Imagine if every botanical specimen, every plant researcher, and all the botanical knowledge could be instantly connected across the world. According to a recently published article in Annals of Botany, that idea is becoming reality through Wikidata, a multilingual database that’s transforming how we organize and access plant science information.

Wikidata is a database of facts, where each piece of information is structured so that computers and humans can understand and use it. Unlike a traditional encyclopedia, Wikidata isn’t about long texts. Instead, it stores data as simple statements, ready to be assembled into more complex structures like:

“The famous French botanist and explorer Auguste de Saint-Hilaire (Q707961) collected many specimens throughout his life. Between 1816 and 1821 he explored Brazil (Q155), where he collected a specimen from which he described a new species to science: Oxalis insipida A.St.-Hil. (Q39395060)”.

For botanists, this means that everything from taxonomic names and collectors’ biographies to expedition routes, herbaria collections, and plant-based data can be stored, connected, and searched. These connections enable complex questions to be answered with a few clicks or lines of code: Which plant specimens collected by women in the 1800s are held in South American herbaria? Which taxonomists also published on medicinal uses?

Better yet, Wikidata is open. Anyone can view, use, and contribute to it. And because it’s multilingual and linked across a growing web of sources, from museums to journal databases, it helps make global participation in science more equitable and inclusive.

Wikidata already contains tens of thousands of entries relevant to botany: identifiers for plant taxa, biographical data on botanists and collectors, details of botanical publications, and records of research expeditions. It also reaches botany related fields, including genes, diseases, and chemical compounds. This information diversity makes it a powerful tool for interdisciplinary work, like ethnobotany, conservation biology, or agricultural genetics.

Thanks to tools like the Wikidata Query Service, Scholia, Bionomia, and TL-2, users can visualize relationships, track citations, build timelines, or follow the history and movement of species in ways that would be time-consuming or impossible otherwise.

Yet large areas of botanical knowledge remain unrepresented, incomplete, or disconnected because people need to contribute. Botany has always been a collaborative science. From early field expeditions to today’s global networks of herbaria and genetic databases, progress relies on people and institutions sharing what they know. Wikidata is the next step in this tradition, but to realise its potential, more botanists need to get involved.

Whether you’re a taxonomist curating a collection, a student studying plant evolution, or a science communicator working on plant knowledge, there’s a place for your expertise in Wikidata. The learning curve for editing is gentle, and a growing set of guides, ethical frameworks, and training resources are available. You can start with something simple like add a publication or update a plant’s geographic range.

So here’s the challenge: visit Wikidata and help make your own work more visible and reusable, increase the visibility of overlooked botanists (especially those from historically underrepresented groups), support international goals like those in the Madrid Declaration, and make botany-related information more FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable).

READ THE ARTICLE

von Mering S., Leachman S., Santos J., Meudt H. (2025) “Wikidata for Botanists: Benefits of collaborating and sharing Linked Open Data” Annals of Botany. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1093/aob/mcaf062

Cover: Globe in the hands. Image: ASphotostudio / Canva.