Earth Portal Blasts Off

Wikipedia — the multilingual, Web-based, free-content encyclopedia — may not be the most reliable source for research papers, says Cutler Cleveland, a College of Arts and Sciences professor of geography and the environment, but the concept behind the online resource is ingenious.

In fact, Cleveland considers Wikipedia so ingenious that he decided to use it as a model for Earth Portal, which he describes as the only authoritative, comprehensive, noncommercial source for environmental news, education, and debate online. “The purpose of the Earth Portal,” says Cleveland, the site’s founder and editor, “is to provide a Web resource that produces reliable information about environmental issues.”

The Earth Portal, which debuted in late April after four years of development, includes three components. There is the rapidly growing and expert-edited Encyclopedia of Earth; the Earth Forum, with Weblogs where leading scientists engage in ongoing conversations with the public; and Earth News, the latest reports on the state of the environment.

Cleveland says the purpose of the Earth Portal is twofold. “While there’s a lot of free mediocre and untrustworthy information on a number of environmental issues, particularly contentious ones such as climate change or nuclear power,” he says, “unless you’re a scientist, it’s often difficult to differentiate between expert and amateur opinion. On the other hand, there’s a lot of high-quality information available, too, but it’s written at a very technical level or it appears in peer-reviewed journals that cost money to read.”

The Encyclopedia of Earth, the first portal to be developed, is the brainchild of Cleveland and Peter Saundry, director of the National Council for Science and the Environment. Articles in that portal are published in two steps. Before any article is written, an editorial board of scientists must approve the author. “This is the biggest difference between Earth Portal and Wikipedia,” Cleveland explains. “Anyone who has Internet access may write or edit a Wikipedia entry. There is no regulation, and all of the articles are anonymous.”

Once an Earth Portal article is ready, the author contacts a topic editor, who reviews the article, suggests changes, and ultimately approves the article’s publication. Articles are can be searched for by title, author, and topic.

The Earth Portal also publishes e-books, or full-text books on various topics. “The Earth Portal increases the intellectual content of the book by providing links to definitions of every scientific term listed in the chapter,” Cleveland says. “Additionally, we started a series called environmental classics, which are important and influential environmental books or papers or speeches written by various people. Darwin’s Origin of Species is up in its entirety, as is Henry David Thoreau’s Walden.”

All material in the Earth Portal is approved by its governing body, the Stewardship Committee of the Environmental Information Coalition (EIC), which comprises a diverse group of respected scientists and educators and the organizations, agencies, and institutions for which they work. The EIC is in turn governed by its own set of bylaws and an International Advisory Board with renowned scholars from diverse fields. The Earth Portal was created with ManyOne Networks, a company owned and governed by the nonprofit ManyOne Foundation.

Vicky Waltz can be reached at vwaltz@bu.edu.