File:Wikimania 2023 - 309 - August 18 - Wikispecies and Wikidata Where next.webm

Speaker: Andy Mabbett
Abstract: A follow-up to the Wikimania 2017 session, "Wikispecies and Wikidata - a match made in heaven, or hell?" What have we learned, and done, since 2017? What remans to be done?
Since the 2017 session, Wikispecies makes more and better use of Wikidata, especially in the biographies of taxonomists. More of Wikispecies' bibliographic metadata has been drawn into Wikidata. But a lot of data is still stored twice, and more could be done to keep things synchronised. The taxon data itself is still not well-linked, and sometimes uses different interpretations of taxonomy (with further differences in various Wikipedias, and Wikimedia Commons).

External sites which require data on taxonomic subjects tend to draw it from Wikidata, not Wikispecies

Does any of this this matter? If so, what can be done? How can we foster better and more productive relationships between these projects, and their communities of volunteers? How can we reduce the workload for volunteers, and provide better services to those who consume them, by making more intelligent use of the tools which link projects?

The session asked "On the face of it, Wikispecies can easily be populated with data from Wikidata. But there is much resistance to this within the Wikispecies community. Do they have a point? Are Wikidata's interface and/ or community norms off-putting to the taxonomists who make up a significant proportion of Wikispecies editors? How can their needs be accommodated? Do we need to store data more than once?"
Presented at: Suntec Singapore Convention and Exhibition Centre, 2023-08-18 07:30 to 08:00 UTC