[image] iNaturalist and Wikipedia Ways to help improve iNaturalist taxon pages through Wikipedia Create Wikipedia pages that don’t exist yet! Ken-ichi added a cool new feature to iNat taxon pages that prepopulates a little template for taxa that don’t have an article on the English Wikipedia.…

[image] bouteloua: Ken-ichi added a cool new feature to iNat taxon pages that prepopulates a little template for taxa that Do bear in mind that you certainly don’t need to complete all of the sections before you “save” the article. It is OK for it to be incomplete, just a simple “stub” articl…

I did insert a bit of my own opinion about what a “good” wikipedia species page should look like, so I hope that doesn’t intimidate folks or result in a lot of stub pages with content-less sections. Personally I think the sections are useful, even if they end up being sparse, e.g. https://en.wikiped…

I would note that I think the headings should be reordered. IME most Wikipedia pages have etymology first, taxonomy higher up, and ecology type information last. I would suggest: Etymology Taxonomy Description Range Habitat Ecology But this could be just from the articles I’ve happened to come ac…

AFAIK, there’s no mechanism for sharing templates across different Mediawiki installs, so each language Wikipedia maintains its own templates for speciesboxes. I don’t know if they regularly update based on en.wikipedia which is where I assume development tends to occur.

[image] kueda: That seems… kinda crazy from an engineering perspective Yeah, just confirming that they’re all different (and that yeah not particularly well designed…). While the English Wikipedia uses the internally automatically updating taxonomic templates, most Wikipedias use those manua…

[image] kueda: Susan, maybe you know this: do tools like Speciesbox work for non-English Wikipedias? Honestly I don’t know. I would hope so…

Thanks, @kueda ! I’ve previously done professional web development as a career, but I’m STILL pretty intimidated by some of Wikipedia’s advanced syntaxes (syntaces?) like the species box. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: This and the accompanying discussion might just inspire me!

FWIW, the rate-limiting step in article creation on Wikipedia is generally having someone knowledgeable write a coherent summary of the topic. If you can do that, other people will pop out of the woodwork to frob with the highly specific formatting details, add a speciesbox, and so on.

Yeah, though with taxon pages it doesn’t take a ton of knowledge to synthesize the most important points from a reference or two.

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General

susanhewitt August 27, 2019, 1:01pm 3

Also, in order to have some idea how to write it, first look at a few articles that already exist on similar taxa, especially those articles that have a good rating (look on the Talk page to see what rating they have).

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