Supplementary materials to Wikimedia Commons: “See you soon!”

This autumn, like last year, Wikimedia Germany issued a call for proposals for projects that foster the free sharing of information. Today, the winners of this Wissenswert (Ideas Worth Knowing) initiative have been announced, and I am glad to report that amongst them is a project that I had submitted on behalf of a team that also includes Raphael Wimmer of the University of Regensburg and software developer Nils Moskopp. What we plan to build is an automated importer of files from Open Access sources (particularly from the supplementary materials, which are widely neglected as a source of information) onto Wikimedia Commons.

The initial focus will be on multimedia files like movies and audio recordings, and as a token for that, I have chosen the Open Access File of the Day to be the file I used to illustrate the proposal (which had been drafted on Wikiversity):

• Movie S1 of the article Social Waves in Giant Honeybees Repel Hornets by Gerald Kastberger et al. (2008) in PLoS ONE.
• Licensed CC BY.
• Used, e.g., on the English Wikipedia and on Meta. Converted and uploaded as well as put into those pages by myself.

As I still haven’t found a practical way to embed ogg files here on WordPress, you will have to click through to actually see the movie:

The file’s legend:

This video shows two 130 cm-wide nests of the Asian Giant Honeybee Apis dorsata attached to a thick branch of a tree in Assam. The nest in the foreground displays shimmering: a Mexican-wave-like, spiral or circular, pattern. The ‘mouth’ zone of the nest is at the left bottom rim, where forager bees depart, arrive and dance. In contrast, the bees in the periphery are quiescent, but in response to hornet attacks, they produce shimmering (QuickTime; 7.8 MB).