[This is a guest post by Timothy Gowers, crossposted from his blog. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] When I was around 11 I heard …

Every article is a room, every hyperlink a doorway. Wander Wikipedia as an endless museum - or race friends through it.

Die Zeitschrift sans phrase verfolgt kein ›Programm‹, weder ein theoretisches noch ein politisches: Ihr einziges Interesse besteht in Ideologiekritik.

There’s some exciting very recent work by Alpöge and Buckmaster, building upon prior work by Córdoba and Martínez-Zoroa, in the general topic around the infamous global regularity problem for…

Company behind ChatGPT says 10,000 of its AI systems cracked the Navier-Stokes problem in 88 hours OpenAI claims to have solved a major mathematics problem that has stumped humans for nearly a century after spending millions of dollars on the artificial intelligence-led endeavour. The company behind ChatGPT said it had cracked the Navier-Stokes problem, one of seven Millennium Prize Problems published by the Clay Mathematics Institute to highlight some of the biggest unsolved puzzles in the field. Continue reading...

Coverage among kindergartners for major vaccines fell in more than half the states, continuing a years-long trend, as measles cases climb.

For the sake of anyone who might read this blog post in the distant future (a month from now, say), let me mention that I am writing it a few days after OpenAI announced that it had solved ten majo…

The US president faces few good options to exit a war he once said would end swiftly with the Islamic republic’s surrender

The president’s recent rant is a sign of serious dysfunction in the Oval Office.

The renowned Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, has recently digitised more than seven million plant and fungal specimens, including hundreds of Dr Greta Stevenson's discoveries from New Zealand.

A mathematician at Anthropic says he and Claude Fable 5 have taken down one of the oldest standing problems in algebraic geometry, and...

Published in History of European Ideas (Ahead of Print, 2026)

The extraction and liberation of biodiversity knowledge from scientific literature increasingly depends on both automated and community-driven workflows. The Wikimedia ecosystem comprised of Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, Wikisource, Wikispecies and related projects has become a large, open, multilingual environment consistently ranked amongst the world’s top 10 websites. It reflects many of the challenges and opportunities outlined in the Disentis Roadmap. This contribution presents Wikimedia projects as complementary infrastructures for literature-based biodiversity evidence synthesis and examines how scientific publications enter and are transformed within this ecosystem. Biodiversity literature reaches Wikimedia through several pathways, including (1) papers cited from encyclopedic entries related to biodiversity and beyond, (2) suitably licensed digital publications or digitized out-of-copyright publications hosted in Wikisource, (3) images and other media extracted from the literature and deposited in Wikimedia Commons, (4) structured bibliographic, taxonomic and methodological metadata represented in Wikidata through both automated imports (e.g., WikiCite workflows) and community editing, and (5) taxonomic concepts curated in Wikispecies. Entities named in the literature can further propagate across Wikimedia projects, creating a rich network of linked context. We examine how these distributed contributions together form a community-maintained pipeline that captures, structures, and redistributes biodiversity knowledge from the scientific literature to the large, diverse, global and multilingual audience of Wikimedia projects. We outline how taxonomic groups, geographic regions, habitat types and publication types are represented across Wikimedia platforms, how media extraction compares to the volume of available literature, how community editing patterns introduce or mitigate various types of biases, and how these facets change over time. We also discuss Wikidata’s increasing integration with research biodiversity infrastructures like BHL, Bionomia or GBIF, and we explore the strengths and limitations of query-based evidence synthesis using Wikidata-related tools like Scholia. By situating Wikimedia workflows within the broader goals of the Disentis Roadmap, we highlight how community curation, open licensing, and machine-readable knowledge graphs can complement large-scale digitization and text-mining pipelines. Finally, we outline pathways for integrating Wikimedia-derived biodiversity information further with infrastructures such as GBIF and Biodiversity PMC, thereby enhancing the accessibility, reusability, and interoperability of literature-based biodiversity evidence. The abstract has the DOI 10.5194/wbf2026-845.

AI scholarly search tools often miss important literature due to incomplete metadata. Better full-text-derived metadata could significantly improve discovery.