Arkive is closing.

Does it say server unavailable?

 

nah

 

What does it say when you click random species?

 

The same species for like 8319381943895819572851865716512541725885912891258958192581981592518952895281935859178156170590102910299999828888888888888882917491748728174817784174123456789021781848465 times in a row

 

Oh, I have not tried to do it multiple times, i'll try to find a solution on the weekend.

 

What a shame ! will miss it once it is gone

 

It's been gone for a year now. Bit late

 

Haven't used it for a while so found out too late

 

I'll just drop this here...

Species Arkive - birds

 

2 years on, I see this still as unfortunate.
But I think that Wikipedia may have played a part in the beloved website's demise -
It would that for what the 'force majeur' internet animal encyclopaedia was worth, much of it was underlooked by the general internet public. Nyaa, instead much of them would rather go to Wikipedia, or amateur websites like A-Z Animals instead.
But Wikipedia, being a free-use encyclopaedia, has it so that much of the content, except where necessary, is copyrighted, or licensed. And as a result, a sizable number of animal pictures on that website are illustrations that date back to the 1800s.
But again, the internet public, for the most part, does not care, and despite Wikipedia seemingly always telling every year that only 2% of the visitors donate, that is quite a sizable number compared to whatever Arkive got. There are about 42 million registered "Wikipedians", and although that does not try to equate the true number of those that use Wikipedia a year, there would still be a sizable amount of money behind that, let alone what the public would give. In Arkive's case, it got only 5 and a half million usages a year, and for what it's worth, only about ~0.0015 of those users donated.
It would seem, quite unfortunately, that Arkive was a medium-sized fish on the small side, in a sizable pond, with a number of bigger, hungry fish eating up what they could whilst the smaller fish perish.
And so, the public made it so that whatever reigns the 'animal encyclopaedia' scene of the internet today either completely-free use and as reliable as the most reliable "Joe", frequently using 1800s illustrations, or is overly commercialised with a sizable amount of dog product reviews.
It was how it was

 

This website appears to be gone now.

 

...and now the original domain links to this obscure as hell page:
One-life concept to raise wildlife- and ecosystem knowledge
Upon stumbling upon it, I was hoping that maybe this 'One Life' thing mentioned was maybe a 'successor' to the original ARKive, but it seems just to be a copy-paste job with little coherency whatsoever, along with confusing wording and grammar
Upon further inspection of the overall website, it seems that little of it has any coherency, and the "International Center for Well-Being" seems to be some sort of confusing spam-site. And if one wants to contact the person behind the site, it appears that isn't an option either - there is no contact details to be found.
I hope some successor to ARKive may pop up in the future, though I'm not sure how likely that is . . .

 

Has anything popped up? Before I stumbled across that website I was planning on creating something similar myself, but nowhere near as comprehensive. I thought it was perfect but only found it a short while before it shut down.

 

In regards to something of a comparable number of pictures? No, not really ...
If anything, my previous posts here seem to hold up quite well a year later.

 

I think Wikipedia is more reliable than you are portraying it to be here. Sure, Wikipedia can be edited by anyone and so errors or misinformation can slip through the cracks, but these are often reviewed and corrected very quickly. In my personal experience, Wikipedia is generally accurate and gives a good basic overview of the subject. The most useful parts of a Wikipedia article in my experience are the references and external links sections which usually link to either reputable sources or actual scientific papers or other academical sources that are detailed and accurate.

 

Well, hope someone was able to archive the images and videos from the site

 

Looking back I think I was being a bit harsh here a bit - Wikipedia for the large part does have a fair bit of good reliable information, and also works as a convenient gateway to peer-reviewed sources - but alas, its freely-sourced media, in my opinion anyways, is rather paltry offerings compared to what Arkive offered.
There are a few websites online that have decent media offerings - but as seemingly a trade-off for this their written content is fairly tasteless.