Main Page

Biodiversity on Opencura

Welcome to the experimental Wikibase containing biodiversity data. It runs on @addshore's WBStack. This wikibase is very experimental and no guarantee's can be given on the persistance of the data that hosts.

Wikiproject iNaturalist

Just after Wikimania 2018, Wikiproject iNaturalist. One of the side-events was a walk in Kirstenbosch botanical garden. There it became apparent that both platforms (Wikimedia and iNaturalist) share a userbase. iNaturalist uses content from Wikipedia in their taxon description and iNaturalist contains many beautiful images of observed species that can be reused through commons.

Since, the wikiproject emerges, some interesting events and tools have emerges and there are already quite some media files on commons that originate from iNaturalist.

Being able to embed specimens in Wikidata queries would be the next step. Unfortunatly, data on specimens does not conform to Wikidata's notability constraint (just to big). This Wikibase intends to bridge specimens data with Wikidata.

This wikibase now primarily imports specimen data from iNaturalist, because of the convenient feature that users can pick their own license, which led to more than 2 Mil observsations with a license compatible with Wikimedia platform s (i.e. CC0, CC-BY, CC-BY-SA).

Phase 1

Currently, a subset of metadata on observations from iNaturalist has been added by a software bot developed for this purpose. The bot added all CC0 licensed data with a research-grade tag into this Wikibase.

Subsequently, the items were created for the observed species and mappings to the Wikidata items on those species have been made.

Basically, this wikibase allows extending taxonomic data on Wikidata, with metadata on specimens, with the caveat that (for now) the scope is limited to only data that are not limited by restrictive licenses (CC0).

I will gradually be extending examples and use-cases to this Wikibase, but anyone is welcome to join the fun exercise to create a federated data-landscape for the biodiversity. --Andrawaag (talk) 18:45, 2 February 2020 (UTC)