Adding basic Wikidata info for "Edinburgh plague of 1585" got me looking at the level of data for other infectious outbreaks, and finding it a wee bit bare. Even the relatively recent "1964 Aberdeen Read more
Memory loss
A recent International Journal of Digital Curation article discussed the longer term threats to archives, not least what happens to an asset created under project funding? For digital as for physical Read more
Detriment to the built environment
After noting the Union Street fire in Wikidata, I revisited the previous query on disasters in the Glasgow area. It is now capturing more of the disastrous fires on the 1960s. A potential extension Read more
Neeps and tatties
At Burns Night, I noticed a strange phenomenon: the Wikidata item labels neeps as the Scots for turnip but the linked article on the rather challenged sco.wikipedia is to an article entitled Swade Read more
Disentangle and expand
Yesterday I spent some time distinguishing and expanding Wikidata on the various magazines named Edinburgh Review published over the past 280 years. There had been one portmanteau item but with a Read more
Safe labelling
Returning to a previous topic (here and here) about how to use a language without having one's mistakes consumed and regurgitated by LLM crawlers, a way ahead may be to focus on the Gaidhlig news Read more
Monuments
I celebrated the extra hour from the clock change by enhancing Wikidata for Scottish scheduled monuments which have a Wikipedia article but no linked image. I used a Petscan query based on the Read more
Shifty eyes
After a couple of failed attempts in recent years to install Linux on my decade-old Windows 10 laptop, I finally switched to Linux with KDE a fortnight ago. What this process into the unfamiliar Read more
Fountains and mercat crosses
Adapting a previous Commons query, I added another option to the Scottish Lost Places bot, so that it can now present a civic artefact: a fountain or a mercat cross. It does occur to me that a Read more
Scottish artists on Commons
A Petscan query based on Wikipedia Scottish artist categories, filtering for those with a Commons category, gives this. This may be an opportunity to increase the links from Wikipedia articles to Read more