An interesting little experiment was launched yesterday – the Encyclopedia of Life, which planners hope will one day host pages for all 1.8 million species (and however many more are discovered along the way) that are apparently roaming the earth today. At minimum the PR for the site must have been a hit, as the site got 11.5 million visitors in less than six hours, the site crashed many times, and as I type this in the wee hours of the morning I still can’t get access to it (www.eol.org).

But assuming that this is not an elaborate hoax, EOL is a massive undertaking that could be of great value to a wide variety of people – scientists, policy makers, students, teachers, etc. However, in terms of the wikinomics angle I’m particularly interested in watching one key thing – who ends up making the 1,799,975 detailed pages we know must still be done. It might be expert driven (likely accurate, quite slow), and it might be a mass collaboration (likely accuracy issues, quite fast), and it might fall pretty much anywhere in between.

You see there was some big bucks behind this thing apparently, and these resources allowed the creation of limited web pages for about 30,000 species – and a handful of “exemplar pages.” Each of these pages have been made by scientists, presumably linked into the crew behind EOL in a variety of professional and social ways. It’s a long way from a handful to 1.8 million, and to get there (quoting an AP article): in a few months the encyclopedia will start taking submissions from the public, like Wikipedia.

Now how “like Wikipedia” it will be is anyone’s guess at this point, as “taking submissions from the public” could end up meaning a lot of different things. However, EOL seems to commonly be describing itself as a unique collaboration between scientists and the general public, so one would have to think that either they’re really committed to it or they just have a very, very good PR department that knows how to drop in the right buzzwords.

Like Don’s post on Nintendo below, this will be a very interesting experiment to watch evolve – it’s an area where expert opinion would seem to be of extraordinary value, but mass collaboration may be required to achieve the targetted volume of information at a reasonable cost. How the two do (or don’t) end up being balanced will be an experiment worth watching.