Corresponding authors: Mohammed Kamal Deen Fuseini Dnshitobu (
Academic editor:
Sub-Saharan Africa possesses a wide range of natural habitats and climatic regions. Understanding the biodiversity in sub-Saharan Africa is still at an early stage. Action is therefore needed at all levels of biodiversity science to write, educate and understand the benefits of improved knowledge. While there is already substantial knowledge on biodiversity globally, the knowledge is often concentrated in specific areas in our world. Fig.
Access to available knowledge on biodiversity can also be limited. Wikipedia is a popular source of knowledge and it is also available in different languages, which can help in spreading the knowledge across languages. These different language editions are linked through Wikidata, the linked data repository associated with Wikipedia. Wikidata currently has almost 3,5 million records on taxa. Many species lack a Wikipedia article. This number of missing Wikipedia articles is low when looking at the number of articles in local languages of sub-Saharan Africa on July 1, 2022 (Table
We can conclude that there are significant gaps in our knowledge about taxonomy of Sub-Saharan species, as a significant number of species remain undescribed. Even among described species, there is a distinct lack of knowledge regarding their distribution and biogeography, as well as basic biology, such as life histories, feeding habits and habitat preferences. Existing knowledge is spread across different data silos and across different languages, which makes it challenging to get a complete overview of the existing knowledge on local biodiversity. We present a sub-project in the community project
In Wikidata, taxa and their respective iNaturalist identifiers are mapped. This allows identification of missing Wikipedia articles in any of the approximately 300 supported languages in Wikipedia.
We have developed a Jupyter notebook that uses the active links between the different platforms to identify missing Wikipedia articles. This notebook collects data from different biodiversity-related databases, such as GBIF or the
Mohammed Kamal-Deen Fuseini Dnshitobu
TDWG 2022
Wiki Mentor Africa
Wiki Mentor Africa
Observations in GBIF (seen: June 30, 2022).
Number of Wikipedia articles on taxa in a select set of sub-Saharan languages (sample Wikidata query:
|
|
|
|
|
903 |
|
|
444 |
|
|
431 |
|
|
415 |
|
|
392 |
|
|
366 |
|
|
287 |
|
|
255 |
|
|
237 |
|
|
149 |
|
|
124 |
|
|
120 |
|
|
78 |
|
|
73 |
|
|
71 |
|
|
56 |
|
|
48 |
|
|
38 |
|
|
28 |
|
|
18 |
|
|
16 |
|
|
13 |
|
|
9 |
|
|
8 |
|
|
8 |
|
|
7 |
|
|
6 |
|
|
4 |
|
|
1 |