@ahospers Wikidata currently doesn’t affect the Wikipedia descriptions for places in iNaturalist, as far as i know. there’s been some talk here and in other discussions about using Wikidata as way to link iNaturalist places, but i’m not aware of any serious steps toward thinking through pros and cons and what that would actually look like if implemented.
this is currently the right way to do it in iNaturalist, along with the option of changing the place name in iNaturalist to match an existing entry in Wikipedia.
it should be noted however, that there could be a lag of up to 30 days for changes in Wikipedia to be reflected in iNaturalist (see discussion starting from https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/creating-inaturalist-places-and-linking-to-wikidata-using-geojson/12220/16), although this may or may not be improved after this: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/adding-wikipedia-links-when-an-article-is-created-about-a-taxon/9084/12.