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July 22

Searching across Wikipedias in various languages

As an experienced editor, and (English language) article creator I am increasingly aware of the the extent to which:

(a) different language Wikipedia articles, driven by cultural differences, present their information and resources in quite different and instructive ways,

(b) different language Wikipedia articles, often written from entirely different perspectives, often direct the reader to new and otherwise un-cited (English and non-English) sources of valuable information, and

(c) it is important to link different language Wikipedia articles to the corresponding English language article.

My question is this: instead of the time consuming process of having to choose a specific language Wikipedia and, then, searching for articles with the title sought within that particular Wikipedia, and repeating the process again and again -- with the additional risk that there might be an important subject-relevant article in some other Wikipedia written in a language that the searcher has not predicted might exist (and, therefore, has missed it altogether) -- is there some way to search for an article on a specific topic -- say, "autosuggestion" -- (or, even better, to search for some reference to that term within some other article) in a language other than English language right throughout the entire Wikipedia domain? Dr Lindsay B Yeates (talk) 05:47, 22 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It's better to do this using advanced Google search rather than trying to do it from within Wikipedia. [1] returns references to autosuggestion in all Wikipedias. [2] is the same search but with the letters "en" (for English Wikipedia) excluded. I'm not sure that second search is 100% effective though, as it might exclude references in, say, the German Wikipedia that include the word "englisch". --Viennese Waltz 09:19, 22 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Wouldn't it be better to use [3] [4] if you want to exclude the English wikipedia in particular? May be add the simple English one as well if need be. Nil Einne (talk) 14:46, 22 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Also if you want to try excluding English results that occur in other wikipedias, you will likely have to rely on the search engines language detection capabilities which are a bit hit and miss (they can get confused if there's too much of one language in a page). Google only seems to let you search in a certain language, may be you can full around with the url to include all languages but one (but I'm not sure whether Google will interpret them all or only the first or last one). But Bing does seem to let you select multiple languages so you'd just need to select each language but English [5]. Bing seems to only use cookies for the search results language so I can't provide a sample URL. Nil Einne (talk) 14:57, 22 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Who is this guy?

Let's say that somebody posts a profile on a social-networking site. How can one find out if the photo was copied from somewhere else? More generally, if you have a picture that you got from the Internet, is there any way to find out whom it belongs to? 50.246.99.245 (talk) 21:20, 22 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

See Reverse image search. AndyTheGrump (talk) 21:23, 22 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, exactly. You might start with a trip to Google. Find the "Image" search tool and click on the camera icon. It'll ask you for the URL where your photo is posted - then it'll produce a list of exactly (and nearly, and not so nearly) similar images. You can visit those to see if the person's name is revealed. There are other similar tools (http://tineye.com is another good one)...but I generally find Google does the best job.

However, while that may help you discover who this is a photo of - it's not generally possible to discover who owns the copyright on photograph. If you see the image uploaded in a bunch of places, then it's quite likely that the one that's the highest resolution and least-cropped is the most original...but that's always going to be nothing more than a good guess! SteveBaker (talk) 03:16, 23 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Cool, I wasn't aware of that feature of Google! 50.246.99.245 (talk) 03:44, 23 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

You can also just open Image Search in a separate tab, then click and drag the image onto the search bar. Beats typing or copying the URL. InedibleHulk (talk) 06:13, 24 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

You can also check to see if there is any copyright (or other relevant info) in the image's Exif or other metadata. I just found an online metadata and Exif viewer (metapicz) that might be useful —and also has a drag/drop feature. ~E:71.20.250.51 (talk) 06:40, 24 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]