Categories, commons, wikidata and wikipedia
editWiki commons items are permitted a unique link to a wikidata item. When one uploads an image of a taxon to the commons, one is invited to categorise it. Thus, if I upload an image of Lysiphyllum cunninghamii, it is grouped in Category:Lysiphyllum cunninghamii. It is useful to then associate the commons category to the taxon name in wikidata. At which point, pages for the taxon in every wikipedia can find the category of images associated with the taxon. Thus, wikidata item Q17140645 looks something like this, with links to other language wikis and the link to commons.
However, a bot is now creating wikidata items for commons taxon categories and giving wikidata items such as Category:Cyathestemon (Q18282608), which meant that the category could not be linked as shown in the figure, and aricles and wikidata were divorced from their natural category. At the time when I first raised this, this meant that articles about the various taxa where this had been done, no longer showed the link to commons in left hand section of their page, but this seems to have been remedied. So there is no longer a problem.
New properties and their uses
editProperty:P8468 Queensland Biota ID
editIn flora, Queensland has only had the ATRF ID, (the Australian tropical rainforest id), which has not been fully populated via mix'n'match, but which has excellent descriptions for Queensland rainforest plants. A new property, Queensland Biota ID (again not yet fully populated) covers all Queensland biota. It is useful for asserting
- that a plant or animal is (or has been) found in Queensland; and
- the taxon's conservation status under Queensland's law.
Givenm its wide applicability, the Queensland Biota ID should possibly replace the ATRF ID on the taxon bar.
Property:P8469 Australian Weed ID
editThe Australian weed id covers some 400 Australian weeds, some of which are Australian natives like Acacia baileyana. At this point, the ID only partially populates wikidata. It
- has good descriptions, together with photographs;
- lists the weed status by state (and hence is a good reference for this)
- details the manner in which the plant is considered a weed;
- gives methods for eradication in Australia.
It covers approximately 400 taxa, many of which are world-wide weeds (and which therefore generally have many wikidata IDs giving potentially useful information.) Thus, it should probably not be an automatic addition to the taxonbar. However, the various efloras available to Australian wikipedians writing plant articles, (with the exception of FloraBase), generally say little on how weeds propagate or on how to eradicate them. Hence, for those of us aware of it, it could be a useful addition which is available via a click on the article's wikidata item, and a scroll down the various IDs (and obviously would be more easily accessed via the taxonbar).
The Bionomia site uses GBIF data to allocate specimens to collectors and those who identify specimens via collector/identifier ID. For more details and examples of its uses, see the wikipedia article Bionomia. Data from this site can be used to enrich biographies of botanists and collectors. For examples, see the wikipedia articles for Mary Ann McHard (a WA collector), and Kevin Thiele (botanist), and can yield CC-BY-0 specimen images for use in plant articles. See e.g. Alysicarpus schomburgkii where the specimen image is that of a type specimen collected by Paul Foelsche.
People can only contribute to this site if they are identified (via an ORCID ID), and the default setting for living collectors/identifers is private. Dead collectors can be identified via their wikidata ID and their profiles made public.
Uploading Nuytsia (journal) articles to wikidata
editUsing OpenRefine, eight volumes of articles (24-31) from the Nuytsia journal (or 199 articles )have now been uploaded to wikidata. This means (after author disambiguation) that the scholia templates added to various Western Australian botanists are starting to become more meaningful. See e.g the scholia link under Kevin Thiele's infobox, and that for Kelly Anne Shepherd. I plan to keep adding volumes from Nuytsia and then perhaps to tackle the journals Muelleria and Telopea. And obviously Australian Systematic Botany needs to be done. However, its articles are behind a paywall, but its DOIs are useful for those with access to journal subscriptions, and at the moment my methods are too crude for true bulk uploading.
Category:Taxa named by ... (together with two botanist queries)
editAfter creating an article for a botanist, e.g.Malcolm Eric Trudgen, it is useful to create, e.g., [[Category:Taxa named by Malcolm Eric Trudgen]] and run modifications of the following query a (by just changing the botanist's Qitem (in the case of these two queries: Q5990483). The queries are: taxa with enwiki articles and taxa without enwiki articles
A modification of the query:taxa with enwiki articles allows you to
- link the author name in the various plant articles;
- check that both wikidata and wikipedia agree on the auhority of the plant name;
- correct misspellings of authorities and their botanical abbreviations;
- prevent your article from being an orphan by the author linking; and
- add a further component to your article: See also Category:Taxa named by Malcolm Eric Trudgen.
And you can, of course, run a modification of the query: taxa wthout enwiki articles (which shows Trudgen as an authority for plants without an article), to create new articles of plants authored by Trudgen.