Rooting for Knowledge: Why We Need a Wiki-Botanist Action Group Today!
Speakers
Douglas has been a Wikipedia editor since 2006 and involved in Wikimedia community work since joining Wikimedia chapter for South Africa in 2012. He was a board member of Wikimedia South Africa from 2012 until 2024 and was the chapter's president from 2015 until 2020. At Wikimedia South Africa he has helped organise the South African component of Wiki Loves Monuments in 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015 as well as a number of edit-a-thons and other Wikipedia editing outreach activities. In 2018 he was the organising Chairperson for Wikimania in Cape Town. Douglas is also very involved in the effort to amend the South African Copyright Act so as to allow for Freedom of Panorama and Fair Use thereby making it easier to edit Wikipedia in the country. In 2025 Douglas was elected to the board of Wikimedia United Kingdom.
My full name is Douglas Scott (司道格 in Mandarin Chinese) and I am from Cape Town, South Africa; although I now live in Edinburgh, Scotland. I previously worked for a non-profit organisation named The Safety Lab that focused on violence crime in high risk areas of the City of Cape Town. I currently work for Campaign Lab as a political researcher in the United Kingdom, which (disclaimer) is why I no longer edit articles on modern British politics.
Abstract
Wikipedia has a large gap in coverage on botanical subjects, specifically on the taxonomy of different plant species. The Afrikaans language Wikipedia community has made significant progress increasing coverage of different plant species by building a partnership with botanists at South African universities. A partnership that has resulted in over 50,000 images being donated for uploading to Commons and the creation of over 5000 new articles on that language Wikipedia with many more to come.
Now it is time to build on this partnership and expand its impact to other Wiki languages. This presentation has three parts; 1) the problem of a lack of coverage on Wikipedia of plants, 2) the success of overcoming this problem on Afrikaans Wikipedia and how it was done by building partnerships with botanists, 3) the call to action asking other Wikipedia editors to work with botanists to cover the plant gap in their language Wikipedias and (importantly) build future GLAM partnerships with botanists starting with the World Botanical Congress in Cape Town, South Africa in 2029.
Additional information
Freedom: increase free access to knowledge of plant species on Wikipedia. Equality: encourage expansion of this free knowledge on as many language Wikipedias so knowledge access is more equal. Reliability: working with professional botanists and GLAM organisations to increase the reliability of plant information on Wikipedia.
Wikipedia editors, Wikipedia community leaders, Wiki User Groups, and anyone with an interest in plants and improving Wikipedia content coverage.
Everyone can participate in this session