BHL/Our outcomes/WiR/Status updates/2025-01-10

The Biodiversity Heritage Library Wikimedian-in-Residence Status updates

05 December 2024 - 10 January 2025

The last month went by fast with the end-of-year festivities, but work has gone steadily and now it is time to share.

The 6 things I would like to do

A bit of Brazilian coffee will do the trick, much like it does for this tiny parrot.

Before telling you what I have done, I want to share quickly 6 things I would love to achieve in relation to the images in the next 4 months:

(1) Add Structured Data via OpenRefine to 1-5k images according to the BHL Image Structured Data Model.

(2) Generalize a bot process using Wikibase Integrator and add automatically basic metadata for the other 200k+ BHL images on Commons.
(3) Properly track the about 200k BHL files on Commons that are not in the BHL category (!!). These files have BHL listed as a source, but do not contain the {{Biodiversity Heritage Library}} template, and are thus invisible to our metrics. I have written code to fix this issue, but still have to enter the bot approval process.
(4) Many BHL Images have already been tagged with particular species by the Commons community. Getting this information into Structured Data as "depicts" statements is another bot coded and ready to go.
(5) The same code may be leverage to populate Wikidata's reference illustration (P13162) and image (P18), extending the reach of the collection

(6) Add the files from Flickr missing from the BHL Collection on Commons

It is quite a lot to get done in a short time, so let's see how far we can get :) . Do you want to see prioritized any of those tasks? Let me know!

The BHL-Wiki Meta page

As mentioned in the last report, the BHL-Wiki page on Meta, which was almost ready, is now live and shared with the world. The goal was to provide comprehensive coverage of the BHL-Wiki activities, but also to the BHL pages on Wiki to look beautiful. Feel free to browse the

There is still some work to do, such as adding a clearer list of participants of the BHL-Wiki Working Group. Mostly there are some concerns if the information on the Charter should be made publically available on-wiki or not.

The Minimal BHL Image Data Model – v 0.1

In the past month I have stitched together discussions, comments and suggestions across 3 different documents into a pair of documents without duplication:

One Google Docs for the Minimal BHL Image Data Model Proposal - v 0.1 summarizing design decisions and discussions

and

One Google Spreadsheet for with the properties, qualifiers and references to use when adding metadata to BHL Images on Commons.

I kept the originals documents unchanged so it is possible to track the discussions if anyone is interested.

The model is based on suggestions, discussions and writings by the BHL-Wiki Working Group, in special JJ Dearborn, Sandra Fauconnier and Siobhan Leachmann, so I thank them very much!

On the Google Docs there are also next steps for future iterations of the model are also outlined — there is a lot to organize, and analysis paralysis is something I try to avoid. If anyone has questions about the model I am, as always, open to feedback!

I am testing the model for a first batch of OpenRefine uploads and listening for feedback.

The model is always open to changes, but they will be (at least for now) organized with versioning so we can have references to the Model that are stable in time while we discuss and improve.

The Eagle, by George Edward Lodge, one of the images with updated Structured Data.

An OpenRefine Tutorial for using the Structured Data Model

Based on work by Siobhan Leachman, based on a Wikidata Lab by Sandra Fauconnier, I organized a tutorial entitled Tutorial: Adding Structured Data on Commons for BHL Images with OpenRefine.

It had been quite some time since I last used OpenRefine, so it was lot of fun and a good opportunity to write the tutorial from a newcomer's perspective. It goes through installing the Wikimedia Commons Extension, cleaning up metadata for a Commons category and reconciling to Wikidata and Commons.

I went through the Category:The_birds_of_Shakespeare_(1916) for the tutorial, which contains illustrations of birds that make part of Shakespeare's stories.

The Commons Impact Metrics Dashboard

The Culture & Heritage team team at the Wikimedia Foundation is promoting a new service for tracking impact for GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) partnerships: the Commons Impact Metrics product, a dataset and API collecting metrics for some Commons categories.

The BHL Image with most views on November 2024, the African Golden Wolf, present in the "dog" entry on English Wikipedia.

I have been working on a way to visualize the data for BHL and other GLAMs, so I have built a little front-end to the API: https://tiago.bio.br/impact_metrics/. There we can visually explore how BHL is making its mark in the Wikimedia world:

Over 300,000 files are tracked in the BHL category
There are over 20 million views every month for these files, with 15 million just on Wikipedia
The most viewed page with a BHL Image in November 2024 was the page for Dog, with 1,879,704 views
The most viewed individual file in November 2024 was a picture of the African golden wolf, seen 893,547 times

On the dashboard it is also possible to explore users that edited the most BHL images and other interesting metrics.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library New Tab Add-On on Firefox shows an image from Commons alongside metadata.

A BHL-Wiki New Tab Add-On

Based on a conversation with Spinster, I have made a Firefox & Chrome add-on that shows BHL images on new tabs, similar to https://tab.hatnote.com. The source code is available at https://github.com/lubianat/bhlwiki_tabs. The add-on is available:

A new Wikidata property: reference illustration (P13162)

Image from "The Birds of America" linked on the item for the black-necked grebe.

The property reference illustration (P13162) was created on Wikidata. It will help us enrich Wikidata with beautiful, scientifically important images even for taxa with good photographic coverage on the main image property.

It is a great opportunity to make your favorite illustrations of popular animals more visible on the Wikimedia ecosystem and I am excited to see how this property will be used in the future.

The BHL Arena game on Toolforge

The BHL Arena is a little web application where users can select their favourite out of two images. These "matches" update a ranking, which ranks higher the images that users liked the most. It was made for users to explore the BHL images on Wikimedia Commons, find files needing extra metadata, and help prioritize candidates for reuse on Wikipedia and beyond.

It was a way that I found to make it even more fun to delve deep into the Biodiversity Heritage images while preparing the ground for the batch upload of Structured Data. The app is live on https://bhl-arena.toolforge.org/ and the source code available on https://github.com/lubianat/bhl-arena.

Main page of the BHL Arena Toolforge app comparing two images.

Other news

The citations of BHL DOIs on Wikipedia could more clearly show the links to the Biodiversity Heritage Library using the Template:Cite_book#via parameter — this is done already for Internet Archive and Gutenberg project links. See usage e.g. on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_pigeon. It should be possible to automate some of that.
The template {{BHL author}} can be used on English Wikipedia to link an author page on Wikipedia to their works on BHL. I have added this as a task on Biodiversity Heritage Library/Get involved .
- Query for authors with BHL ids on Wikidata but no {{BHL author}} template on English Wikipedia: https://w.wiki/CYK8

And that is basically itǃ Thank you for reading this update, and if you have questions or suggestions, don't hesitate to reach out. Happy New Year!