Andy wrote:

I second Mavs concerns about forking, yet including all of the Wikispecies contents (as I understand it) into Wikipedia would be stretching the rules as well. One possible (but not really beautiful) way I could see is to put the source and database stuff into the separate Wikispecies, but put the plain text stuff and basic in Wikipedia - and of course closely link the two.

I was (and still am) supportive of the WikiSpecies project. You can't expect to have a Wikipedia article about every species of caddisflies, or about every ground-dwelling roundworm. As Andy pointed out, these articles would remain stubs, as mostly no information but the mere name would be available - plus some scientific stuff that is of no interest for the general reader. Some of these data might be the scientific name, its synonymes, the scientist first describing the species (the taxonomic author).

However, I partially understand mav's concerns. Behaviour, reproduction and stuff like that should remain in Wikipedia (and should not be duplicated). The WikiSpecies project could have the above-mentioned data, followed by a link "Read more about this species in English - German - Polish - Japanese". So it would serve as an interlingual species directory as well. But it should contain as few duplicate information as possible.

Mirko