The Encyclopedia of Life (www.eol.org) is an attempt to document each and every one of the 1.8 million known species (and millions of other specie that are yet to be discovered) online.
According to the website’s developers, “Encyclopedia of Life is an ecosystem of websites that makes all key information about life on Earth accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world. Our goal is to create a constantly evolving encyclopedia that lives on the Internet, with contributions from scientists and amateurs alike.”
The attempt according to this NYT article is not a new one — scientists have tried and given up in the past due to the sheer magnitude of the task. However, as the website’s FAQ section points out “mash-up technology and wiki-style editing and accumulation of content, have only demonstrated their effectiveness on a large scale in the last year or two.”
The wiki editing seems important to me since it will allow scientists worldwide to collaborate. Still, it will take a while (anywhere between 3-5 years) for the website to be fully populated. Once done, this will be the one-stop guide to living organisms on Planet Earth. For now this one is a work in progress.
