Biodiversity Heritage Library/Our outcomes/WiR/Status updates/2024-12-05

22 November - 05 December 2024

The BHL-Wiki Meta page

These two weeks were dedicated mostly to organizing the Biodiversity Heritage Library presence across the Wikimedia Projects.

After a good conversation with Gio, there was a big re-shape of the BHL-Wiki page on Meta. The goal was to provide comprehensive coverage of the BHL-Wiki activities, but also to the BHL pages on Wiki to look beautiful.

For that, the design of the pages was inspired on Wiki Loves Living Heritage and the great work of Susanna Ånäs in making it look modern and fresh while being useful, maintainable and direct. This required me to exercise my web-dev muscles and dive into the CSS and styling details of documentation pages, for example the GLAMportals/style.css file and the templates that rely on it, such as the Template:GLAMportals/Box GLAMportals/Box.

I also thank Ambrosia10 for picking some extraordinary images for the gallery on the front page.

The subpages, for the moment, are still in Gio's namespace, as we prepare it for a release in the following weeks. It is, of course, open to contributions and ideas, after all, the page needs to live.

One particular highlight of the Portal is the Listeria-powered query for the BHL partners, painting a beautiful picture of the institutions that form BHL at Our community.

The BHL-Wiki pages on Commons, English Wikipedia and Wikidata.

As the Meta page gets ready, I also took time to refresh the project pages for BHL on Commons, English Wikipedia and Wikidata. The idea here was both to redirect users to the new multiproject page on Meta, but also to reorganize legacy information. Some of the pages had been left in years, giving the impression that the BHL-Wiki collaborations was way less active than it really is.

During this reshape, I did my best to preserve and acknowledge the contributors of BHL on Wiki along the way, and avoid anachronism. The goals of the projects change with time, and it is important to make sure the views, goals and contributions of past participants are not represented.

I added, for example, a session on the History of the Commons:BHL Project, with a highlight to the work of Gaurav and Fæ to make it all happen.

Statistics on Wikidata for the BHL-Wiki group

I am also working on the statistics for the BHL-Wiki activities in the Wikimedia ecosystem.

There are, from my perspective, two kinds of statistics/metrics that are interesting to track:

The impact of the BHL-Wiki working group and volunteers in the Wikimedia universe and
The impact of the Wikimedian-in-Residence on this

I have started working on these background metrics. One first step was a rebuild of the Wikidata:WikiProject_BHL/Statistics page, adding many new queries that track usage of the 6 different BHL ID properties on Wikidata. Here is the summary:

PID	Name	Count (items)	Mix'n'Match
P4327	BHL Bibliography ID	64,358	#1131 (64,415 out of 136,083)
P687	BHL Page ID	78,324	-
P4081	BHL Creator ID	35,319	#506 (46,169 out of 234990)
P6535	BHL Part ID	17,129	-
P8724	BHL Name ID	572	-
P11959	BHL Item ID	60	-

Total BHL IDs mapped on Wikidata (as of 2024-12-03): 205,445!

Statistics on Commons for the BHL-Wiki group

On Commons, there is still some extra work to decide our metrics of interest, including finishing the data model. To get started, by using the Commons Query Service, I got the number of images that comply completely with the current metadata model (query link). On Nov 28, 2024, it listed only 3 files , a number that is growing fast, mostly through the dedicated work of Ambrosia10, following the OpenRefine tutorials by Spinster, as well as creating a BHL version of the tutorial.

More current metrics are not available as the Commons Query Service (as of Dec 5) seems to be down.

I have also set up a GLAMorous Dashboard for the category, where it is possible to see where the 300,000 BHL files are being reused. There are over 15,000 items on Wikidata and over 5,000 pages on English Wikipedia using BHL images!

The BHL Userbox

Userboxes are a way for Wikimedia users to identify the projects they work on or support, as well as personal preferences and languages spoken. I have set up a Userbox for BHL on Meta, Wikidata, Wikipedia in English, Wikipedia in Portuguese and Commons. Now you can show your appreciation for BHL across the Wiki landscape:

This user loves the
Biodiversity Heritage Library

(this bit is formatted differently so the Userbox does not break the page)

Other updates

The next steps for the Meta page include a general clean-up and review, a migration to the main namespace, adding support for translation to multiple languages and sharing it widely, everywhere :)

We are starting to look at the data model for Structured Data on Commons and add this metadata in batch, first thing after the deploy of the Meta page!
Talks with the FlickypediaBackfillrBot are ongoing – I have provided Alex with a set of BHL files to prioritize. There are many BHL files on Wiki, however, that seem to have come not from Flickr, but from other sources, these will require an extra step, probably a Bot. An investigation on how these files ended up on Wiki – and how to retroactively add BHL and Flickr IDs is ongoing, with some details at Commons:Biodiversity_Heritage_Library/Fae_uploads.
While navigating the old logs, we re-discovered a nice project documentation by Ambrosia10 on Women Illustrators: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/BHL/2018_Women_Scientific_Illustrators
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 and I have sent the add-on for review on both Chrome and Firefox stores. I will share these links when they become available.
The property "scientific_illustration" is ready for creation on Wikidata, waiting for some propertycreator to take the last step and make it available. It will help us enrich Wikidata with beautiful, scientifically important images even for taxa with good photographic coverage on the main image property.
I have been sharing BHL-Wiki content frequently on Bluesky where you can find some updates: https://bsky.app/profile/tiagolubiana.bsky.social

And that is the gist of the last two weeks! If you have ideas, feedbacks, requests and more, just let me know!