300 species to oversee (counting just the known species, not the millions more that are likely to be identified as scientists attempt to fill out the encyclopedia). Even if you spread that work around to other types of scientists, every curator would have dozens of pages to maintain—on top of their actual, paid jobs as university faculty or government scientists.
EOL documents acknowledge that in the long run, the experts’ time is too precious—in other words, that the encyclopedia will have to be “consumer-driven.” And already, the organization has made some tentative steps toward soliciting material from the general public. There’s an EOL group on the photo-sharing site Flickr where you can upload your own photographs of plants and animals; if you identify the photos with the correct machine-readable species names, they will eventually be folded into the relevant pages of the encyclopedia, the organization says. Over time, EOL’s planners envision a greater role for people they call “citizen scientists,” meaning, for example, amateur horticulturists, biology students doing classroom ecology projects, and the thousands of birdwatchers who participate in annual species censuses. The species pages, according to EOL documents, “will provide a framework for natural history societies and related citizen groups to undertake local inventories of the flora and fauna in their area,” efforts that will “produce a national inventory of biodiversity which can be used in modeling a wide range of phenomena, from climate change to human impacts.”
That all sounds great—but I don’t think EOL has taken the citizen scientist concept far enough. The only way for the encyclopedia to get big fast, I submit, is to take the full Web 2.0 plunge. This would mean opening up the site to direct involvement by amateur enthusiasts, Wikipedia-style.
Of course, it would also mean opening up the encyclopedia to misinformation, bad writing, spam, and revert wars (the internecine battles, all too common on Wikipedia, in which writers and editors endlessly undo one another’s changes). But there is cause to hope that these problems can be minimized. While no one argues that the Wikipedia articles are 100 percent reliable, the Wikipedia community has developed remarkably rapid procedures for detecting and correcting errors and vandalism. Indeed, because Wikipedia is Web-based and wired into a community of volunteer editors who are automatically notified of every change to every page, errors there are found and fixed much faster than those in print-based publications like the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
If EOL allowed citizen scientists to serve as curators, my guess is that they’d be even more vigilant than Wikipedia editors—especially given EOL’s rather lofty and inspiring goal, which is nothing less than to catalogue and preserve Earth’s biodiversity. And there’s nothing (except lack of time) to prevent trained scientists from coming along later and vetting the material that non-experts create.
EOL says it’s also working on something called LifeDesk, a Drupal-based application for building EOL pages that will be made available first to taxonomists but may eventually be opened up to non-experts. I believe that tool should be rolled out to amateur natural historians as soon as possible. EOL’s steering committee and advisory board—a collection of rather senior figures from leading natural history museums, biology labs, botanical gardens, and foundations (San Diego Xconomist Larry Smarr is one advisor)—has already embraced the Wikipedia-style notions of open source software and free distribution of knowledge. Here’s hoping that they will see also the benefit in harnessing nature lovers’ enthusiasm for learning and sharing.
For more information on the Encyclopedia of Life:
Bill Moyers interview with E.O. Wilson
David Pogue interview with E.O. Wilson
YouTube video introducing the Encyclopedia
EOL newsletters
Adobe EOL taxonomy visualization project page
Digital Morphology Project (one source of images for EOL)
Microsoft Photosynth EOL page
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