Advancing Community Curation of Research Expeditions: A Collaborative Journey with Wikidata and Biodiversity Information Standards

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 Wikidata Q identifiers. The sharing of metadata and descriptions will facilitate the linking of material distributed across museums and related research data. It will also help to identify further specimens with missing metadata belonging to the same expeditions. At the 2023 Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) conference in Tasmania was formed. The TG will create best practice recommendations and guidelines for the modelling and linking of expedition data (see the TG Charter, von Mering et al. 2024b). A GitHub repository*2 will be used to facilitate and document the work progress. A WikiProject*3 was formed to share resources and to interact and collaborate with the wider community of Wikimedians.*1, an informal international working group presented plans on modelling research expeditions in Wikidata and proposed a TDWG Task Group “Modelling Research Expeditions” (von Mering et al. 2023). This was approved earlier this year and an official Task Group (TG), under the Collections Description Interest Group, The open and community-curated knowledge base, Wikidata To increase transparency and improve accessibility, Wikidata items for historical and contemporary expeditions are created and the events linked to entities such as localities, expedition participants, publications of scientific results, and collections holding specimens gathered during the expeditions. Useful statements include information on the location of archival records related to the expeditions such as field or log books, correspondence or estates of participants. All these Linked Open Data (LOD) can then be used by other tools, e.g., for visualisations of itineraries or in knowledge graphs (Fig. 1).*4, provides structured data in a human and machine-readable format, which can be edited by anyone in multiple languages. The TG is currently developing a terminology, a formal set of terms and definitions used to describe such events, and best practice documentation for modelling research expeditions. First achievements include a draft schema of properties used in Wikidata for research expedition data, which is being trialled at natural history in