Commons:Biodiversity Heritage Library

Visit the BHL Portal on Meta-Wiki
The Meta page is the source of BHL-Wiki documentation across the Wikimedia projects

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is one of the largest collections of digitized illustrations of animals, plants and other forms of life (i.e. biodiversity) on the internet.

While the Meta page is the core source of BHL-Wiki documentation across the Wikimedia projects, this page exists to host documentation, statistics and tasks related in particular to the contributions in Wikimedia Commons. It is also a source to peek on the history of the BHL-Wiki interactions.

Use {{Biodiversity Heritage Library}} in the source field of Wikimedia Commons uploads to add them to the Files from the Biodiversity Heritage Library category, which currently has 304,069 items. This page also has advice on copyright tags to use for such content.

Check the GLAMorous Tool for updated file usage statistics across the Wikimedia projects.

As most BHL images are free to reuse, they have spread through the internet, and there are several sources for importing BHL images to Wikimedia Commons.

As of 2024, one of the best ways is via the Flickypedia tool, for which a BHL tutorial is available (gDocs).

Of note, BHL hosts not only Public Domain content, so do check the guide for copyright of BHL images for Commons uploaders

For current data modelling efforts please refer to the dedicated page.

• BHL images that depict taxa found in South America
• BHL images that depict taxa found in Africa

	Pending tasks for Biodiversity Heritage Library:	edit this list - add to watchlist - purge
	Add a new task to the to do list!

• Category:Files from the Biodiversity Heritage Library (304,069 items)

This page was created by Gaurav in 2011 with the "hopes to facilitate a partnership between the BHL and the Wikimedia Commons to their mutual benefit."

The original description said that in order to convince the BHL to commit scarce resources to this task, the group wanted to start by showing them the value of the Wikimedia Commons as a facilitator in making their content widely available and as a way to enhance their brand, as well as making a mailing list available to discuss BHL/Wikipedia collaborations.

In 2012, the Commons:BHL Project received extra support by the Missouri Botanical Gardens, which received an NEH grant (see the blog post) fund the Art of Life project, the details of which are available on a dedicated page

Around 2014-2015, Fæ went through uploading most of the BHL images to Commons, using both Flickr and the BHL Application programming interface. The details of this task are available also on a dedicated page.

As of 2024, the Biodiversity Heritage Library has set up a working group to support work on Wikimedia projects, including committing resources for hiring a Wikimedian-in-Residence, in line with the goals of the project.

1. To show that uploading content to the Wikimedia Commons would be a valuable step for BHL to undertake, by creating a template (in the style of Template:KIT-license) which can be placed on Wikimedia Commons images already taken from the BHL.
2. To identify content from BHL which would be of direct benefit to Wikipedia by matching requests for images on the English Wikipedia's requested photos of animals with illustrations in the BHL.
3. To standardize the licenses of BHL images in the Commons, and to encourage new uploaders to use the correct licenses (for instance, by ensuring that BHL images are not erroneously tagged with {{PD-Art}}).
4. Improve the most used BHL files. GLAMorous results for our category can help with this.
5. To lobby BHL to lobby their book providers to release more content under CC-BY or CC-BY-SA licenses (instead of CC-BY-NC-SA, as is the current practice) so that they can be used in Wikipedia and its related projects.

Check the GLAMorous Tool for updated file usage statistics across the Wikimedia projects.

For two target categories, South America and Africa, the most current update counts (2024-12-10):

• South America: 2546 (see on Petscan)
• Africa: 1227 (see on Petscan)

Note: as some books may have files from sources other than BHL, the estimate above is conservative and takes only files tagged directly with the BHL category. These files often come originally from BHL and were sourced from, e.g., the Internet Archive and tracking these files is planned as a bot task for the future.

A GLAM Reports Dashboard was available and maintained between 2014-2018 by Fæ for files from the Biodiversity Heritage Library! The following reports were available:

• Most used files
• Most edited files
• Volunteers improving BHL metadata
• Most popular categories
• Largest files

• Gaurav (talk) 22:18, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
• Check in with when you want community organization to sort images. That project has the same problem and perhaps we can collaborate on a solution. Blue Rasberry (talk) 01:45, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Daniel Mietchen - WiR/OS (talk) 10:31, 3 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]
• Marcus Qwertyus (talk) 12:24, 6 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
• Fæ (talk) 00:49, 23 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Original comments by Fæ were relocated to Commons:Biodiversity_Heritage_Library/Fæ_uploads -- TiagoLubiana (talk) 14:02, 4 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• TiagoLubiana (talk) 14:05, 4 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• "Books about Africa" that are also in the "Files from Biodiversity Heritage Library" category but were not yet categorized per region: https://petscan.wmcloud.org/?psid=30317057
• "Books about South America" that are also in the "Files from Biodiversity Heritage Library" category but were not yet categorized per region: https://petscan.wmcloud.org/?psid=30317057
• MediaSearch for uncaractegorized BHL files matching "Africa" -- tip: may be changed to search for particular locations (e.g. Angola or Mozambique).