Encyclopedia of Life Launches First 30,000 Pages

An anonymous reader writes to let us know that the Encyclopedia of Life opened up to the public today with its first 30,000 pages in place — and, according to the AP, promptly crumbled even before being Slashdotted. (The site seems fine now.) We discussed this project last year when it was announced. The Telegraph has an overview of the launch, and reports that only 25 "exemplar" pages on the site are fully fleshed out to the extent scientists hope eventually to attain for all species; the other few tens of thousands are expanded placeholders. The project hopes to begin taking input from citizen-scientists late this year.

Re:Dupe?

[banana fiend]

They are separate projects, with TOL being less well funded basically, and smaller in scope. I believe that TOL have shared their data with EOL.

Re:180?

[llirik]

Try http://eol.org/ [eol.org] not http://www.eol.org/ [eol.org]. Yeah, how dumb is that? Could be a bug in their firefox support though.

Re:Elitest Wikipedia?

[wonnage]

Way to beat on that straw-man... Besides, if you bothered to read the article: "There are also tens of thousands of additional species pages not authenticated by scientists but still containing a wealth of information. Later this year the public will be able to contribute text, videos, images, and other information about a species and the best of it will be incorporated into the authenticated pages." By the way, it's spelled "elitist".

Badly designed...

[red star hardkore]

It's slow, only has demonstration pages and is extremely badly designed.

As somebody has already mentioned, images don't have alt tags, but also there are tables used for layout (with many empty rows/cols for no apparent reason) and there are image maps. The site uses an XHTML doctype, but isn't valid XHTML. There are missing slashes for closing single tags. The divs for the popups are contained outside the body tags, that's NOT ALLOWED!

That's all I see, what about anybody else?

Re:Badly designed...

[sjaguar]

Yeah, since everything is an image, it is a PITA to copy (quote) text. And, with a 30 second+ load time, it is unusable.

Re:Badly designed...

[Stooshie]

If you look at the site they are currently looking for programmers to work with them.

Re:Dupe?

[esocid]

Let's try that again with the link this time.
From this page here [tolweb.org] at ToL, you can see that there is a collaboration between efforts as to not overlap in data. It also states that the goals of each are slightly different in that EOL focuses more on specific species, whereas the ToL is more about phylogenetic classifications and evolutionary branches. I've been looking into the National Science Foundation's AToL program recently because of an offer for grad school which is due to a grant from that specific program and I'm curious what, if any, connection there is between the two.