> It all depends whether the other team are at all
> hostile to the fact that rather than joining their
> project which we knew was happening, we decided to
> start our own.
> If its at all in the GNU spirit, they wont be but you
> never know.
Both sets of data are under GNU Free Documentation Licence, even if they won't co-operate they can still use each others data.
BTW. Have you looked at the Nupedia project, try signing up and look how much you have to fill in to write an article. They seem to be of the opinion "unless you've got a Phd in the topic you'll only write an crap article about it".