Statistics and Facts 1 1 The Animal Diversity Web is an extraordinarily rich, multimedia
natural history database with a high profile among educators and general audiences.
We currently have **2,150 accounts of animal species** online and **350 accounts of
higher taxonomic groups**. We also present **11,500 images** and **725 animal sounds**.
We will add another 250 species in the next two months. Our site architecture is explicitly
designed to permit rapid and virtually unlimited expansion.
We serve **200,000 pages of content to ~10,000 IP addresses** every day. We know from
comments and questions we receive that we are heavily used by high school and college
students and their instructors, and also by the general public, ranging from 3rd graders
to grandparents. At least 15% of the content we serve each month goes outside the
U.S. to over 100 countries. Because the site is relatively old (first pages up in
1995) many other educational sites have linked to us, and we are highly ranked by
the popular Google search engine, with ADW being the first result for many searches
on animal names. People searching for information about natural history often come
to us first, giving us a remarkable opportunity to influence the way they think about
biodiversity.
Undergraduate students throughout North America create species accounts as part of
coursework. We have collaborated with **30 colleges and universities** in creating
new content, and recruit new participants each year. It is this model of recruiting
hundreds or potentially thousands of authors that gives us the potential for remarkable
growth and ultimately, coverage of the animal kingdom. Using our tools, course instructors
provide feedback to students and do the initial editing of accounts. Accounts are
then submitted to ADW and, if they are of sufficient quality, are edited and published
on the site. Specialists write the accounts for higher groups; these accounts are
also evaluated and edited by ADW staff before publication. Account writers are guided
through the process by a highly structured template that is provided with detailed
help text. The end result of student research and ADW editing is a set of searchable
natural history data for individual animal species. structured-text
