Encyclopedia of Life

Last night I had the urge to look up the ecology of tank bromeliads. Not having a university biology library in my apartment, I turned to the internet. And found nothing. The "information superhighway" is supposed to be a glut of information; a curious Googler is supposed to be able to find anything. I have found this to be increasingly not the case. Very, very few resources provide deep, detailed, well-written material for the purpose of free information. Most of my searches return a superfluity of corporate garbage, functionally empty blogs, and woefully incomplete or inaccurate official pages. There are a few well-respected sites which provide high-quality information consistently--like the OED and Encyclopedia Britannica--but all have significant flaws; too narrow a scope, too little free content, or too-shallow coverage. Wikipedia has immensely broad but shallow and frighteningly inconsistent coverage. General Google searches are a major headache for anybody trying to find quality information. At every turn a researcher is bombarded with hundreds of irrelevant ads, search results, and links. I have found the internet to fall well short of its promise of being a powerful and accessible repository of the sum of human knowledge.

For these reasons I have been nearly beside myself with excitement for the last year in anticipation of the unveiling of the Encyclopdia of Life. The EOL will be the culmination of the internet, and by far its most important resource. In the words of E. O. Wilson, one of the coolest guys on the planet and the inspiration for the EOL:

Imagine an electronic page for each species of organism on Earth available everywhere by single access on command.

And it's even better than that. Each page will eventually contain all known information about each species. It will accept user content, but only after screening by an expert, so the EOL will have the breadth of Wikipedia [within biology] with the information quality of a scientific journal. But the depth of information will be unlike any resource ever created by man. Seriously.

This morning I received this message in my inbox:

The new Encyclopedia of Life portal has gone live with more than one million
species pages! In celebration of this big event, our first EOL newsletter is
available at:

Click here to read the newsletter.

You can see the new pages at http://www.eol.org/. We also invite you to take the
survey at the site so you can help us improve.We thank you for your interest and
support over the past year. Enjoy.

Woohoo! It is here--in abbreviated form, but it is here. I strongly urge you to go take it for a spin; the information format in revolutionary and brilliant.

Now when Little wakes up in the morning and asks to look at a picture of a kinkajou I don't have to rely on the crummy random pictures that Google image search returns...

Update: nytimes.com has a nice article on the unveiling of the EOL.