The Encyclopedia of Life is a free, online collaborative encyclopedia intended to document all of the 1.9 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 incorporates content from the Biodiversity Heritage Library, which digitizes millions of pages of printed literature from the world's major natural history libraries. The project was initially backed by a US$50 million funding commitment, led by the MacArthur Foundation and the Sloan Foundation, who provided US$20 million and US$5 million, respectively. The additional US$25 million came from five cornerstone institutions—the Field Museum, Harvard University, the Marine Biological Laboratory, the Missouri Botanical Garden, and the Smithsonian Institution. The project was initially led by Jim Edwards and the development team by David Patterson. Today, participating institutions and individual donors continue to support EOL through financial contributions. More information...
In June 2020 the website eol.org was on the 2,758th place in the ranking of the most reliable and popular sources in multilingual Wikipedia from readers' point of view (PR-score). If we consider only frequency of appearance of this source in references of Wikipedia articles (F-score), this website was on the 371st place in June 2020. From Wikipedians' point of view, "eol.org" is the 1,380th most reliable source in different language versions of Wikipedia (AR-score).
The website is placed before flickeringmyth.com and after oas.org in multilingual PR ranking of the most reliable sources in Wikipedia.
Popularity and reliability assessment of sources in references of Wikipedia in different languages. Data extraction based on complex method using Wikimedia dumps in July 2020. To find the most popular and reliable sources we used information about over 200 million references of Wikipedia articles. More details in the research "Modeling Popularity and Reliability of Sources in Multilingual Wikipedia". Values for PR-score and AR-score were additinaly increased 100 times (to distinguish smaller values in the ranking).