Are there any Wikipedia editors from Australia with some time on their hands?
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You could go ask on WP:Australia. Not everyone there’s Australian ofc but I feel like it would get a better response than asking here.
Thank you, I did not know of that site. I was hoping for someone who was both a Wikipedia editor and a member of iNaturalist.
My intention was to try, when there was an update on iNat, to set up a process that updated Wikipedia as both the Atlas of Living Australia and iNat take there information directly from Wikipedia.
At the moment the update is left to chance
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There is also a tag in the Forum for Wikipedia - that way you could find Wiki iNatters
Hi Ian, I am active on both iNaturalist and Wikipedia. I am also active in sharing
information and images between the two sites.
Wikipedia avoids using self-published or user-contributed sites (like iNat) as a source for taxonomic changes (or any other type of information). If there is a taxonomic update on iNaturalist, these changes would not be made on Wikipedia based on the iNat source alone. They may however be changed on Wikipedia based on the taxonomic authorities/databases that the relevant Wkipedia project (Plants, Fish, fungi, etc) is using as their main source for taxonomy. Even then, not all changes will be automatically adopted.
Was there a different type of information (other than taxonomic) that you were looking to share? Also, please keep in mind that there are no “automatic” processes that incorporate any information into Wikipedia other than fields populated by their associated entries on Wikidata (a sister project also under the Wikimedia umbrella). All the information and organization you see on a Wikipedia article is added (or changed) manually by thousands of individual volunteers. The priority of any workflow is not directly managed and instead operates solely on an individual volunteer’s available time and interest in that subject.
Recently, I have been uploading images of orchids endemic to Western Australia (and no, I am not Australian) to Wikimedia Commons, where many of them are then used in individual Wikipedia articles (in any of 300+ languages). Next month, it could be desert insects of North Africa or South American frogs, anything could be possible depending on my interests at the time.
If you have any other questions regarding Wikipedia processes, do not hesitate to ask here.
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Thank you all for your responses.
This started some months ago when the Koala subspecies were merged. At that time and off and on for the months after. Michael(bushbandit) tried to get the now obsolete information on iNat changed to reflect the new situation.
This was happening again with the merging of the 2 subspecies of the Eastern Grey Kangaroo. The discussion can be viewed in that flag.
Michal tried and I joined in to try and set up a process that led to the new information being on iNat. We suggested the following.
1 A merger or change is made on iNat then
2 A Wikipedia editor ushers the changes through that system, so that
3 The new information appears in the Atlas of Living Australia and in iNat as both these source their descriptions from Wikipedia.
The old system had no link between the iNat curator and a Wikipedia editor. It was left to the chance discovery by the editor of the change.
Michael and I have skin in this game as we both had 7,000+ subspecies IDs as we had relied on the information in the Australian Museum’s Mammal book, the Atlas of Living Australia website and iNat itself and we did not want this to happen to others trying like we did to improve iNat.