Wikidata is a multilingual linked open knowledge base to which anyone cancontribute that contains multitudes of botany-related information. Wikidata reveals interactions between entities and connects botany-related information from multiple institutions and other sources, benefiting the botanical community in numerous ways. The aim of this article is to give an overview of Wikidata from a botany perspective and issue a call to action to the botanical community to collectively improve the quantity and quality of information related to botany, botanists and botanical collections, in Wikidata. Here, we use a broad definition of botany to include the study of many different taxa and specializations.
This is one among many items I will regularly tag in Pinboard as oegconnect, and automatically post tagged as #OEGConnect to Mastodon. Do you know of something else we should share like this? Just reply below and we will check it out.
I spotted this paper from a Mastodon post by one of the co-authors, Siobhan Leachman who to me was [a memorable keynote speaker from the OEGlobal 2024 Conference i Brisbane](https://Siobhan Leachman) with “From Passive Absorption to Empowered Co-Creation: A Journey into the World of Open Knowledge”
Siobhan’s passion and interest for using Wikidata in citizen science approaches as well as her interest in the natural world was energizing.
This paper also kindled some flames under my own interest i Wikidata and a pile of have thought ideas how we might as an organization be proactive in entering organizational data fields that relate to open education efforts.
Just on idle curiosity I was looking for maybe efforts like what this new paper writes about for botany, what might be done as a field for education. My research was pretty quick and thin, but I did find a working group for Wikidata in Education that has been working on school curriculum and alignment data.
If anyone here, especially those with a bit more Wikidata knowledge than me, is willing to participate, I would enjoy rallying some effort to add more open education related data- this could be connected to the data structures for organizations. And well, much mroe can happen.
