Hi everyone, sorry for the absenteeism. I was in Hong Kong attending a family wedding and have just gotten back, desperately trying to get over the 12-hour jet lag!

I came across this website today that I wanted to bring to your attention: Encyclopedia of Earth. It’s a clever attempt to get over some of the weaknesses of Wikipedia and put out some authoritative information about earth and environmental sciences.

The prevailing impression of wiki-based online encyclopedias (ie Wikipedia) is that the information cannot always be trusted as accurate, since any joe-schmoe can, in theory, write and edit that information. Nature did a controversial survey of some scientific Wikipedia entries and found them to be as good as those in the Encyclopedia Britannica, which in turn, loudly disputed the study.

Encyclopedia of Earth is trying to combine the best of both Wikipedia and the Britannica? That is, tap into the collective knowledge of an online community of users, but also make sure that the community is credible and authoritative. EoE is written and edited by specially chosen experts: professors, scientists, educators, policy analysts, etc. The editor-in-chief is BU geography and environment professor Cutler Cleveland.

It’s still early days for the site so its list of topics is fairly limited and consists of an odd mix of titles. I couldn’t find any entries on “climate change” or “global warming” but did find one about the impact of ozone on climate change. I read about how a boiler works and also about the Bituminous Coal Conservation Act of 1935. Growth of the site will be limited by the number of writers and editors, so to all you earth scientists out there, rather than complain about the misinformation in the press and on websites about this topic or that in the earth sciences, you can do your part in setting the record straight by contributing to Encyclopedia of Earth.