The Friday Fillip

Today is a holiday in Canada, and for Christians a solemn holiday. I thought that it might be appropriate for this Good Friday to offer you a site about life, life in all its splendid abundance and variety (1.9 million identified species, and growing). Moreover, it’s a site that, like so many nowadays, is built through the cooperative action of us — all of us, potentially.

Sensibly, the site is called the Encyclopedia of Life — with a nice, snappy URL that’s easy to remember: eol.org. But don’t think that this is some feel-good, amateur effort: the Encyclopedia is the project of some pretty heavy hitters and is set up as much for scientists as it is for the edification of us common folk.

There are various ways to get into the content of the site, perhaps the easiest being simply to click on one of the life forms presented in the row at the top of the site. Don’t fancy those on your screen? Click the arrow and get offered a new batch of your fellow travellers. Or, you could type the name of an animal or plant (or fungus or bacterium) into the search box and let things happen from there. There’s a video on how to use the site, because things can get a little complex, particularly when the backbone, so to speak, of the enterprise is the almost Borgesian taxonomy that researchers have been working on ever since Linneaus.

You’re invited to get involved, of course, becoming a member, submitting pictures, adding comments to descriptions, etc. And there are interesting tools that EOL has made available, most likely as by-products of setting up the site and backend on Drupal. (Taxonomy and collaboration freaks check out the EOL spinoff LifeDesks.) There’s a Twitter account, natch, and, as biologists say, there’s more — much, much more!