Iwaruna.com

Last year I had eagerly anticipated the arrival of the Encyclopedia of Life (EoL). Entries on individual species became viewable on 28 February, a few months earlier than the projected mid-2008 deadline. Coolness!

Currently they have twenty-four exemplar species pages, tens of thousands of authenticated (but not detailed) species pages, and about a million other species pages with minimal, unauthenticated data. Assuming that there are nearly 2 million species to document, that’s not too shabby for an initial proof of concept launch! Filling in the blanks will be ongoing work, because biology is a growing and dynamic field, after all. But if the content is informative and well-crafted, I certainly don’t mind.

I’ve been watching this site since its launch, and a few of my criticisms below have already been resolved over the past month. The EoL still has a long road to travel, nevertheless it’s great to see the progress and improvement.

Easy start

The EoL won’t allow the general public to contribute until later this year. Indeed, some incomplete pages contain a request for contributions in the future. The site does allow account creation, though. (Rather than using the visual CAPTCHA for account creation, I tried out the audio version, which was easy.) But I can’t do much of anything, other than to select preferences for email notification, password changes, language choice, and two settings regarding levels of information.

Overall, the site’s layout is visually clean, and images and text are easy to view and read. The Explore section at the top of the homepage, and in the right sidebar of taxon pages, serves as a nice teaser, without interfering with the rest of the content.

Taxon pages: content & detail

Part of me is surprised at the range in the quality of writing. Part of me isn’t, since there are multiple contributors. The Peregrine Falcon entry, touted as an exemplar EoL article, could have used a grammar and style check. Problems include my peeves (yeah, yeah) about incorrect use of it’s (and even its’) as a possessive, and failure to capitalize formal nouns and adjectives. While I don’t expect literature, the tone felt stiff and awkward. On Wikipedia, by comparison, the featured articles are of a higher caliber.

A colored horizontal stripe between the page header and taxon name denotes the kingdom. Green for plants, red for animals, blue for bacteria, aquamarine for Protozoa, lavender for fungi, grey for viruses, brown for Chromista, and purple for Archaea. (Ironically, the EoL lacks introductory descriptions for kingdoms, hence my Wikipedia links to the lesser-known ones.) Elementary accessibility dictates that color should not be the only way to convey meaning. A brief text label (even in addition to the color stripe) would be beneficial.

The media panel near the top is smartly arranged into Images, Maps and Videos. However, there’s a wacky bug where viewing an image (via the browser’s context menu command), then returning back to the taxon page displays an translucent overlay stating “You have been logged in (out).” This occurs even though I don’t explicitly click the login (or logout) link.

The Table of Contents in the left sidebar neatly organizes the content for each species. However, I don’t understand why its sections are inconsistent between species —at least for well-known organisms in the same kingdom. Take the cacao and tomato entries, both marked as exemplar articles: The one on cacao has a section on Relevance (covering culture, cultivation, uses, nutritional information, etc.), which is oddly absent the tomato one.

I doubt that the Detail slider above the Table of Contents adds any value. Sliding to the right displays scientific name, and more items in the Table of Contents and media panel. Wouldn’t the introductory content in the central column suffice as an initial view, with a complete Table of Contents? (Abridged content, especially in organizational tools such as tables of content, seem unreliable or contrived.) No matter what I do, I’ve yet to succeed in moving this slider all the way to the right (beyond 75%) for a full detail view, even within an exemplar article. Is this to help reduce confusion for those with less education, or cognitive disabilities? It fails, IMHO, by feeling dumbed-down, somewhat condescending, not to mention perplexing. Please, just remove it.

On a related note, the account preferences for levels of detail strike me as unnecessary and a bit baffling. What I see for the taxon name near the top of the page, and the initial position for Detail, depends on whether I choose “Information intended for beginners” (common name only, Detail at 25%) or “Information intended for experts” (both common and scientific names, Detail at 75%). The taxon name for the middle “Information for any audience” choice is the same as the beginner’s choice, but Detail defaults to 50%. The difference between selecting “Only information that comes from authoritative sources” or “All information” is that the latter displays external links to unauthenticated sources such as Wikipedia and Google. Frankly, this complexity in adjusting the information volume is not worthwhile.

