The Encyclopedia of Life is here (well sort of). The lucky few who managed to get through the traffic are treated to 25 "exemplar" pages illustrating the type of content EOL aspires to get for all species; thirty thousand less detailed pages (thanks largely to FishBase); and a million stubs (courtesy of Species-2000). By chance I happened to be running a lecture and practical on launch day as part of the Natural History Museum's MSc course in taxonomy and biodiversity. The lab was on "Computerized Identification" and provided a perfect opportunity to get some feedback on the first release from 25 web savvy students . Because this was on the morning (GMT) of EOL's launch day, we had unfettered access to the site before America woke up and EOL's servers fell over.

First reactions of the students were mixed. Most thought site was attractive and intuitive to navigate, although to my mind the page layout could do with some tidying up. I am not sure the "table of contents" section is clear (many students missed the links in this section altogether) and far too much real-estate is occupied by logos of the initial content providers. This leaves little space for content of substance, but then this isn't too much of a problem right now since there really isn't much substance just yet. Having got the students to identify some common aquarium plant samples (thanks to an excellent LucID Key) I encouraged everyone to look-up their newly identified taxa on EOL. Alas, these species are not covered by EOL in any detail yet. In fact, one was not even mentioned as a stub page. Fortunately Wikipedia came to the rescue, with descriptions and photos, supplemented by some useful resources found by Google. The students then turned their attention to their personal groups of interest, but again there is little to see for most of them right now. A few commented on the classification of "their" groups, noting that they were incorrect or not up to date. In hindsight this is because some were not using the slider properly that affects the level of classification detail. However, there are some glaring (though understandable) errors. For example, the group I work on (biting and sucking lice - Phthiraptera) are labelled "Biting Lice", yet the classification shown is the one I provided to ITIS for the Sucking lice (Anoplura). Interestingly none of the students spotted the lack of hyperlinks in the body text. Even on the "exemplar" pages, there is barely a hyperlink in sight. Contrast this with Wikipedia articles, some of which are almost all blue thanks to hyperlinks.

To be fair EOL must start somewhere and the informatics group building this has quite a task. But given that there is already a lot of fantastic content about biodiversity on the Web, just as was demonstrated by these students when they could not get their answers from EOL, I can't help but think this is a missed opportunity - especially given the massive press attention.

For me, the biggest single problem with the project is the notion that pages will be "authenticated" or edited, much in the same way that traditional paper based content is authored and edited. As much as I understand the desire to manually maintain the quality of content, I think this model of contribution is not tenable, even in the short term! Doubtless EOL will garner thousands of people signing up to become editors of select pages in the first few weeks of launch (I'll blog about the great EOL land grab soon). But sustaining these peoples interest beyond the first few months, and into the years required to maintain a lasting connection to the project will be next to impossible under this model. This is illustrated by other related projects (I won't name names) that have had little or no growth or update since their inception. I have long argued that EOL should be the Google News of biodiversity, algorithmically aggregating content from various authoritative sources. Only by removing people from the task of compiling these data, will the project scale to the challenge faced by biodiversity science. This is not to say that people don't have a role in EOL - quite the contrary. Getting people involved in compiling and curating their own content should be fundamental to the project. Its just that the EOL main pages are not the place to do this. For more, read my earlier posts on this subject.

A few other points:
It’s not a Wiki - Comparisons with Wikipedia are fatuous at this point, as is the notion that there will be Wikipedia like growth. This is (again) because of the current content contribution model.

Its Web 1.0 - There is no API and (again) no way to contribute. An API will be fundemental if this is to become a tool, rather than just a pretty website. The FAQ's say these are coming, but the timeline (3 or 4th quarter of 08!) is not tenable if these are to be meaningful.

PS.
My usual disclaimers apply. I am part of the informatics advisory group that will (eventually) have some kind of role in assisting the project, and know several of the people involved in EOL. I am also involved in a related project (Scratchpads) that has complementary goals. Congratulations to everyone involved in the initial launch, but I think the work just begins here!