Showing posts with label Special:MediaSearch. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Special:MediaSearch. Show all posts

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

Thursday, September 10, 2020

Амама Мбабази is a politician who held multiple positions in the Ugandan government

Amama Mbabazi is a former Prime Minister of Uganda and held many other governmental positions. There are 19 Wikipedia articles for him, Mr Mbabazi is notable. 

When you want to find a picture for him and you know his name in Russian, you can use Special:MediaSearch. You can also find him with اماما_مبابازى. 

One of the positions Mr Mbabazi held is Justice Minister of Uganda. English Wikipedia has a category for these Ministers, at this time two people are included but not Mr Mbabazi. There are ten Ministers missing in the category. Mind you, it is English Wikipedia that has a list that made my work at Wikidata possible!

On the talkpage for the Wikidata item for Justice Minister of Uganda, I added the {{PositionHolderHistory}} template. A bot updates the information every day and it adds comments on the quality of the information. This makes it easy to add positions of interest to a watchlist. 

On my Africa project you find Listeria lists for African political positions. It is duplicated to several Wikipedias and once a Wikipedia is synchronised it will show information like the lists that include Mr Mbabazi. 

One day all the data will be complete and up to date. In the meantime it is a "work in progress" and you are kindly invited to check the information out, find its shortcomings and make updates where necessary.

Thanks,

       GerardM