[Foundation-l] Encyclopedia of Life

[Platonides]

Brianna Laugher wrote:
> http://www.eol.org/home.html
> 
> "Imagine an electronic page for each species of organism on Earth,
> available everywhere by single access on command. " --E.O. Wilson
> 
> They have an amazing number of sponsors, partner organisations, FUNDS, etc...
> 
> Want to be mega-impressed? Check out one of their demo pages:
> http://www.eol.org/vision/rice_expert.html (although they list
> Wikipedia as one of the sources, which is, um...)
> 
> Now that's a killer interface.
> 
> They don't have a statement about what the license will be, but they say this:
> "A possible area of obstacles or dangers is intellectual property. The
> Encyclopedia will be very generous with credit and recognition, and we
> will soon be posting a general statement of principle about open and
> accessible content, encouraging sharing, and so on. The world of the
> Internet and software changes so fast, we know we need to be very
> alert to what are considered good and prudent practices."

They put a "© Enciclopedia of Life, 2007" not so encouraging.


> From their FAQ:
> ==
> 6. What about Wikipedia?
> Wikipedia inspired us. Wikipedia accumulated about 1.5 million entries
> in English in its first four years. That gave us confidence that our
> tasks are manageable with current technology and social behaviour,
> although the expert community in a lot of the subjects for pages in
> Encyclopedia of Life may be only a handful of people. Wikipedia has
> also created some species pages, as have other groups. Encyclopedia of
> Life will, we hope, unite all such efforts and increase their value.
> The Wikimedia Foundation is a member of the Encyclopedia's
> Institutional Council.
> ==

So they want -as Wikipedia- everybody able to contribute, but they don't 
provide an easy way to <s>contribute</s> read their content.

> I'm not sure what an 'Institutional Council' does.
> 
> (BTW didn't we used to own http://www.wikispecies.org/ ? It seems to
> have lapsed, if so.)
> 
> So... hm, what will success for Wikispecies look like?

http://species.wikimedia.org/