Siobhan Leachman

Research expeditions are an important source of specimens in natural history collections. To further open up and increase the accessibility of related collection data, unambiguous naming of such events is required, and stable identifiers for the expeditions are needed. In the absence of a global catalogue for expeditions, we recommend the usage of...

The Te Papa research expeditions project was a 12-week pilot project, funded by Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand and supported by the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. As Wikimedian in Residence at Te Papa, Siobhan Leachman trialled the draft Wikidata schema proposed by the TDWG Expeditions Task Group, sharing research expedition data with Wik...

A discussion on social media led to the formation of a multidisciplinary group working on this project to highlight women’s contributions to science. The role of marginalised groups in science has been a topic of much discussion, but data on these contributions are largely lacking. Our motivation for the development of this dataset was not only to...

Expeditions and other collecting events are a major source of objects in natural history museums (e.g., Mesibov 2021). Historically, these trips were often transdisciplinary: biological and Earth science specimens were collected at the same time as ethnological or anthropological objects. As a result, specimens and other material gathered during th...

The purpose of this document is to provide a framework for how to mobilize information via Wikidata about people working in and/or associated with scientific collections. Building on previous Wikidata documentation produced by Siobhan Leachman (2020, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4724139), participants of the Using Wikidata to Capture and Share In...

Scientific collections have been built by people. For hundreds of years, people have collected, studied, identified, preserved, documented and curated collection specimens. Understanding who those people are is of interest to historians, but much more can be made of these data by other stakeholders once they have been linked to the people’s identit...

People are involved with the collection and curation of all biodiversity data, whether they are researchers, members of the public, taxonomists, conservationists, collection managers or wildlife managers. Knowing who those people are and connecting their biographical information to the biodiversity data they collect helps us contextualise their sci...

Moths form a diverse group of species that are predominantly active at night. They are colourful, have an ecological role, but are less well described compared to their closest relatives, the butterflies. Much remains to be understood about moths, which is shown by the many issues within their taxonomy, including being a paraphyletic group and the...

People are one of the best known and most stable entities in the biodiversity knowledge graph. The wealth of public information associated with people and the ability to identify them uniquely open up the possibility to make more use of these data in biodiversity science. Person data are almost always associated with entities such as specimens, mol...

I intend to present an outline of my work as a citizen scientist. I use English Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata to interlink databases, including GBIF, EOL, NZOR and Plant-SyNZ. All of these provide information on New Zealand endemic species. I link those databases to scientific literature, including the original description as well as th...

Here we present how two independent infrastructures, Wikimedia and iNaturalist, can be jointly leveraged to improve content on both platforms. iNaturalist.org began as a Master's final project in 2008 and grew to a globally used app to help identify biodiversity. The community behind iNaturalist consists of citizen scientists, who record a species...

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) provides open access to over 54 million pages of biodiversity literature. Much of this literature is either in the public domain or is licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons framework. Anyone can therefore freely reuse much of the information and data provided by BHL. This presentation will outline how...

This article employs qualitative research design and methods to examine volunteer motivation and continued experiences of participation in the Smithsonian Institution's Transcription Center (TC), a large-scale crowdsourcing project and space for engagement with collections, Smithsonian Institution staff, and peer volunteers, or volunpeers. Data wer...