Press releases/IUCN

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IUCN red list and Wikipedia join forces to inform the world about biodiversity

XX August 2010, UK: The IUCN Red List teams up with Wikipedia to include distribution maps in over 25,000 articles about animals and plants.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List has made their spatial data of the distribution of animals and plants around the world available to create maps under a free license. This means that maps of their data can now be used in Wikipedia, its sister projects and other websites. This will not only allow the improvement of Wikipedia articles but also promote the important global work done by IUCN in evaluating the conservation status of the world’s fauna and flora in a consistent, reliable and comprehensive way.

Wikipedia and its sister projects have many articles in more than 270 languages covering many species of animals and plants created by their team of thousands of volunteers scattered worldwide. The online encyclopaedia is constantly being improved, with new articles being created and more information being added to existing articles.

This partnership was established after negotiations between the IUCN red list and their partners, Wikipedia volunteers, and the local Wikimedia chapters of the UK and Portugal. The images will be created by volunteers from across the world and made available on Wikimedia Commons (the image repository used by Wikipedia). They will be used both on Wikipedia and Wikispecies.

EDITORS' NOTES

Further information:

• The IUCN red list website: http://www.iucnredlist.org
• The IUCN red list project on the Wikimedia commons: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:IUCN_red_list
• Wikimedia foundation: http://wikimediafoundation.org/
• Wikimedia Portugal: http://pt.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Portugal
• Wikimedia United Kingdom - http://www.wikimedia.org.uk/

About Wikimedia Commons:

Wikimedia Commons is a free image and media file repository, and is a sister project to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. It was started on 7 September 2004, and is operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. It currently contains over 5.5 million freely licensed images and media files.

About Wikimedia UK:

Wikimedia UK is an independent organisation that supports free and open knowledge throughout the United Kingdom, including promoting and supporting the projects of the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation.

About the Wikimedia Foundation:

The Wikimedia Foundation Inc. is the US-based non-profit organisation that operates some of the largest collaboratively-edited reference projects in the world. These include Wikipedia, one of the world's 10 most-visited websites, and Wikimedia Commons.

Contact details:

Michael Peel, Chair, Wikimedia UK

• Email: michael.peel@wikimedia.org.uk
• Phone: +44 (0)7988 013 646