I would like to start a game to find the species on Inat that has the most observations while not having a dedicated Wikipedia page in the English language.
Hopefully the game can make us learn about new species and maybe it will inspire some of us to create new Wikipedia pages!
Let me start low with a blue bee with 236 observations:
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/513305-Amegilla-calceifera
I’m assuming you mean in English, or any language?
Unionids (freshwater mussels) are rather common but nearly all of the Wikipedia pages on them are outdated or very, very short.
Lampsilis radiata, a particularly shiny mussel as shown above, doesn’t have a Wikipedia page at all. Not the most observations I could find but it’s an interesting one. It has 493 observations.
The jumping spider Ptocasius strupifer (which is mostly found in China) has 2,247 observations, but no English Wikipedia article. It does however, have a very short Chinese Wikipedia article: https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/毛垛兜跳蛛
just for reference, there’s been an effort before to create Wikipedia pages for plants that had a lot of observations: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/the-most-inatted-plants-without-wikipedia-articles/8747.
this doesn’t have have to be a game where one person makes a guess and another person tries to make a better guess. it should be possible to get the most observed species in iNaturalist and then just run them through a SPARQL query to figure out whether a Wikipedia page exists, in whichever language you’re looking for. here are some example queries that should point you in the right direction: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/use-wikidata-for-place-names-and-wikipedia-descriptions/7702/31.
Haha I didn’t think about that! I’ll edit the post thanks.
here’s an australian weevil with 800 odd observations
It’s pretty easy to create a “stub” Wikipedia article for a species (or other taxon). I’ve been thinking about making Wikipedia pages for some of the more common iNatuaralist pages without a Wikipedia page.
I just made a page for Amegilla calceifera.
There are actually quite a a lot of species of vertebrates that do not have an English Wikipedia page yet. Mostly fish and amphibians and some reptiles. Birds and Mammals are quite complete on Wikipedia though I wouldn’t be surprised if they were also missing some
Agromyza vockerothi has 2400 observations and no wiki page. Most common one I could think of.
I’m like completely unfamiliar with SPARQL queries and that thread didn’t seem to penetrate my brain very well - could you post the code you used? I’m assuming its possible to implement for a specific taxon level (IE, most observed Basidomycete or what have you)?
first get a list of taxa that you want to check. for this example, i’ll just get the first 500 taxa from https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNatAPIv1_observations_species_counts?taxon_id=47169.
then format the list as a space-separated list with double-quotes around each id.
then get the last query from the linked post in my previous post. uncomment the line (10) that filters for Wikipedia language, and replace the values in the line (2) that contains the taxa you want to query, using the values from the space-separated list. run this against the Wikidata query service. the results of the query will show you where any of the taxa in the list can or cannot be matched over to an English Wikipedia article. note that this requires a taxon record to be set up in Wikidata, tied to both the iNat taxon ID and the Wikipedia article. (it’s possible that the link may not be set up correctly / completely, but this will still give you a good starting point.)
the method above allows you to specify different Wikipedia versions to search within (or to search all of them), but if you just need English Wikipedia, iNat also attempts to store the English Wikipedia link. so you could also get this information from the iNat API via /v1/taxa/{id}. for example, you could query for the list of taxa from before using my helper page, and you can look for cases where the scientific name is not a link (to English Wikipedia). note that iNat’s records of Wikipedia pages don’t always seem to be up-to-date, but it’ll give you a good starting point.
I read on readdit that Dutch and West Frisian are almost the same as English, so why do you refer to a Chinese Wikipedia article, if is not even close to English?
The surprising thing to me is how often I come across species that only have a page in some Austronesian language even though they are found in the Americas.
If you’re referring to Cebuano it’s due to one person/bot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lsjbot
That one is due to differing taxonomies. English Wikipedia still considers it to be a subspecies of Atalopedes campestris, which does have an article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atalopedes_campestris. Atalopedes huron was revalidated as a species in 2022, and split off from Atalopedes campestris on iNat just a few months ago. See https://www.inaturalist.org/flags/607318. (FWIW, the evidence that it’s a separate species is debatable, but it looks like several sources have adopted the split.)
Ledidoptera taxonomy is highly inconsistent on the internet as there is no generally-agreed-on and up-to-date authority. Same with fungi.
I’ve been dabbling in wikipedia editing as of late so I’m glad to see relevant discussion happening here :) Thank you for this thread!
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/534851-Cyrenoidea
Coming back here to note this superfamily with exactly 18000 observations. Not exactly a species, but I feel like a taxon this big should have one… I’ll see what I can do.
Edit: I added a short page.
That is because there is already an article at the order and family levels. Wikipedia tries to avoid having stub articles at taxon ranks in-between the classic Linnaean ranks.
That makes sense. However, Venerida, the order that Cyrenoidea is under, is a very diverse order with many different superfamilies. In fact, 1/5 of all bivalve observations on iNaturalist are within it.
Now that you say that, though, I’m noticing a lot of other ranks without Wikipedia pages. I won’t add anymore pages knowing that they aren’t supported, but Subclass Autobranchia has 413,463 observations and no Wikipedia page, yet Infraclass Heteroconchia with 256,557 has one.
I’ll stop there given that this thread is supposed to be focused on species
