BHL/Our outcomes/WiR/Status updates/2025-04-04

21 March 2024 - 04 April 2025

There is only one month left and I am already missing thisǃ I will definitely be around in the BHL-Wiki Working group, though. ǃ The updates for this week are shorter, as focus went fully on the events and on documenting/cleaning up the code.

General Updates

We hosted three 1Pic1Bio events to increase usage of BHL images on Wikipedia. The events occurred Spanish on March 26, in French on March 28 and in Portuguese on April 2 and were hosted by me, Giovanna, Siobhan and Lidia . Each of the events took around 1h45 and brought different insights on the relation between Wikimedia communities and BHL. As the events were related to equity, diversity and inclusion, they were sponsored by the Wikimedia Foundation, but not the Smithsonian, to comply with U.S. Federal orders. The events were recorded via Zoom and recordings will be made available by WMF in the near future.

The BHL Day ̟and Annual Meeting are coming up next week and Siobhan and Sabine will be in Berlin to discuss all kinds of nice Wiki things. I'll join them virtually on a 45-minute workshop on the morning of April 10 discussing reuse of the BHL collection. If you are in Berlin, join usǃ

Technical Updates

BHL Image Explorerː The events were also great testing grounds for the BHL Image Explorer, and now it is moving towards becoming a mature tool to explore BHL Images in Commons. There were several technical changes based on user feedback / pain points, including
- Wikidata autocompleteː the taxon search now uses Wikidata as a backend for the taxon selection. This means searching for common names (e.g. Baobab instead of Adansonia digitata) is possible, as the tool uses the complete information on Wikidata to suggest candidates. Only candidates with GBIF identifiers are shown.
- Click-based navigationː I have added a clickable taxonomic hierarchy box, enabling users to navigate to upper taxa by clicking around (e.g. if I am on the page for Adansonia digitata I can go to the order Malvales with a single click. The species names are also clickable, redirecting the user to the BHL Explorer page for the species.
- Distribution mapː A map of GBIF Occurrences is displayed next to the taxonomy, giving some visual feedback on where a taxon is expected to occur. This may help users to know better if a species is present in South America or exclusive to South America, for example.
- Wikimedia reuse counterː Image boxes now show a Wikimedia reuse counter for each of the images, giving an idea of their impact inside of the Wikimedia ecosystem. Most images have 0 global Wikimedia uses – a lot of opportunities for volunteersǃ ː)

Refactor and clean-upː A core activity now is a bit invisibleː going through the code base and making sure it is reusable in the future. I am focusing the work on two repositories, one for the BHL Image Explorer and the other one for the scripts to update structured data on Commons . The idea here is preparing then for future reuse by me and others.
Internet Archive / ARCHː On March 25, I met with Karl Blumentahl from the Internet Archive to discuss possible uses of ARCH to improve HTR/OCR and taxonomic name recognition for plates in the BHL Image collection. I had no follow-up on his side since then, but it may eventually lead to something.

And that is it, see you in a couple of weeksǃ For those going to Berlin, have a safe travel and a great eventǃ