Marco Krohn wrote:
[...] "trivia
information" which exists in Wikipedia articles, but surely will not part of
any wikispecies article.
If we strongly limit the Wikipedia "depth" for ToL articles, we still will at
some point have >100.000 articles, where - except trivia information - the
Wikipedia articles will be more or the less subset of the information which
is contained in wikispecies.
Just to cherrypick :-), I'm not sure that it's quite accurate to say
that specialists are not interested in "trivia" or connections to pop
culture; consider how popular clownfish experts got a week after
Finding Nemo came out, or look at Howard Scott Gentry's book on
agaves, where a number of difficult species identification problems
are shown to be intertwined with tequila consumption, wealthy
European plant collectors, and Yucatan seaport history. Look
closely and you'll see FishBase has a fish-on-stamps section...
In a way, wikispecies is seeming more like a cut-to-the-chase for
people who already know the background ("what are the species of
blind cavefish in Oklahoma?" in response to "what's that white
thing doing down there, a hundred miles outside its range?!?" :-) ).
Stan