The iNaturalist website now goes through Wikidata to look for the appropriate Wikipedia article in each language. This solved some problems, but opened up others (yay!). Namely, there are many cases where the Wikipedia article won’t be linked directly at Wikidata, e.g.
- The article about a species is hosted at the genus page because it is a monotypic genus
- Wikidata and/or Wikipedia taxonomy is out-of-date and most of the links to the Wikipedia articles are placed on the old name and not the new name that iNaturalist is using (or vice versa - no need to discuss the particular taxonomic issues here please)
In this example, many Wikipedias are still calling this bird Coloeus monedula but iNat is calling it Corvus monedula. There are Wikidata items for each name, and the Spanish Wikipedia is calling it Coloeus. If I change my site language to Spanish, you can see that iNat is already doing the work (finding the Spanish Wikipedia article for this taxon), but in this case it’s being quickly replaced by the English Wikipedia article. It should show the Spanish article.
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/8000-Corvus-monedula
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q25345384
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q25394
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coloeus_monedula
In some cases, it will flash the article briefly and then display the typical blank About tab with the basic text “taxon is a rank of highertaxons with X observations” or show another page, like EOL.
Using iNat in English, https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/53405-Heteromeles-arbutifolia displays the EOL page in Spanish, but there is an English Wikipedia article - it’s hosted at the genus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteromeles (iNat already knows to find it via the redirect here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteromeles%20arbutifolia). You can see the article flash briefly before it shows the EOL page.
If no link to the Wikipedia article in that language is found via Wikidata, can iNat fall back to the original Wikipedia look-up tool (searching Wikipedia for an article using the taxon name)? @radrat or @reosarevok might have more thoughts on how to manage this connection.