There are more than 1.9 million animals, plants, and other forms of life on Earth. In May 2007, some of the world’s leading scientists announced the development of theEncyclopedia of Life (EOL) to document them all. Inspired by biologist E. O. Wilson’sTED Wish and supported by more than $25 million in funding, the project aggregates and makes accessible information about species ranging from 19th century journals to modern online databases.

You’ll also find a “Wikipedia” entry in the table of contents. It reveals a copy of the Wikipedia article about tomatoes. As of this writing, the article text has a yellow background.
This means that an Encyclopedia of Life curator has not yet reviewed the content for inclusion in EOL. An EOL species page can have one or more curators who select and validate information added to EOL pages. Wikipedia articles, where they exist, are included by default.
Once the article has been validated by a curator, the yellow background is removed. Theinformation for curators andcuration standards pages on EOL give some additional background on the curation process, which applies to all content objects in EOL.Specific guidelines have been written for curation of content from Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. We’re particularly pleased that EOL encourages its curators to improve Wikipedia directly if errors or omissions are found.
So far, more than 200 Wikipedia articles have been reviewed through this process. Reviewers classify the information as follows:

• ‘trusted’ – reviewed by curator and not deemed to contain substantially incorrect information
• ‘untrusted’ – reviewed by curator and deemed to include incorrect or unverifiable information
• ‘inappropriate’ – reviewed by curator and deemed to not be eligible for inclusion in EOL for other reasons (e.g. too short to add value)

A proof-of-concept for expert reviews
Magnus Manske is a biochemist and programmer at theSanger Institute in the United Kingdom. He is also a long-time Wikimedia volunteer, and wrote the first version of the PHP software used by Wikipedia, which later becameMediaWiki. As a scientist, Magnus has advocated for the scientific community to use and improve Wikipedia, most recently as co-author of the paperTen Simple Rules for Editing Wikipedia.
I informed Magnus about the new EOL review information, and suggested that we might want to explore using this information to generated printed books or PDF collections of reviewed articles. The software for exporting Wikipedia articles into books already exists, so it was just a matter of putting two and two together.
So, Magnus used the available data feed to create an automated tool that creates a list of all EOL-reviewed article versions in a form that can be used by Wikipedia’sbook tool.
This makes it possible to download a PDF file or order a printed book that only contains EOL-reviewed versions of Wikipedia species articles.
To try it out, visit the page forMagnus’ example book. Click “Download PDF” to generate the (very large) PDF file that contains all the species articles, or “order printed book” to preview or order a printed book from PediaPress (which, as of this month, alsooffers books in color and hardcover format). If you want to remix or play with the book further, you can click “Open book creator”.

A replicable model

Magnus’ implementation was already created with an eye to future extensibility. If you’re inclined to take a closer technical look, check out Magnus’ “Sifter-Books” script which generates the book data, and can potentially support multiple partner institutions/organizations providing article reviews. As of the time of this writing, Magnus has already added two additional groups who review Wikipedia articles,Rfam andPfam, databases of RNA and protein families.

Moreover, Magnus has written a smallproof-of–concept scriptwhich makes the existence of reviews visible on Wikipedia itself. You need to create a user account on the English Wikipedia and follow the installation instructions to use the script. Once installed, a “Reviews” tab will indicate available article reviews.

We look forward to exploring similar partnerships with subject-matter experts in institutions (like universities and libraries), scientific associations, and specialized knowledge communities. If you’re interested in this model, drop me a note (erik at wikimedia dot org).

Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Representative of Wikimedia in the Encyclopedia of Life Institutional Council

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