Use English Wikipedia as taxa information fallback if no Wikipedia entry in my (non-English) language exists

Feature Requests
1

I want inaturalist.org to show taxa information from the English Wikipedia if no Wikipedia article in my language (eg German) exists - in order to not be forced to copy the taxa name and search manually in en.wikipedia each time.

2

welcome. it seems like this request might be best considered in the context of https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/use-wikidata-to-link-to-appropriate-wikipedia-articles-in-all-languages/5538.

2 Likes
3

Not really. What I am suggesting is a simple fully automatic fallback: Wiki page not existing in Non-English -> show EN page. The linked request suggest manual changing of Wikipedia articles or handmade links placed by curators.

1 Like
4

what i mean is that the other discussion doesn’t fully articulate how to handle fallback languages, and if both this and the other other item ultimately end up getting implemented, it doesn’t make sense to do this first and then have to redo it in the context of the other thing.

5

Ok, I understand your point. Just to clearify: My request deals with not existing Non-English pages. The other request deals with existing pages which are not found by the current algorithms.

However - the implementation of my solution would mitigate the problem of the other request considerably, with very little effort.

1 Like
6

I sometimes have the opposite problem. The wikipedia article either doesn’t exist in English or is severely lacking. I’ll search and find more detailed wikipedia articles on the subject in other languages.

I’d like the link to be to whichever wikipedia article has the best and most current information regardless of language.

2 Likes
7

On my Dutch iObs app (about 3.0.4) I see first the english Wikipedia taxon page and after a second is it refreshed by the Dutch page. is it not already implemented ? But i have no idea what happens if there is no Dutch taxon page

1 Like
8

Apparently this feature has been implemented in the meantime. Works fine and this feature request can be closed.

9

Not sure that is the case : https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/use-wikidata-to-link-to-appropriate-wikipedia-articles-in-all-languages/5538/26

If this and the other Wikidata request were implemented I should:

  • have got the English article for the taxon when running in Danish
  • got the Swedish article when running in Swedish

Yet in both cases I got the no matching article message.

10

I re-checked for German:

  • German Wikipedia entry exists - German Wikipedia information shows up
  • German Wikipedia does not exist but English entry exists - English Wikipedia information shows up
  • Neither German nor English Wiipedia article exists - German standard text (like “is a species of yy with xx observations”) shows up

So: All perfect. :-)

1 Like