Life Encyclopedia: Too Popular to Live
WASHINGTON (AP) — The concept of a comprehensive encyclopedia of life on the Internet proved too popular. Its computers were overwhelmed and couldn't keep it alive when it debuted Tuesday.
The encyclopedia, which eventually will have more than 1 million pages devoted to different species of life on Earth, quickly crashed on its first day of a public unveiling, organizers said.
Scientists at the Encyclopedia of Life sought help from experts at Wikipedia for keeping their fledgling Web site going despite massive — and anticipated — interest. The site went back up Tuesday afternoon, but with expectations of more problems, although only temporary ones.
"We've been overwhelmed by traffic," encyclopedia founding chairman Jesse Ausubel said. "We're thrilled."
The encyclopedia's Web site logged 11.5 million hits over 5 1/2 hours, including two hours of down time, according to organizers.
Tuesday's unveiling included limited Web pages for 30,000 species. There are also "exemplar pages" that go into more depth with photos, video, scientific references, maps and text of 25 species ranging from the common potato to the majestic peregrine falcon to a relatively newly discovered obscure marine single celled organism called Cafeteria roenbergensis. Eventually, planners hope to have all 1.8 million species on the Web and already have set up 1 million placeholder pages.
The most popular of the species for Web searches is the poisonous death cap mushroom, which may say something about people's homicidal intentions, joked Ausubel.
All the pages have been made by scientists, but in a few months the encyclopedia will start taking submissions from the public, like Wikipedia.
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While it has taken almost a year, the non-profit Encyclopedia of Life project launched yesterday. It gained so much attention, that the site quickly crashed. It went back online Tuesday afternoon (EST), but went down again the next morning.

During five-and-a-half hours, the site logged 11.5 million hits, including visitors who reached the "503 error".

EOL is estimated to have cost US$110.5 million so far.

The site has limited information on 30,000 species, and full profiles of 25 species. These fleshed-out profiles include an article with scientific references, maps of where the species are found, and are illustrated with photos and video. One million placeholder pages have been set up so far, and the plan is to eventually catalog all 1.8 million species.

The Wikimedia Foundation launched a similar project in August 2004, Wikispecies. Perhaps the least known of Wikimedia projects, it "was created to provide an open source forum for taxonomic and biological information." It has logged 120,247 species, under a free license. The US government runs an Integrated Taxonomic Information System, with 464,081 scientific names. It is created in partnership with similar Canadian and Mexican databases.

There is also a Tree of Life Web Project, and a Catalogue of Life, the latter being the most successful; it is a compilation of 1,008,965 species, from 47 taxonomical databases.  ZipcodeZoo offers descriptions of over 3 million species of plants and animals, with 250,000 photos, maps, pronunciations, and definitions in 13 languages. ARKive collects media of species, and the All Species Foundation was a failed early attempt at a web catalog.