Comments on: Encyclopedia of Life

Encyclopedia of Life

homunculus — Wed, 09 May 2007 22:15:24 -0800

The Encyclopedia of Life project will create a compendium of every aspect of the biosphere. It aims to compile data on all of Earth's 1.8 million known species on one Web site, and will include species descriptions, pictures, maps, videos, sound, sightings by amateurs, and links to entire genomes and scientific journal papers. E. O. Wilson is getting his wish. [Via BB.]

By: Blazecock Pileon

Blazecock Pileon — Wed, 09 May 2007 22:27:25 -0800

It doesn't appear to be ready, yet, but I can't wait!

By: banished

banished — Wed, 09 May 2007 22:54:17 -0800

Estimates are it will take 10 years to complete, so you better relax.

By: maxwelton

maxwelton — Wed, 09 May 2007 22:56:05 -0800

Why can this not be an ongoing project? I guess I don't get the delay in opening it. Even with only two pages it would be cool, with 200 cooler, 2000 useful. Seems a bit premature to hype but not launch. Still, very cool idea.

By: BlackLeotardFront

BlackLeotardFront — Wed, 09 May 2007 23:06:35 -0800

I was just about to make a post about this. I checked it out earlier, it looks like it's going to be fantastic. Imagine all that information at your fingertips. The most obscure critters, profiled with all their vitals and the literature on them ... I'd surf it for longer than I do wikipedia!

By: well_balanced

well_balanced — Wed, 09 May 2007 23:10:19 -0800

Screw this. I tried to send them my footage and they told me to piss off.

By: homunculus

homunculus — Thu, 10 May 2007 00:01:47 -0800

The EDGE of Existence programme

By: Abiezer

Abiezer — Thu, 10 May 2007 00:15:15 -0800

Excellent, but I pity the poor soul who has to sell it door-to-door.

By: zouhair

zouhair — Thu, 10 May 2007 00:56:49 -0800

maxwelton: "Why can this not be an ongoing project? I guess I don't get the delay in opening it. Even with only two pages it would be cool, with 200 cooler, 2000 useful. Seems a bit premature to hype but not launch. Still, very cool idea." VAPOROPEDIA

By: maxwelton

maxwelton — Thu, 10 May 2007 01:24:30 -0800

well_balanced, this explains the origin of Beavis.

By: brundlefly

brundlefly — Thu, 10 May 2007 01:49:48 -0800

Someone mentioned this to me today and it sounded pretty neat. Looking at the site, it sounds even neater. I can't wait till this gets up and running.

By: Sangermaine

Sangermaine — Thu, 10 May 2007 02:57:48 -0800

maxwelton Why can this not be an ongoing project? I guess I don't get the delay in opening it. Even with only two pages it would be cool, with 200 cooler, 2000 useful. Seems a bit premature to hype but not launch. Read the FAQ: "It is too soon to predict how long it will take to fully document, catalog, and list all 1.8 million species on the Encyclopedia of Life site. We intend to make key components of the Encyclopedia available to the general public starting some time in 2008. As a ballpark estimate, we believe that we can produce the full encyclopedia in about 10 years." It sounds like it will be put out on a rolling basis, starting next year.

By: the quidnunc kid

the quidnunc kid — Thu, 10 May 2007 03:01:08 -0800

So, ARKive not good enough for you people? You ungrateful assholes don't DESERVE life. I'm taking all MY biodiversity out of YOUR ecosystem and going home.

By: GavinR

GavinR — Thu, 10 May 2007 03:41:15 -0800

Another *pedia site? Yeah, let me know when the next Digg or Flickr clone gets launched too.

By: GavinR

GavinR — Thu, 10 May 2007 03:44:49 -0800

Sorry, didn't mean to be so cranky....too darn early for me.

By: MarshallPoe

MarshallPoe — Thu, 10 May 2007 04:22:31 -0800

Well, I suppose this is good. But what proportion of the 1.8 million species actually have an "audience?" I suspect that it's around .01%. This being so, one wonders what value the encyclopedia will generate, and whether the resources might be better spent elsewhere.

By: Jody Tresidder

Jody Tresidder — Thu, 10 May 2007 04:31:05 -0800

Thanks for the ARKive link the quidnunc kid

By: stbalbach

stbalbach — Thu, 10 May 2007 04:36:03 -0800

Wikipedia was an inspiration for the EOL:

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.

