Business - Written Wednesday, February 27, 2008 by Denis Hancock - 0 Comments

The encyclopedia of life – 30,000 and counting

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. Continue…