On 26/02/2008, Steven Walling steven.walling@gmail.com wrote:
Still seems to be either slow or down completely.
"...our exciting journey to document all species of life on Earth."? Isn't quite uncontroversial among scientific circles to note that we haven't even documented a large part of life on earth, much less enough to write encyclopedia articles on each and every species? Seems a little bit of an overblown goal.
They plan to add species as they are discovered.
Considering that "The immense amount of information in the encyclopedia is being drawn from a variety of sources, including several existing specialist databases such as AmphibiaWeb and FishBase.", it seems to me they are just taking advantage of other people's hard work rather than building their own encyclopedia.
Could be argued that we do that everytime we cite someone. Then there is Rambot.
As for, "The project will solicit the help of users to submit photos and information for assessment by an authentication team.", sounds just like the reason Nupedia failed and why Citizendium doesn't even have an article on everyday species such as sheep.
They have $50m funding. Buys then a lot of requests for images. I suggest we respond by raising the bar and requesting users submit videos of species.
I just don't generally see why this would be engaging as a resource or as a participatory endeavor, personally.
It is meant to appeal more to traditional academics.