[WikiEN-l] Encyclopedia of Life kicks off

[Andrew Gray]

On 26/02/2008, Steven Walling <steven.walling at 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.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk

* Well, a wide range of real institutions and then WMF. It always
amuses me to see us on the board of this sort of thing.