- Talk to Stuart at Wikimedia UK, he's asked for help with the upload
- See what help is needed
- Write up need and opportunity and process, draft to be reviewed by Alicia, Stuart, John etc https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vJZyyFWXExNUiGo7Ofspkn7ghRwlIPRlZbMv9_3wdZs/edit
- Check with Stuart
- Answer questions from Susana
- Talk to Laurence at NHM, outline first set of work
- Introduce Laurence to Alicia
- Read https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/cobi.13702
- Work with Laurence and Stuart on next steps
Image collection
The Natural History Museum has one of the widest natural history collections in the world including the largest collection type specimens (the specimen or specimens which are used to describe the species in science) as well as collections from Darwin, Wallace and others. The museum is digitising over 5 million specimens in their collection.
Their online database (based on CKAN) holds over 2,600,000 images, the default license is compatible with Wikipedia. This includes over 600,000 lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) images. Image include standard DSLR images as well as xrays, microscope images, macro images etc. This 2.6 million images doesn't exclude NC, ND or license not known filters, or filter out pictures of labels and log book pages etc which may not be suitable for Commons. Example images below
Connections
Stuart Prior at WMUK is managing the relationship and knows the manager of the database.
John Cummings previous worked at NHM and knows the team and project quite well because he was in that team.
Opportunities
- If only 1 million of the 2.4 million images are suitable for Commons this would be the largest and most valuable natural history content donation to Wikimedia to date.
- Type specimens should be added to all species articles, even if images are already available meaning very high pageview numbers.
- Categorising images on Commons creating and matching Wikidata items and Wikipedia articles should be very simple using taxonomic ranks. Commons categories are first and or second parts of Linnean names + generic tags eg xray, microscope images etc. We have the subspecies, species name and genus names and can look up family names etc on Encyclopedia of Life if needed.
- A large opportunity to make a very reusable guide as all natural history collections use Linnaean Taxonomy
