Encyclopedia of Life Off to a Shaky Start
Hey, life is popular. The Encyclopedia of Life found that out when they went on-line yesterday. It didn’t take long for word to spread, even though they launched before their scheduled opening date. With more than 11 million hits in their first few hours, the site soon crashed.
It is back up and running. So far, it has information on something in excess of 30,000 species, out of an anticipated 1.8 million. They could probably double their content immediately by scarfing up all the species covered in Wikipedia — isn’t sharing what the GNU license is all about?
It is certainly a very ambitious project, and like other I hope they succeed, though I have my doubts. The experts whose input is needed are busy folks with their own agendas, who has the time for volunteer work that will doubtless generate more bickering than gratitude? OK, specialists in a particular species might want to ‘curate’ a species page — but are there 1.8 million specialists available? You might get a few hundred volunteers for that obscure Homo sapiens critter, but how many experts are available for each of the more than 8,000 algae species? And the 10,000+ living diatom species? And … etc., etc. Buena suerta.