The BBC and Bob Geldof have announced an intention to collaborate on the Dictionary of Man, a unique and ambitious anthropology project that will record every human society on the planet.

The Dictionary of Man website will be a limitless repository of content, an immense digital catalogue of all current human existence and an enormous resource for the exchange of ideas and information.

The BBC will, in tandem, produce for television a classic BBC landmark series, The Human Planet. The eight-part series will be produced in a unique collaboration between the BBC’s world-renowned Natural History Unit, BBC Bristol Features and Documentaries and BBC Wales.

The scale and ambition of this unprecedented project will use every available medium to create the largest ever living record of films, photographs, anthropological histories, philosophies, theologies, economies, language, art, and documented and personal accounts from people of every society across the globe. It will serve as a definitive record of us - Mankind - at the beginning of the 21st century.

Twenty years ago, Bob Geldof was sitting on a tree stump in Northern Niger with a regional governor, looking out at what Geldof described as “a moonscape”. The governor told of how 300 different languages that once existed had disappeared forever in just two years during the famine. Geldof has written, “Even though I never heard those languages, I already miss them. In these ways the lights of human genius wink out.” From then on he was determined to record “all those sounds, voices and jokes so they never disappear again”.

Announcing the Dictionary of Man project at the MIP conference in Cannes, Bob Geldof, who is working in partnership with award-winning producer/director John Maguire, said, “This will be an A to Z of Mankind which will catalogue the world we live in now, the people who share this planet, the way we live and the way we adapt to face common and different challenges. Mankind is the world’s most extraordinary animal. In an age of globalisation and increasing connection, we face the growing homogenisation of cultures and the disappearance of extraordinary and diverse mechanisms that man has invented in order to survive in whichever environment he has found himself. Culture is a function of survival.”

With the cooperation of the great institutions of the world all extant photographs, archives and records will be included. Anthropologists, social historians and experts in many other disciplines will be involved as, over the years, the degrees of human difference are gradually logged.

The architecture of the site will use the very latest social networking technologies in order to allow individuals across the globe to track and trace their national, clan, tribal, family and individual dispersals and reconnect to far-flung and ancient versions of their family or group members. “Ultimately I suppose in some ways we’re also building the World’s Family Photo Album,” said Geldof.

Simultaneous to this vast site, Dictionary of Man crews will travel the globe to capture on film 900 of the separate groups of people that anthropologists believe to be in existence. Experts suggest that there could be up to 27,000 variations alongside the core 900.

In a hugely ambitious multi-media initiative, all the collated material will be available through the Dictionary of Man website, an encyclopaedic volume of DVDs featuring hundreds of hours of programming, books, magazines, CDs, exhibitions, theatrical and all media platforms.