Remember Encyclopedia of Life? They've just gone partially, er, live:
25 reviewed "example" pages showing the level they intend to reach for every species; about 10,000 partial pages, and a million or so "minimal species pages" (basically a substub placeholder). They have funding and backing - it seems pretty likely they'll succeed.
Licensing is a bit of a mismash - some CC-BY, some NC, etc. All labelled, at a quick glance.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7263134.stm - BBC News story.
Andrew Gray wrote:
Remember Encyclopedia of Life? They've just gone partially, er, live:
25 reviewed "example" pages showing the level they intend to reach for every species; about 10,000 partial pages, and a million or so "minimal species pages" (basically a substub placeholder). They have funding and backing - it seems pretty likely they'll succeed.
Licensing is a bit of a mismash - some CC-BY, some NC, etc. All labelled, at a quick glance.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7263134.stm - BBC News story.
The occurence maps are very interesting. But not labelled :-(
ant
On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 11:45 AM, Florence Devouard Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
Andrew Gray wrote:
Remember Encyclopedia of Life? They've just gone partially, er, live:
25 reviewed "example" pages showing the level they intend to reach for every species; about 10,000 partial pages, and a million or so "minimal species pages" (basically a substub placeholder). They have funding and backing - it seems pretty likely they'll succeed.
Licensing is a bit of a mismash - some CC-BY, some NC, etc. All labelled, at a quick glance.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7263134.stm - BBC News story.
The occurence maps are very interesting. But not labelled :-(
Some of their articles link back to Wikipedia, even with the default "show authoritative sources only" preferences setting...
I created {{eol}} to link back to them.
Magnus
And it's... down again. I didn't know we could slashdot a site by mentioning it on wikien-l...
Magnus
On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 3:12 PM, Tony Sidaway tonysidaway@gmail.com wrote:
An inordinate fondness for gnomes.
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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.
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.
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.
I just don't generally see why this would be engaging as a resource or as a participatory endeavor, personally.
On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 8:52 AM, Florence Devouard Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
Magnus Manske wrote:
And it's... down again. I didn't know we could slashdot a site by mentioning it on wikien-l...
Magnus
fond memories from 2002-2003 :-)
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This gives some context: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/83
Michel Vuijlsteke
On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 10:39 PM, 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.
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.
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.
I just don't generally see why this would be engaging as a resource or as a participatory endeavor, personally.
On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 8:52 AM, Florence Devouard Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
Magnus Manske wrote:
And it's... down again. I didn't know we could slashdot a site by mentioning it on wikien-l...
Magnus
fond memories from 2002-2003 :-)
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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.
On 26/02/2008, Steven Walling steven.walling@gmail.com wrote:
"...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.
As opposed to quite modest goals such as "the sum of all human knowledge"?
- d.
On 26/02/2008, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
As opposed to quite modest goals such as "the sum of all human knowledge"?
Modulo "notability."
Even so...
"The sum of all human knowledge, if it's a species of living thing" is still a more restrictive set :-)
On 2/27/08, Steven Walling steven.walling@gmail.com wrote:
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.
They're organising, assembling, collating, collecting etc - very useful.
Steve
Not to mention that this is intended to provide a base for the day when we've got autonomous and/or pocket detectors that can easily analyze and record everything living thing in a sample or region. IIRC, the same group backing this tried this idea in the past and it didn't work out. The fact that they are willing to try it again and the appeal of the idea leads me to believe it will be successful.
On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 10:23 PM, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 2/27/08, Steven Walling steven.walling@gmail.com wrote:
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.
They're organising, assembling, collating, collecting etc - very useful.
Steve
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On 26/02/2008, Steven Walling steven.walling@gmail.com wrote:
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.
When the information's been compiled, and when the people who've done that compilation are willing to work with you, why not use it? You are, after all, going to have to get all the data from *somewhere*, and there's no sense reinventing the wheel.
Between them, those two datasets provide ~37,000 species. It's a drop in the bucket relative to the overall task, but it's a very useful framework to have to be able to build on.
We do just the same thing - strip-mine existing data sources in order to kickstart articles, and it certainly hasn't stopped us writing other material... heck, for the past few months a bot has been dripping out hundreds of stub articles on species based on parsing the IUCN Red List database, and they're really not.
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.
Fifty million dollars funding and the backing of Real Institutions* gets you a lot of kickstarting in this regard, which neither Nupedia or Citizendium had. It seems a bit unreasonable to deem a major attempt at something likely to be doomed by the same things which crippled hobbyist attempts at it.
On 27/02/2008, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
We do just the same thing - strip-mine existing data sources in order to kickstart articles, and it certainly hasn't stopped us writing other material... heck, for the past few months a bot has been dripping out hundreds of stub articles on species based on parsing the IUCN Red List database, and they're really not.
"...really not that bad, decent frameworks for building on", is the way I meant to finish that sentence!
My memory is a bit flawed - this was Polbot, and it's not currently running. But the point sort of stands as of six months back :-)
BTW, there are and have been, for some years, public sites where scientists are encouraging the general public to make and publish their own observation records of animals and or plants, by location, date and other various metadata.
These have been pure original research, and with no requirement of academic credentials by the people making the observations.
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]