The Encyclopedia of Life project aims to aggregate information for all of the 1.8 million known species and publish it on the Internet. It will pull content from a series of scientific databases and focus on engaging the scientific community to add content as the project matures. Will that strategy, in its scientific niche, work better than Wikipedia’s more open approach?

To gain feedback from the online community, the Encyclopedia of Life just launched its alpha site which includes pages for 30,000 different species, according to the press release.

Many of the pages are sparsely populated right now, including the page for humans which essentially hosts a set of links to scientific sources that reference homo sapien. Compare that to Wikipedia’s article on humans and it leaves much to be desired.

Looking at another comparison like pteridium aquilinum (a type of fern) on the Encyclopedia of Life and Wikipedia also provides a good snapshot on the difference in reference-ability and quantity of content.

Members of the Encyclopedia of Life project hope to engage the scientific community in generating additional content in what essentially may become a Wikipedia monitored by experts instead of the community at large.

Theoretically that will provide more accurate information than a system like Wikipedia that relies on its users to fact check. But, it also may restrict the amount of content pushed out on a regular basis as a relatively small minority of people will be able to contribute.

Here are some targets the Encyclopedia of Life plans to hit in the coming months:

- Generate a million species pages, most of which will be authenticated by experts
- Digitize a large portion of biodiversity literature
- Generate educational materials for students, schools and universities
- Use the EOL resource to generate new synthetic knowledge about the world’s biodiversity

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Entry was posted on Tuesday, February 26th, 2008 at 10:52 am under Internet, Science and technology, Web2.0.

Read more entries by Matt Jansen.
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