Printed Matters

The Encyclopedia of Life. What a grand-sounding name, and what a huge undertaking. “Ambitious, even audacious,” according to the Who We Are page at the site.

Launched a month ago, the project hopes to have a page on its site for every single species of plant, animal, and bacterium on the planet. That’s 1.8 million pages, by some estimates, with another 20 million or so species still to be discovered.

So far they have just 30,000 pages, and only about 25 completely filled out as what they call ‘exemplar pages’ showing the rich level of detail that every page will eventually contain.

So how will they accomplish this massive goal? Why, the Wikipedia model, of course. Plus $50 million. Me and you and anyone else with an interest in cataloguing the diversity of life are expected to go and help fill out the pages. Professional scientists then vet what we write.

Can it be done? Some critics don’t think so. They say it’s too much to expect of even the most dedicated of lay publics. And, they say, the $50 million is not enough to be able to pay the scientists who will then have to go and clean up all our hard work.

But we’ve been surprised before. Who knew that so many people would help to create Wikipedia? The most uncynical among us could not have predicted the overwhelming success of that project, not even those of us who had participated in DMOZ. And who’s to say the professional taxonomists won’t be drawn in by the desire to harness the tidal force of volunteer power that will surely build?

By the way, the author of this Star article about the project may have gotten it wrong when he referred to the EOL project as biology’s equivalent of the moon shot – that spot has already been taken by the Human Genome Project.

I hope it can work. The whole idea was proposed in 2003 by one of my heroes, Edward O. Wilson. I’ve been reading his books, including Biophilia (1984), since I was a young man. I got from him my first inklings of the importance of biodiversity, and the pressing need to catalog and index all the species before they disappear.

“I dream that in a few years wherever a reference to a species occurs on the Internet, there will be a hyperlink to its page in the Encyclopedia of Life,” said Dr. James Edwards, the executive director of the Encyclopedia of Life.

I can certainly help with that part. From now on, whenever I talk about the death cap mushroom or the white pine weevil – as I often do – I’ll link to the respective page at the EOL.

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