Nice, Denny.

On Tue, May 10, 2016 at 11:15 PM, Denny Vrandečić <vrandecic@gmail.com> wrote:
> Just a little story I wanted to share.
>
> As I sometimes do, today I hit the “Random item” link on Wikidata. Almost
> always I can find something I can improve, and almost always I learn some
> random fun fact that I usually forget within a few moments.
>
> Today might be different. The link took me to Q14829494, the beetle species
> Linsleychroma monnei. The species didn’t have much information on it: it is
> a species, it had the genus, Linsleychroma. A link to the Encyclopedia of
> Life and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. There were links to
> seven different Wikipedia language editions - the usual suspects for
> species, Cebuano, Indonesian, Waray-Waray, Minangkabau, Vietnamese, Dutch
> and Swedish. If you’re around on Wikidata you recognize this list as the
> language editions who have used bot created articles extensively.
>
> The articles had hardly more information than Wikidata. Two of them had a
> sentence about the larvae being damaging to wood, some included that the
> species lives in Panama. They all listed the taxon author, Giesbert 1998,
> which was missing in Wikidata, so I thought, let’s add that to Wikidata. All
> I need is to find or create an item for Giesbert. Shouldn’t be too hard.
>
> OK. A bit of Googling and the name of Giesbert seems to be Edmund F.
> Giesbert. Now there seems to be an actor that usually uses the name Ed
> Gilbert, but who might have been born as Edmund Giesbert. Probably just a
> coincidence. Although, English Wikipedia doesn’t say so anymore - that
> changed in just two months ago, when the user fixed the typos on this page
> and changed Giesbert to Gilbert.
> [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ed_Gilbert&diff=712105192&oldid=712096468]
>
> I also reached out to the Raidohist, the editor who fixed the name
> difference.
>
> But many other sources on the Web still claim that Gilbert’s name was
> Giesbert. Unfortunately, many of them seem to be copies from Wikipedia, and
> thus prone to citogenesis. IMDB doesn’t say Giesbert, but Gilbert, so do a
> few of the other sources. So maybe Wikipedia sourced that error?
>
> Gilbert died in 1999 in Beverly Hills. Giesbert’s papers had no institution,
> but listed his private address - this happens rarely, for researchers
> without affiliation. Giesbert’s address? Beverly Hills. And then stumbled
> upon this obituary for Frank Hovore
> [http://oldsite.the-signal.com/?module=displaystory&story_id=33168&format=print],
> mentioning that Frank’s old friend of thirty years, Edmund Giesbert, had
> died in 1999.
>
> Are Gilbert and Giesbert the same person? Was the actor who voiced in a
> number of Disney’s shows and played in Dallas and Knight Rider, the same
> person describing Linsleychroma monnei and other bugs and beetles?
>
> Wikidata also has a number of identifiers for Gilbert, including for the
> Library of Congress and VIAF - and finally, the Library of Congress seems to
> give the best clue: “Edmund F. Giesbert, educ. at the Univ. of Chicago;
> works in the film, TV and radio industries in Los Angeles, and pursues the
> study of Coleoptera (Cerambycidae) as a serious avocation.”
> Based on that, I decided to merge the newly created Gilbert into the
> long-existing Giesbert.
>
> If I am wrong - which I might easily be - feel free to fix it.
>

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