User:Josve05a/species

In the natural world, around 8.7 million species exist. Scientists estimate, however, that around at least 150-200 of these goes extinct every day. With the help of the IUCN Red List we can estimate which species are in the risk zone of soon going extinct. Wikipedia has a lot of articles on these species, but not many of them have any images or illustrations, just because of the scarcity and low population of these species around.

iNaturalist is, according to Wikipedia, "a citizen science project and online social network of naturalists". People go out and (in most cases) photograph species and record them, and together help each other identify the species depicted. In June 2020, over 41,800,000 observations on the platform had been made. The users of the website can, like on Flickr, select to license their images under a Creative Commons license. Many do actually take advantage of this and release their images, but it is in most cases under a "non-commercial" or "non-derivative" license, which is incompatible with Wikimedia Commons, and thereby incompatible with Wikipedia.

I've spent the past week doing outreach and messaging users on the platform iNaturalist. I've located observations with identifications marked as research-grade (meaning that at least 2/3 of all users agree on a species, with a minimum of 2 users) where no image existed on Wikimedia Commons (or locally on Wikipedia), and asked them to consider re-licensing their image in order to be able to host it here. As of writing (20:40, 27 July 2020), I've been able to convince 31 users to relicense 33 images where we have had articles on a species but no free image. Many of these are marked as endangered or critically endangered on the IUCN Red List.

All I need to do is work 10 times as fast (or get help from 10 other users), and I might be able to illustrate more articles on species than go extinct each day. But, at least I can help out and get some photos of species before it is all too late.