Wikidata:Dataset Imports/Historical bird plates
You may find these related resources helpful:
Overview
[edit]Dataset name
[edit]Historical bird plates: modern identifications
Source
[edit]Wells Riley. Plate images from the Biodiversity Heritage Library scans; identifications made plate by plate against each plate's engraved caption.
Link
[edit]Dataset description
[edit]Every plate of five 19th-century bird folios, identified to modern species. The folios are Gould's The Birds of Europe (The Birds of Europe (Q51448070)), The Birds of Australia (The Birds of Australia (Q967304)) and its Supplement (The birds of Australia, supplement (Q51382318)), The Birds of Asia (The Birds of Asia (Q51448002)) and The Birds of Great Britain (The birds of Great Britain (Q51404118)), and Audubon's The Birds of America in the Havell edition (The Birds of America (Q377817)). Each identification links the modern species by Wikidata, eBird, GBIF and Avibase ID, with the reasoning behind the call. The dataset is released under CC0.
Before this import Wikidata had items for all five works but, except one Audubon plate (Snowy Owl (Q48802014)), none for individual plates. The import made one item per plate.
Additional information
[edit]Six test items came first: Griffon Vulture (Q141559892), Cinereus Vulture (Q141559931), Osprey (Q141559900), House Sparrow and Tree Sparrow (Q141559907), Laughing Gull (Q141559912) and Black Headed Gull (Q141559917).
Structure of data within Wikidata
[edit]One item per plate:
| Field | Property | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| label, description (en) | Label is the name printed on the plate; a sheet with several birds is labelled "A, B and C", and figure notes are left to the title. Description is "hand-coloured lithograph, plate N[, volume V,] of John Gould's Title" (Havell: "hand-coloured engraving and aquatint"). Two plate numbers printed on one sheet (Europe 447 and 448) are each labelled with their own bird, and the description says so. | |
| type | instance of (P31) | lithograph print (Q15123870) (lithograph), or engraving (Q11835431) (engraving) for Havell |
| work | part of (P361) | the folio, qualified with series ordinal (P1545) (plate number) and volume (P478) (volume, where a folio numbers its plates per volume). The Australia Supplement's plates are part of the Supplement, The birds of Australia, supplement (Q51382318), with no volume. |
| artist | creator (P170) | John Gould (Q313787) or John James Audubon (Q182882) |
| printed title | title (P1476) | the name as engraved or listed; in Latin where the plate prints no English name (Asia IV.59) |
| BHL page | BHL page ID (P687) | where the folio is scanned on BHL |
| species | depicts (P180) | only for identifications rated high or judged, each with a reference URL (P854) reference to the folio's folder in the dataset
|
Which plates are included:
- Gould: plates identified and checked against the engraved caption. A medium or low identification gets no depicts (P180).
- Havell: every identified plate.
- Plates Wikidata already had are not made again. The existing Havell plate 121, Snowy Owl (Q48802014) (Snowy Owl), was given its plate number, title and species instead of a new item; its label and description were left as they were.
Which species item: Wikidata often has two items for one species, one under an older genus. depicts (P180) uses the item Wikipedia links to (the most sitelinks) among those at species rank that carry the dataset's scientific name or eBird code, share its English name, or are listed as its synonym, with the same species epithet. For species split since BirdNET's taxonomy, the daughter follows the plate's locality: Audubon's Barn Owl is the American Barn Owl, Gould's Delicate Owl the Eastern.
Importing data into Wikidata
[edit]Method: QuickStatements (V1), generated by tools/quickstatements.py, in chunks of 80 items a minute apart to stay under the per-account edit rate limit.
| Folio | Plate items | depicts (P180) statements | Items without depicts (P180) |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Birds of Europe | 392 (386 + 6 test) | 410 | 0 |
| The Birds of America (Havell) | 399 (398 + Snowy Owl (Q48802014)) | 431 | 0 |
| The Birds of Australia and Supplement | 657 (577 + 80) | 634 | 23 |
| The Birds of Asia | 354 | 269 | 85 |
| The Birds of Great Britain | 7 | 7 | 0 |
| Total | 1,809 | 1,751 | 108 |
Import completion notes
[edit]Each folio's batch was reviewed against the dataset before it ran, and every item was checked afterwards through the Wikidata API: one item per plate, no duplicates, and label, description, title, BHL page, plate and volume, and depicts (P180) with its reference all matching the dataset. Rerunning the generator makes no items for any folio.
The reviews also corrected the dataset: species links moved from subspecies and older-genus items to the main species items, and a few identifications were settled on the plates' localities (Gould's Delicate Owl, White-bellied Shrike-Tit, White Tern and Plumed Egret; Blyth's Strix indica; Audubon's Trudeau's Tern, the type figure of Sterna trudeaui; Gould's Ruticilla erythrogastra). The Europe items made before those corrections were updated to match.
Edit history
[edit]| Date | Description | Method |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-09-25 | 6 test items (Europe plates 1, 2, 12, 184, 425, 427) | Wikidata API |
| 2026-09-30 | Europe: 386 items. The first batch hit the edit rate limit; the 134 plates it missed were rerun. | QuickStatements 282560, 282572, 282581 |
| 2026-09-30 | Europe corrections after review: 9 labels, 2 descriptions, 11 titles, depicts (P180) on 19 items | QuickStatements 282628, 282699 |
| 2026-09-30 | Havell: 398 items, and plate 121's statements added to Snowy Owl (Q48802014) | QuickStatements 282705, 282711, 282718, 282726, 282734 |
| 2026-09-30 | Havell plate 409: depicts (P180) Snowy-crowned Tern (Q997524) (figure 2, Trudeau's Tern) | QuickStatements 282814 |
| 2026-09-30 | Great Britain: 7 items | QuickStatements 282870 |
| 2026-09-30 | Australia: 657 items (577 in the seven volumes, 80 in the Supplement) | QuickStatements 282877, 282885, 283855, 283863, 283884, 283898, 283905, 283919, 283926 |
| 2026-09-30 | Asia: 354 items | QuickStatements 283932, 283943, 283951, 283957, 283963 |
Maintenance
[edit]Queries and expected results
[edit]| Query | Expected |
|---|---|
| Plate items per work | Europe 392, Havell 399, Australia 577, Supplement 80, Asia 354, Great Britain 7 |
Schedule of new data released
[edit]The dataset is versioned on GitHub and Zenodo. As more plates are identified (Great Britain is a first pass, and 176 Asia plates are unidentified), the same script adds their items; it skips plates already on Wikidata.
Discussion of import
[edit]Comments welcome here or on User talk:Wells.riley.