, spammers and such ...BUT...
- Liberal editing gives better growing speed. Wikipedia has grown much more faster than any other work that requires reviewing.
- Liberal editing is much better for very small and rare subjects that *almost* nobody care about. In organised work, there aren't enough ressource to distribute to those subject and they are left un addressed. In liberal editing regimes, there always be an - albeit small - community of dedicated people who'll write on the rarest subjects. Granted : There is less guarantee about the accuracy without peer review, but at least it's a good starting point.

So there is a place for both EOL (for providing "official" reviewed information) and for WikiMedia's species (where you'll still find information about some obscure bug that almost nobody cares about - but all the 4 labs in the world that intensively study it have written an article about).

Just like there's a place for both traditionnal encyclopedia and wikipedia.

Re:Isn't it already a part of Wikipedia?

...and also this http://www.tolweb.org/tree/ [tolweb.org]

Re:Isn't it already a part of Wikipedia?

May the fittest survive!

FAQ on Wikipedia

From the EOL FAQ

6. What about Wikipedia?
Wikipedia inspired us. Wikipedia accumulated about 1.5 million entries in English in its first four years. That gave us confidence that our tasks are manageable with current technology and social behaviour, although the expert community in a lot of the subjects for pages in Encyclopedia of Life may be only a handful of people. Wikipedia has also created some species pages, as have other groups. Encyclopedia of Life will, we hope, unite all such efforts and increase their value. The Wikimedia Foundation is a member of the Encyclopedia's Institutional Council.

From the article

"I dream that in a few years wherever a reference to a species occurs on the Internet, there will be a hyperlink to its page in the Encyclopedia of Life," concluded Edwards.

I suppose anyone could try and duplicate any current effort, like a search engine, browser, video site, political site, movie site, music site, and then hope that with enough money and lawyers behind it to gain a large portion of the market.

Re:Isn't it already a part of Wikipedia?

It's interesting to read this FAQ [eol.org] from the Encyclopedia of Life:

6. What about Wikipedia?

Wikipedia inspired us. Wikipedia accumulated about 1.5 million entries in English in its first four years. That gave us confidence that our tasks are manageable with current technology and social behaviour, although the expert community in a lot of the subjects for pages in Encyclopedia of Life may be only a handful of people. Wikipedia has also created some species pages, as have other groups. Encyclopedia of Life will, we hope, unite all such efforts and increase their value. The Wikimedia Foundation is a member of the Encyclopedia's Institutional Council.

They don't mention WikiSpecies directly, but would have to be aware of it with the Wikimedia Foundation on board. It will be interesting to see what license will the EoL be using and will it be WikiSpecies (GNUFDL) compatible? Hopefully the Wikimedia Foundation will give some good advice.

Given that a stated aim of the EoL is to get lots of people involved and be a cooperative effort, a copyleft license might promote cooperation. Perhaps it would be worth a few Slashdotters politely contacting the EoL [eol.org] and suggesting that copyleft would be a good thing for the EoL?

Check out the sample pages

I had a look at a couple of the page mock-ups on the site. The information seems organized in a much better way than on the Wiki-species page. If the actual site turns out to be as good as the examples I will use it frequently.

Re:Isn't it already a part of Wikipedia?

In theory, the Wikipedia version will constantly have "Bigfoot" added over and over again whereas the other one will not.

But hasn't The Guide already said it in two words?

Mostly Harmless

To Serve Man

I hope they don't forget to include a field describing how delicious each life-form is (and perhaps how it is best served).

Re:To Serve Man

Hopefully they'll start with homo sapiens, I know a few people who have been dying for a new recipe

Internet pages

From the press release:

Over the next 10 years, the Encyclopedia of Life will create Internet pages for all 1.8 million species currently named.

These Internet pages, are they something I'd need an Internet browser to enjoy?

What About...

the tree of life project: http://tolweb.org/tree/phylogeny.html [tolweb.org]

Heh...

Call me when they have added Big Foot footage. Until then watching Bush on TV will be enough zoo time for me.

But...

I wonder if creationists in the future might later claim that the website didn't take 10 years to compile, but was created in a day...

Web 2.0

And for the web 2.0 version, I'll make a mash-up between that and hotornot.com where the user can rate the animal on perceived taste from "Yuck" to "Let's farm these suckers" to "Will all be eaten before domestication".

Storytime

A few years ago, when I was babysitting the neighbor's kid, I spotted an odd grashopper in the street. It was larger than any of the species I've seen up here before (Pacific Northwest), nearly four inches long, and mottled grey in a way that matched the asphalt pretty closely, with bright blue on its hind legs. It stayed very still for the most part, but occasionally walked a few inches before stopping again (I'm talking over a span of a few hours). Getting closer revealed that it looked like it was sucking on the road itself (or maybe some of the lichens within? I dunno). Now I spent much of my childhood chasing and catching grasshoppers in this same area, so this quite fascinated me and I wondered if there wasn't some urban offshoot of Orthoptera I hadn't previously known about. I let the bug be, but resolved to scour the web for information on it. Unfortunately, there was nothing to be found. No matching descriptions, and certainly no pictures. It didn't occur to me until much later that it may have been an as yet undocumented species.

This is all to say, it is about damn time we had something like the Encyclopedia of Life. Wikis are great to a certain point, but an organized project with funding, set on being as comprehensive as possible? Sign. me. up.

Re:Storytime

Would be really cool if you could upload a photo of the insect/animal, and have the website find matches. Not sure how far research has come with finding similar images. It would have to try and determine the part of interest, and then search on colours, shapes, etc... not sure. But it would be a very interesting research project.

why so long?

...the project is expected to take about 10 years to complete...

What's the holdup? It only took Noah a few days to get them all on a boat, and we can't even make a list? This is really making us look bad, people. He even had to figure out care and feeding, but we can't even get a list of names together. Sheesh. We're really going downhill here.

Poor choice of acronym?

Anybody who's ever worked in sales or IT is going to be understandably agitated by their choice of acronym [wikipedia.org] for the project, especially considering the subject matter [wikipedia.org] at hand.

At last, a self-limiting database!

A database that will get smaller over time instead of always growing out of it's disk space! Do your part to help by killing everything you don't recognize as a member of your family.

-- ydra

Plaease stop evolving now...

We can't keep up!

Re:Plaease stop evolving now...

Homer: "Now, honey, poachers are nature's way of keeping the balance. Whenever there are so many species that people get confused and angry, a poacher is born."

Special thanks to snpp [snpp.com].