Great work and hats off to the NACO trained librarian (in this case someone
at the Library of Congress -looking at the DLC value in $a in 040:
) that created his name
authority file. One should always consider consulting the Library of
Congress Name Authority File. Almost never fails.
violeta
On Tue, May 10, 2016 at 5:32 PM, Daniel Mietchen <
daniel.mietchen(a)googlemail.com> wrote:
Nice, Denny.
On Tue, May 10, 2016 at 11:15 PM, Denny Vrandečić <vrandecic(a)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&am…
]
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&f…
],
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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