By: tylermoody

tylermoody — Thu, 10 May 2007 04:38:51 -0800

I can't wait for all the bacteria pages.

By: DU

DU — Thu, 10 May 2007 05:39:20 -0800

Of course, there's also the Tree of Life Web.

By: DU

DU — Thu, 10 May 2007 05:41:03 -0800

But what proportion of the 1.8 million species actually have an "audience?" I suspect that it's around .01%. If it's a wiki, the "audience" only needs to consist of a single person willing to type the information in. And if the species is a known one, that person is very likely to exist. I mean, there are people willing to exhaustively document Sleestaks, which don't even really exist.

By: MarshallPoe

MarshallPoe — Thu, 10 May 2007 06:33:56 -0800

And if the species is a known one, that person is very likely to exist. I wouldn't say "very likely." I remember when I did undergrad bio ages ago, that the vast, vast majority of species had no attention to them whatsoever (unlike Sleestaks....).

By: Songdog

Songdog — Thu, 10 May 2007 06:52:11 -0800

Kevin Kelly and Co.'s All Species Foundation was established in 2000 for a similar goal, but they gave themselves 25 years.

By: Tehanu

Tehanu — Thu, 10 May 2007 07:30:07 -0800

This will be incredibly useful to biologists, nature nerds in general, and students in particular. Much of the reliable information on many species is scattered across paper references, and the less well-studied the species, the more important and yet difficult to find is the information that is out there. Not to mention the information on the internet about anything that isn't a mammal or a bird is often so inaccurate, I'd label it fiction. Hilarious fiction, if I didn't know that many people who found it as a source thought it was true and authoritative because it reads as such.

By: tempestuoso

tempestuoso — Thu, 10 May 2007 08:19:40 -0800

It would also be interesting to catalog also, to the extent possible, the species that have already disappeared. Having detailed genomic data for organisms could help revive them down the line. Even if we haven't seen a dodo for a long, long time, in 200 (or however many) years, if we knew what comprised one, we could make one. So many organisms are disappearing every year, every day even, it seems like at the minimum, we should be doing what we can to record that they existed in the first place.

By: milovoo

milovoo — Thu, 10 May 2007 08:47:50 -0800

There seems to be a lot of these popping up recently (and several which have been around for years). I always thought that wikispecies seemed like the best idea. I guess there will have to be a meta-species database to track them all, which is kinid of the situation now.

By: eustatic

eustatic — Thu, 10 May 2007 09:08:04 -0800

as far as these "grey" literatures go, i have enjoyed the FWS's literature summaries on individual species, as boring as they are. found in your local library, under the federal documents section. I 49.89 there are also some good reports on the different Ecosystems, which is the next level, i suppose; once you've cataloged all the pieces, you need to catalog all the ways the pieces work together. worldcat.org Species Profiles

By: redbeard

redbeard — Thu, 10 May 2007 09:30:41 -0800

I just wonder what kind of hell will be raised each time there is a major taxonomic revision (and this has been pretty common in the last 15 years - e.g., the collapse of kelp into far fewer taxa than previously existed from Lane et al's analysis) - but, very cool - particularly as this place also meshes with sequence repositories. And one step closer to whenever we have those "DNA tricorder" thang-a-ma-bobs. Woo planning for the future!

By: Eothele

Eothele — Thu, 10 May 2007 11:51:34 -0800

I wish people were less concerned about building websites about species and more concerned with figuring out what a species is (here's an interesting essay by a smart guy), if anything (pdf). And I'm with DU, Tree of Life rocks.

By: bhouston

bhouston — Thu, 10 May 2007 11:55:47 -0800

This project is also an implicit admission that Wikipedia is insufficient for any serious attempt at documenting the world. But then again we already knew that.

By: zusty

zusty — Thu, 10 May 2007 15:52:13 -0800

Aw, man, we're just making things easier for Brainiac and those brains from Futurama.

By: eustatic

eustatic — Thu, 10 May 2007 17:01:57 -0800

the catalog of life, created from efforts to assist government agencies with taxonomic problems (primarily related to the ESA). Itis comes with an attendant list of experts for each species.