More arm-waving notes on taxonomic databases. I've started to add data to ChecklistBank and this has got me thinking about the issue of data quality.

I've released a simple search engine for publications in Wikidata. Wikicite Search takes its name from the WikiCite project, which was an initiative to create a bibliographic database in Wikidata. Since bibliographic data is a core component of taxonomic research (arguably taxonomy is mostly tracing the fate of the "tags" we call taxonomic names) I've spent some time getting taxonomic literature into Wikidata.

Last week I submitted a manuscript entitled "Wikidata and the bibliography of life". I've been thinking about the "bibliography of life" (AKA a database of every taxonomic publication ever published) for a while, and this paper explores the idea that Wikidata is the place to create this database.

David King et al.'s paper "Towards the bibliography of life" http://dx.doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.150.2167 has just appeared in a special issue of ZooKeys . I've written a number of posts on this topic, so I've a few comments.King et al. survey some of the issues, but don't really tackle the big issue of how we're going to build this.

One of my hobby horses is the disservice taxonomic databases do their users by not linking to original scientific literature.