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The Encyclopedia of Life is geared more toward the public http://eol.org/. The cool thing about the effort in the open tree of life ( http://opentreeoflife.org/ ) is that it is open data and open source driven. You can check out the code on github. https://github.com/OpenTreeOfL...

You can learn more about the African tigerfish on the Encyclopedia of Life: http://eol.org/pages/206410/details

It already contains google maps mashups.

The Learning and Education group for EOL is working on a set of tools and applications designed to make EOL more accessible and useful for education audiences. EOL itself is an amazing (and growing) international effort to bring together biodiversity information from around the world on one website, with a webpage for every described species on Earth. EOL is open and free with all content licensed under the Creative Commons. Check out http://educaiton.eol.org/ for more info on how students and teachers can use EOL... There is a "build your own fieldguide" tool that is just about ready for public release. Some sample guides are currently available to show you the idea.

Another great thing about the Census is that much of the information is feeding into the Encyclopedia of Life project (www.eol.org) with the content being shared under a Creative Commons license.

http://eol.org/ wouldn't load for me earlier, now it just gives me a 403.

http://www.eol.org/ points to their old demo site, it seems (which is why everything is just images, with popups explaining features)

http://eol.org/ is the correct site, which seems much better. still not valid though

http://www.eol.org/ points to their old demo site, it seems (which is why everything is just images, with popups explaining features)

http://eol.org/ is the correct site, which seems much better. still not valid though

http://www.eol.org/home.html

Actually, it's not so much.

Try http://www.eol.org/

Try http://eol.org/ not http://www.eol.org/. Yeah, how dumb is that? Could be a bug in their firefox support though.

Try http://eol.org/ not http://www.eol.org/. Yeah, how dumb is that? Could be a bug in their firefox support though.

http://www.eol.org/ The encyclopedia of life looks to have the right idea. It will be an encyclopedia of every species of organism on Earth. If you check out their demo pages, you'll see they're going to have a slider bar for species, from Novice to Expert. This allows you to tailor the page to your needs. The more detailed information is there, but you can look at a dumbed down version of the page if you only want rudimentary knowledge. Wikipedia would benefit greatly from a similar structure.

FYI, Wikimedia are one of the EOL partners

It's interesting to read this FAQ 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 and suggesting that copyleft would be a good thing for the EoL?

It's interesting to read this FAQ 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 and suggesting that copyleft would be a good thing for the EoL?