Tuesday, April 27, 2021

How to find pictures of a თახვი (it means beaver) or a Wisent? Please help!!

Wikimedia Commons is the biggest repository of freely licensed media files. It serves a global multi lingual community editing Wikipedia and it has the ambition to serve students as well. When you live in Georgia and you don't speak English, you search for a "თახვი" and this picture is all that you find.

There is a tool for that. Hay's sdsearch does a good job when its interface is localised. Sadly, no such luck for Georgian. Wikimedia produced a tool as well; Special:MediaSearch does a good job. You have to know that the tool exists and when you do, you find that for Dutch it does not work at all

It is suggested that you can change the preferences for best result. I fail at getting the results that Special:MediaSearch used to provide. There is no documentation.. Please Help!!

Thanks, GerardM

Sunday, April 25, 2021

Scholarly articles in @Wikidata and its link with #Fatcat

 "Dam-site selection by beavers in an eastern Oregon basin" is a scholarly paper. It has a DOI that is not functional, it is known to Researchgate and consequently we can find a PDF of the paper. 

This paper is cited by a paper I have an interest in. I am adding its references into Wikidata (this is its Scholia) and I added the "Dam-site selection" paper to make a complete reference.  The result is something like this.

The PDF of the paper is available for download and as is to be expected, the Way Back machine of the Internet Archive has a copy as well for the URL of the download page. And then there is Internet Archive's Fatcat

"Fatcat is a versioned, publicly-editable catalog of research publications: journal articles, conference proceedings, pre-prints, blog posts, and so forth. The goal is to improve the state of preservation and access to these works by providing a manifest of full-text content versions and locations."

Wikidata is used as a source of Fatcat and as I include an additional paper, it will at some stage be picked up by Fatcat. If there is one thing to wish for, it is a function where entering a Wikidata Qid will trigger Fatcat to update its data based on the Wikidata info. If I can have two more wishes, one would be an icon for Fatcat. The second would be a Fatcat identifier making it easy to link from Wikidata to Fatcat.
Thanks,
        GerardM