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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."
Wikimedia Foundation already has a project called WikiSpecies -- http://species.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page . Not sure how different that project will be.
Mostly Harmless
Maybe if this sig is witty or clever enough, someone will love me...
Wikipedia is great and all, but its stated intent to not validate its data (unlike Citizendium, for example) means it has a limited usefulness.
These Internet pages, are they something I'd need an Internet browser to enjoy?
I always mod up spelling trolls.
From the article
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.
Call me when they have added Big Foot footage. Until then watching Bush on TV will be enough zoo time for me.
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.
:(){
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...
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
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".
EvilCON - Made Famous by
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.
Anybody who's ever worked in sales or IT is going to be understandably agitated by their choice of acronym for the project, especially considering the subject matter at hand.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
I hope they don't forget to include a field describing how delicious each life-form is (and perhaps how it is best served).
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
And the grandparent wasn't a WikiTroll? I had mod-points but decided to post instead of moderate.
/., echo away.
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.
If anything else, Wikipedia's way of doing things has also proved a couple of things :
...BUT...
- YES, you can find trolls, vandals, spammers and such
- 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.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]