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I don't know much about the "category system," but if you were to use Kingdom, Phylum, Subphylum, Family, Class, Order, etc. down to Genus and Species as categories, that'd make it quite simple. I don't know how you'd work that, but it would make things simpler.
I have mixed feelings about the proposal. While the textual material might be better in the existing encyclopedias, there are probably data structural advantages that could be derived from the proposal, though I would see it as a single project that could be interlinked with the various Wikipedias. The idea of having a separate Wikispecies for each language would be a tremendous waste of resources.
Couldn't Wikispecies be a true subset of Wikipedia, i.e. just another interface, but the same underlying database? Say, all articles in the Categories forming the Tree of Life, accesible with an specialized interface with functions not only for edit, but also for, say, search only in the Families or only in the whatever, helped by some specialized indices? Also there could be specialized tree navigations etc.
This would automatically have the same actuality on wikipedia proper and wikispecies, but would give the feeling of a distinguished project for biologists, which could be helpful for them.
+------+ | db | <------ interface ----> WIKIPEDIA | ....| | : | <--- other interface -> WIKISPECIES +------+
instead of
+------+ | db | <----- interface ----> WIKIPEDIA | | +----+ | | <-- manual updating ----------------> |db2 | -> WIKISPECIES +------+ +----+
What do you think?
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