Biogeosciences and the Wikimedia ecosystem

This talk explores existing and potential interactions between biogeoscience research and education on the one hand and the Wikimedia ecosystem on the other. This ecosystem - which includes sites like Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata and their respective communities and workflows - represents a sociotechnical platform providing a vast and continuously curated repository of openly accessible knowledge and reusable materials on a wide range of topics, including many that are relevant for biogeosciences. This resource is leveraged at the scale of billions of monthly direct pageviews and in many more indirect ways, e.g. via search engines or large language models. The presentation begins by providing a general overview of the Wikimedia ecosystem, its structure, and its interactions with and impact on scientific communication. We will then explore how biogeosciences are represented and how biogeoscience-related communities can engage with the Wikimedia ecosystem, including reviewing Wikipedia articles, uploading scientific images or media files to Wikimedia Commons, utilizing Wikidata to connect and visualize reference data across knowledge domains or exploring open-science workflows taking place on Wikimedia infrastructures. We will also discuss the benefits of engaging with the Wikimedia ecosystem, including increasing the visibility and impact of biogeoscience research, improving public understanding of scientific concepts, scientific contributions to societal discourse, and promoting collaboration and networking among scientists as well as between them and others. Additionally, we will cover some of the challenges and potential pitfalls of engaging with the Wikimedia ecosystem, such as the different writing styles and attribution mechanisms and the potential for conflicts of interest, bias and misinformation, along with mechanisms for addressing such issues. The talk is accessible on Wikipedia via https://w.wiki/6XMg and archived on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7792227. Discussion is invited throughout