Encyclopedia of Life

Techcrunch has a post comparing the Encyclopedia of Life with Wikipedia, asking whether it will be better at science

Without seeing more than screen shots of, the final product at Encyclopedia of Life it’s difficult to judge decisively whether the new comer will be superior to Wikipedia on Science, and yet it sounds far more approachable in terms of readability. Visually Encyclopedia of Life wins by a country mile.

I don’t mean to be rude to business people, but a list of species is science in the same way a list of pies is human culture, and I’m a biologist, so I am probably inflating the importance. A list of species isn’t even remotely complete biology let along science, where is the genetics, the cell biology, metabolism, ecology etc?

Not that I think EOL should include these things, it has a very focused goal. Will EOL be better than wikipedia at science? No, and I don’t think they are trying. Will they be better at wikipedia (and more to the point wikispecies) and describing the species? quite possibly! That is not a bad thing for wikipedia though. I can’t find anything on their licensing, but if it is GFDL compatible it could be a very good thing. If it isn’t free at all, I think they might be surprised at how much a free license correlates to the amount of people who want to help the project.