Every taxon page on iNaturalist—pages about species, genera, families, etc—has an “About” tab that automatically pulls content from Wikipedia, if there is a page for that taxon.
iNaturalist About tab for Hypericum kalmianum:
Ways to help improve iNaturalist taxon pages through Wikipedia
- Edit, expand, and improve Wikipedia pages about taxa. Anyone can edit Wikipedia! Even you. ;)
- If you don’t feel comfortable yet editing Wikipedia articles directly, you can point out issues on their associated Talk pages, or at the relevant WikiProject Talk page.
- Add useful identification tips (citations are required)
- Create Wikipedia pages that don’t exist yet! For example, all the red links here are flora found in the Chicago region that don’t have a Wikipedia page yet.
- Add your or others’ photos to existing Wikipedia pages – you can search iNaturalist photos by the type of photo license. A helpful website has been created to assist in this task. Only CC BY, CC BY-SA, and public domain licenses are available for use on Wikipedia, but see example text to politely request if users are willing to change their photo license.
- Do the same for Wikipedia in languages other than English.
- Bring in vernacular/common names from Wikipedia (if they are sourced) and add them to iNaturalist
- ?
Relevant feature requests
- Use Wikidata to link to appropriate Wikipedia articles in all languages
- Use Wikidata for place names and Wikipedia descriptions
Basic components of a taxon/species page on Wikipedia
See more detailed example template for a taxon article here.
- Taxobox (Automatic taxobox, Speciesbox, Infraspeciesbox) – Wikipedia’s way of sorting species within their taxonomic hierarchy
- Intro paragraph
- Physical description
- Taxonomy
- Distribution and habitat
- Ecology
- Conservation
- Human uses/Culture
- References
- Taxonbar (super useful, pulls information from Wikidata)
- Categories
Where to ask questions / learn more
- The Teahouse on Wikipedia
- Talk pages of WikiProjects, e.g. WikiProject Plants and other descendants of WikiProject Tree of Life
- WikiProject iNaturalist on Wikidata
- Feel free to shoot @bouteloua or some of the other people below a message!
(And hey, how meta, a wiki topic about Wikipedia. Feel free to edit!)