This letter to the editor by Heidi M. Meudt, @Ambrosia10, Tiago Lubiana, and Sabine von Mering is just out in Nature (behind a paywall). Full text below.
Join online editing communities
https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-00940-y
As biodiversity scientists and active volunteer Wikipedians, we applaud Nature articles calling for researchers to edit Wikipedia (see, for example, Nature 649, 1079–1080; 2026). Other platforms provided by Wikipedia’s host, the Wikimedia Foundation, also allow scientists to contribute to the quality and accessibility of biodiversity information.
For example, uploading species images to Wikimedia Commons — a repository for media with an open licence, widely used for scientific dissemination — increases the visibility of biodiversity.
And adding biodiversity- related information to Wikidata, Wikimedia’s knowledge database, promotes the FAIR principles: findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. Information in Wikidata is interlinked, multilingual, queryable and in the public domain. It is used in biodiversity resources (such as the Atlas of Living Australia) and artificial- intelligence applications. It can also be scrutinized for its research value and biases.
Contributing to open biodiversity knowledge is rewarding, and essential to science and conservation.
- Heidi M. Meudt Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington, New Zealand. heidim@tepapa.govt.nz
- Siobhan Leachman Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand.
- Tiago Lubiana Wikimedia Brasil, São Paulo, Brazil.
- Sabine von Mering Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin, Germany.
