The free Encyclopedia Of Life

Encyclopedia of Life.Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) is a free, online collaborative encyclopedia intended to document all of the 1.8 million living species known to science. It is compiled from existing databases and from contributions by experts and non-experts throughout the world. It aims to build one "infinitely expandable" page for each species, including video, sound, images, graphics, as well as text. In addition, the Encyclopedia will incorporate the Biodiversity Heritage Library, which will contain the digitized print collections from the world's major natural history libraries. The project is initially backed by a US$50 million funding commitment, led by the MacArthur Foundation and the Sloan Foundation. The EOL went live on 26 February 2008 with 30,000 entries.The site immediately proved to be extremely popular, and temporarily had to revert to demonstration pages for two days when it was overrun by traffic from over 11 million views it received.

At this time, the project's steering committee has senior officers from Biodiversity Heritage Library consortium, Field Museum, Harvard University, MacArthur Foundation, Marine Biological Laboratory, Missouri Botanical Garden, Sloan Foundation, and the Smithsonian Institution. Vision Biologist E. O. Wilson announced a "dream" that someone would fund the project during a TED speaking engagement in March 2007, a yearly forum in which luminary speakers are given the opportunity to ask for a "dream prize". On 9 May 2007 that dream "came true" when five science foundations announced an initial 50 million dollar grant to get the project started. Wikipedia and other existing online works served as an inspiration for the Encyclopedia of Life. Most of the content organized by the site is available under various Creative Commons licenses.{From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia}