In this interview with David Patterson of the Encyclopedia of Life project, Seed Magazine draw a parallel between that project and the creation of the OED:
Seed: Have you looked at the history of the Oxford English Dictionary, which was another daunting project and an early example of using citizens to get information that experts could never acquire on their own?
DP: I actually have somewhere around here a book about it called The Professor and the Madman. I think that there are a number of things that make the Encyclopedia of Life a tractable project and why this attempt is likely to be successful whereas other attempts have failed — and there have been plenty of other attempts, both on paper and electronically. The capacity to use aggregation technology is one component, so you don’t redo the work of others. Coming up with management of names is critical, because that allows you to integrate the stupid information. But getting community buy-in as contributors, as creators, and as fact checkers is an absolutely essential part. If we fail on that front, I suspect the Encyclopedia of Life would fail.
The Encyclopedia of Life might be even more ambitious than the original OED was, if this mission statement is anything to go by:
The Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) is an ambitious, even audacious project to organize and make available via the Internet virtually all information about life present on Earth. At its heart lies a series of Web sites—one for each of the approximately 1.8 million known species—that provide the entry points to this vast array of knowledge.
The first edition of the OED, in comparison, had 250,000 entries, and took nearly 40 years to complete. I’m hoping the EOL will manage it a bit more quickly than that.
The OED is also frequently compared to Wikipedia itself:
The Oxford English Dictionary, arguably the greatest reference work in the English language (and certainly the greatest reference work ABOUT the English language) found its origins in a wiki model, whereby scholars put out the word to English speakers far and wide that they would welcome hard evidence of the earliest appearances of English words. The response was astonishing (never underestimate the enthusiasm of amateur lexicographers), so much so that the building in which the word submissions were kept, called The Scriptorum, began to sink under the weight of all the paper.
The parallels aren’t perfect: for better or worse, wikis tend to be democratic where the OED is collaborative. But it’s a good reminder of the importance of public participation in finding the evidence used for creating that dictionary.