Encyclopedia of Life Launches First 30,000 Pages 87
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.
30000 pages... (Score:3, Interesting)
I can see it now, like in wikipedia... about 1/10 of the articles are stubs... they mark it as stubs and no one ever remembers to fill them. I would fill them, problem is, I only found the stubs because I was actually searching for that information... not because I had it.
ONLY 30000? (Score:4, Interesting)
There are Tens of millions of different species on earth - Flowering plants ALONE are numbering 250000!
there is another similar project called tree of life [tolweb.org]
Download and license (Score:5, Interesting)
The data from tolweb.org are downloadable [tolweb.org] under a Creative Commons license.
Re:ONLY 30000? (Score:3, Interesting)
GGCAGGGGTCTATGGTGGCAGGAAGCTTGGCGTGCTAGAGGGTTGTGGTTGGGC
Specifically, a Core Promoter as shared by almost all Eukaryotes.
Where each species differs by one or two characters. I guess you could work it out in terms of Hamming Distance..
citizen-scientists? (Score:3, Interesting)
Do you mean amateur scientists? Some people refuse to call a spade a spade, referring to it as a "pointy shovel", but you're calling it a "bonk-digger".