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Editorial Archive	January 2000	News and Events
Inaugural Editorial 1 January 2000
1 January 2000 is a conspicuous birth date. On this day we celebrate the public launch of EcoPort, a database, not just a website, designed and devoted entirely to inter-disciplinary integration of information to manage biodiversity, mankind's: "...most valuable but least appreciated resource" (Wilson, 1992.) In 1992 E.O. Wilson speculated about a "Great Encyclopedia of Life" Wilson (1992), p.151. Imagine, he wrote, an encyclopedia, "say one page to a species. The description would contain the scientific name, a photograph or drawing and a brief diagnosis." All this information, Wilson speculated, would be "electronically recorded, so that the Great Encyclopedia can reside .. in a box on one side of an office desk." Soon after, Janzen (1993) emphasized the attributes of an electronic database devoted to biodiversity management; a vision of the role of local naturalists and insights into the power of the Internet, that are now core features of EcoPort. It should be immediately obvious that no single person or even a large circle of scientists could hope to write such a book. Moreover, it would change all the time and would be completely inaccessible to school children in rain forest towns and far-away villages in Africa. The latter point should be borne in mind by those who scoff at the idea of making computers available to underprivileged societies: they have a point, but books or any other analog medium for that matter, certainly cannot do the job at all, no matter what their cost. Thus, we either give up on the critical challenge of making ordinary people knowledgeable enough to make informed decisions about their daily actions that determine "Our Common Future", thereby leaving the matter of biodiversity management in the "ignorant hands of humanity" (Wilson, loc cit.), or we accept that a real solution can only come from being digital and unconditionally embracing the implications of the fungible nature of digital information and using this insight to eliminate the digital divide that separates North and South. We don't have much time. During the next decade or two, mankind at home, could be expected to come close to doing as much damage to our planet as we did in several previous centuries, i.e. if we don't blow ourselves up first or do even more damage than predicted here. International meetings and conventions are useful, as are grandiose global programmes, but in the end we will still need people to know that they cannot throw their rubbish away, because there is no such place as "away". We need to change human values so that we can understand how ignorance and avarice leads to the annihilation of species, habitats and the very biodiversity on which our future depends. To change our values, we will need accessible knowledge and we will have to work together to create, nurture and apply this knowledge — a quest and ideal to which we dedicate EcoPort. In January 1859 the Philological Society in England launched an appeal to the English and American public to assist as volunteers to help create what is today, the magnificent and authoritative Oxford English Dictionary. EcoPort invites you to participate in a similar project — a project to write Wilson's "Great Encyclopedia of Life". However, because of ecology's axiom of interdependence the EcoPort Encyclopedia will have to cover more than just biology information about species. Geography, socio-economics and human culture are among the many subjects that hold the memes that influence the decisions we make in managing biodiversity. Therefore, EcoPort offers a framework and tool chest of procedures to enable anyone who wishes to teach and learn about biodiversity, to share their knowledge by using EcoPort as a consilience engine in the manner described by E.O. Wilson. EcoPort is not a one-way information broadcasting system like most of the Internet with its own 'central dogma' whereby only a central webmaster can create hyperlinks between memes to create the inter-meme connections that distinguish knowledge from information. In spite of hypertext being almost a household word since Vannevar Bush's breakthrough insights 55 years ago, hardly anybody can actually write it. To solve this problem, we have invented and implemented a set of tools and procedures, that enable users to write hypertext themselves — tools that were used to write this Editorial and its hypertext links. Coupled to standard peer review procedures that maintain scientific accuracy, EcoPort's hypertext writing tools were created to allow us to work together to repeat the open source process that created the Oxford Dictionary, this time to write Wilson's "Great Encyclopedia of Life" fuelled by the insights and imperatives of consilience. Join us as we build this Great Encyclopedia of Life, one meme at a time. We will build EcoPort as a learning system and share it as an open-source, public service. We will begin by assembling all the world's checklists of organisms. This will create the barest of all frameworks for us to populate through consilience. It will also mean that many users will most often not find what they want to know immediately. However, if every user leaves the answer they do find outside EcoPort also in EcoPort, we will, as it happens in the Oxford English Dictionary, build a shared resource of unparalleled value. Explore EcoPort, leave behind footprints of shared knowledge and remember that it is better to light a candle, than to curse the darkness. If you have comments, please contact the EcoPort Supervisor.