Open curation of knowledge on biodiversity: An introduction to Wikidata

In recent years, a number of research institutions, cultural organizations, citizen science contributors and open source developers have been curating a live, growing body of structured knowledge on biodiversity in Wikidata—the open knowledge base that anyone can edit and Wikipedia’s fastest growing sister project. As of today, there are 2.6M taxonomical entries and over 2M statements referencing GBIF identifiers in Wikidata. Wikidata also includes information and metadata about tens of millions of scientific papers, researchers and scholarly institutions. In this talk I’ll give a hands-on introduction to Wikidata and show how Wikimedia projects more generally can amplify the output of research communities and institutions, engage the general public, and help maximize the reach and reuse of knowledge and data they produce.