Speaking of helping to understand, there ought to be a glossary or dictionary of common terms used throughout the site, perhaps accessed from the top menubar. What does IUCN, under the species name, stand for? In such cases, a simple title tip with a short definition for the abbreviation would help.

Taxon pages: classification & navigation

Located in the upper-right of the page, the Classification box allows me to navigate the biological taxonomy. Unfortunately, while the EoL claims it wants the advantages of Web 2.0 appearances and behavior for the site, my experience says it’s jumpy and sluggish. In addition, they omit the (-) text button after the selected Kingdom in the Text view, which gives a brief but annoying sense of disorientation. Why not consistently use (+) for expanding and (-) for collapsing throughout the trees, for all taxa?

Anyhow, the Text view of the Classification box contains names that are also links to the respective taxon pages. Click on Animalia, and I get the page on animals. It works at all levels for which there’s some content written, so I can jump between class, order, family, species, and so on. But there’s a bug: Empty, unwritten taxa have a label of Not assigned. This is fine, except that sometimes I can keep on clicking the (+) button to yield another Not assigned (-) which is also clickable and yields yet another.

(Speaking of pluses and minuses: On the homepage, they should not use a plus sign for a bullet point. It’s a point, a statement, not a navigation tree to expand! A dot, circle or arrow would be more suitable.)

Ever since late February, clicking Graphic in the Classification box gave me a message that the web browser needed Flash installed…which, uhm, it already had. The Graphic view now works, but as another reminder that it’s under construction, it only animates views of the taxonomy trees. Nothing happens when I click any of the names, such as loading a taxon page, even though they look like links.

What does the third Classification view, Source, do? Clicking it sluggishly displays a popup (over the box) describing the classification resource. Looks cluttered. Why not just access it via the Table of Contents, under References & More Information, or Additional Resources?

Searching

The EoL has a ubiquitous Search tool, of course. Site search seems geared towards finding species, with Name of organism as a prompt within the Search field. Fortunately, in reality site searches aren’t limited to just the species taxon. (Also note that in Camino (at least in v1.5.x) the search field buttons are blank due to a bug with native buttons; this is not a problem in Safari or Firefox.)

Search engine optimization also appears to be in progress. For example, searching for Theobroma cacao in Google listed the EoL link on the second page; neither Yahoo! nor MSN had an entry within the first five result pages. If they want more visibility, it should’ve (ideally) been on the first page of results.

According to the FAQ, the EoL’s next version, due during the latter half of this year, should contain “embedded semantic information.” The taxonomic infrastructure for the site is advancing. The taxon page source back in March contained generic meta description and keywords, referring to the entire EoL site rather than the specific page viewed. But as of this writing, such pages now include a title with taxon name, and very basic description and keywords. The search engine results remain the same, though it does take time for engines to update their indices.

I still care

Many of my complaints could be addressed if and when the EoL implement more Wikipedia-like standards: Namely to allow more people to edit, especially to correct simple mistakes and encourage better writing, as well as to incorporate intra-site cross-references (i.e., linking terms and names to other entries).

They offer three venues for feedback and communication with users and developers, which admittedly I haven’t gone through much. First, they have many forums. Second, they started a blog in January (running WordPress for news and quick updates. Third, they recently opened a community-run wiki for comments and errors. Wouldn’t both forums and wiki potentially confuse users by having more than one place to look for help, or to post comments and corrections? Why not have article-specific discussion located at the given EoL entry, similar to Wikipedia, to better focus on such issues?

I still look forward to using the EoL, lest you think this essay implies my giving up on the project. A few moments of exasperation, true, but no, I’m far from hopeless!

You should check out the EoL if you haven’t already done so. If you have questions, head over to the extensive FAQs or watch the video tours. In fact, the site offers a survey, which you can access from the right side of the homepage. Let them know what you think!

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• Encyclopedia of Life