I totally agree. I've submitted a big chunk of my caribbean and indopacific photo archives through the flickr group but at the moment each image is going to attach to a species page without a lot of data. Whilst having a library of clearly correctly identified images of a lot of species would of itself be vastly useful the project could be so much more.

I would suggest a comnbination approach. Each species page could have brief scientific details editable and approvable only by the relevant scientist curator and then a wiki type editable section to which all can add further detail. For some species, like many birds, this would obviously be rapidly expandable
(see for example the birdforum opus).

It was mentioned proudly in the flickr group's discussion area.

@biodiversivist: Thanks for pointing to my column at Xconomy. I wish I'd seen your posts before I wrote mine! I certainly didn't mean to steal any of your ideas.

I got a thoughtful comment on my post from David Patterson at EOL who wrote, "Finding a balance between authority and participation in the Encyclopedia of Life is challenging. Participation (and therefore scalability) without having a sense of quality would be very risky. So, the position is to begin with authoritative contributors, and then progressively open up the Web 2.0 dimensions. More of the participatory dimensions will become visible within the next few months."

So it sounds to me like they are at least vaguely aware of the benefits that crowdsourcing the project could bring, but are going to be super-cautious about it. Like you, I tend to think they're being too cautious and that if they opened up faster, the quality issue would sort itself out over time.