My latest story for the New York Times is up: it's a sneak peek at the Encyclopedia of Life--a web site that will ultimately contain detailed pages about all 1.8 million known species. Right now it's just a demo site, but on Thursday, there will be thousands of pages up, each with details on a different species. Will it reach its goal? As I point out in the article, previous attempts have failed. Their remnants are littered across the Web, such as the All-Species Foundation. But the scientists behind the Encyclopedia of Life have a lot of tools, like wikis and text-mining, that their predecessors lacked. Check it out on Thursday and come back here to tell me what you think. Update, Tuesday 11 am: I just got an email newsletter from EOL saying the new version is now live. But at the moment, the site is down due to heavy traffic.
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