The NSF BD&I looks promising. One catch:

“International collaboration is encouraged; however, financial support for any non-U.S. participant organization must be provided from within the participant’s country or other non-NSF sources.”

I may be able to conjure up some funds to get started, but my hope is that this will be pretty inexpensive to get off the ground if we use/exapt existing interfaces.

Scratchpad might work:
http://www.editwebrevisions.info/scratchpads

…But in an ideal world, NCBI or someone would set something like this up for biologists. Really, all biological datasets and databases everywhere should just be hosted/mirrored on NCBI or something like that. Not just every new sequence, but every new specimen, fossil, species, etc., would get entered into the database. Journals would make entering this data into the databases a requirement for publication.

All this will happen When I Become King. While I’m dreaming, BTW, I’d like a pony.

P.S. wikibase.org, datawiki.org and database.org are taken.

I think this could have a lot of potential for biological datasets as well. One idea that might be helpful to incorporate would be some kind of rating system for database entries. For example, if you want to have a species specific page which includes a brief “introduction,” rather than allowing only a single entry for the introduction at any one time, allow multiple entries. Users could then “vote” on the one they feel is the best, and it would get a higher weight accordingly.

All in all it sounds like a great project. Keep us posted on how it goes.

Goodluck!
Keith
Open.nfo