GLAM/Newsletter/August 2021/Single
Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos (WPWP) Campaign in Albania and Kosovo
Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos (WPWP) Campaign in Albania and Kosovo
The Wikimedians of Albanian Language User Group developed the WPWP Campaign in August and held an edit-a-thon on August 31st.
In the first place, WoALUG wanted to keep the audience focused by posting every week on Social Media and inviting them to join the campaign.
The results were satisfactory as editors did good work by illustrating and adding pictures to Wikipedia articles. Overall 231 edits were done during the campaign and 67 new photos were uploaded.
Check out the statistics here.
Social Media: wikimediashqip.org, @sqwikimediansug, FB/sqwikimediansUG, ig/sqwikimedians_ug YoutubechannelWikimedians of Albanian Language User Group
How Australian libraries are turning to Wikipedia during the global pandemic
Victoria has been home to many famous Australians, but not all of them are household names.
Jessie Deakin Clarke was an Australian early refugee advocate who was eventually awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia in 1997, while Alice Kitchin was an Australian nurse who served in World War I, and earned the Victory Medal, among others.
Until recently, anyone interested in their stories would need to dig through various libraries and archives to find them, but in 2020 staff at the State Library Victoria decided to do something about it. In the midst of Victoria’s first extended COVID-19 lockdown, they began creating new pages for notable people on Wikipedia.
“We were looking around for meaningful work that staff could do from home, but also things that would be useful for the library to do,” State Library Victoria Principal Librarian Tim Hogan said.
“So that meant that we had to do some things that we wouldn't necessarily do in normal times. One of the ideas was getting staff to write a Wikipedia page on Victorian history or people that would include material from the Library's collections, to highlight things that are notable for being in our collection.”
Alongside new pages on Jessie Deakin Clarke and Alice Kitchin, librarians also added over 100 new images from their collection to enhance pages, such as one on Australian painter Violet Teague.
“People don't necessarily realise that we're a library of pictures as well, and we have thousands of pictures, rare books or ephemera. Things that tell a story about Victorian people. So we wanted to highlight material of interest that was in the library that people might not know about”, Hogan said.
Libraries have long had a close relationship with the Wikimedia movement. Wikimedia Australia’s Executive Officer Caddie Brain says librarians play an important role in growing quality content on Wikipedia.
“Librarians are some of our greatest allies because they just naturally understand the platform. They have such incredible collections, they understand referencing, they understand what quality source material is all about. They just get it”, Brain said.
Wikipedia further embraced librarians and their work by launching #1Lib1Ref in 2016, an annual campaign that encourages every librarian to add one reference to Wikipedia. The State Library of Queensland has been a leading contributor to the campaign in Australia, contributing nearly one quarter of all citations contributed worldwide in 2017, a staggering 4,238 edits.
State Library of Queensland Engagement Officer Jacinta Sutton said, “it’s important to us because we see Wikipedia and libraries as natural allies. We're all about freedom of information and knowledge sharing, so we can help each other.”
“We can leverage the platform and the global audience of Wikipedia to reach new people, and we can help improve Wikipedia with the knowledge and expertise of the librarian and reference staff.”
Since the pandemic, while participating again in #1Lib1Ref, the State Library of Queensland has experienced the kinds of event restrictions and distributed staffing challenges faced by most libraries around Australia.
In response, Wikimedia Australia and Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand held a series of online drop-in sessions for librarians in 2021, extending the opportunity for regional participation in #1Lib1Ref. Participants from Melbourne, Sydney, Wagga Wagga, Hanoi and Christchurch, to name a few, contributed 1,736 new references to Wikipedia in just three weeks.
Back in Victoria, Tim Hogan said he hopes the State Library Victoria can continue contributing to Wikipedia in the future, but for now the project is on pause.
“We'd like to, and I think when things settle we will incorporate it into our work. But for us it’s just a nice additional thing to do”, Hogan said.
This story was first published on the Wikimedia Australia website on 13 August 2021.
Transbordados: WikidataCon's preconference for Latin America discusses GLAM and decolonization
Transbordados: WikidataCon's preconference for Latin America discusses GLAM and decolonization
As WikidataCon 2021 approaches, Wiki Movimento Brasil is organizing in partnership with Goethe-Institut São Paulo Transbordados, a preconference that will address Wikidata and decoloniality, knowledge organization and digital dissemination of collections in Latin America contexts. There will be three sessions with wikimedians and experts broadcasted live on September 14, 21 and 28, always at 21h UTC, with simultaneous translation for Portuguese and Spanish, via YouTube. The goal of Transbordados is to outreach Wikidata potentialities for Latin America, especially GLAM institutions, universities, free knowledge organizations and local wikimedians.
You can check out the program below:
- 14/09 - Towards a decolonial wiki: overflowing knowledge from the Latin American horizon
Speakers: Amanda Jurno (Wiki Movimento Brasil), Bianca Santana (journalist, writer and activist) and Silvia Gutiérrez (El Colégio de México) - watch it in PT-BR / ES
- 21/09 - The universe of libraries: Wikidata and the multiplication of knowledge potencies
Speakers: Lilian Viana (GLAM das Bibliotecas da USP) and Maurício Genta (Wikimedia Argentina e Biblioteca Nacional da Argentina) - watch it in PT-BR / ES
- 28/09 - Digital collections and Wikidata: organizing a network of knowledge
Speakers: Evelin Heidel (a.k.a. Scann; Wikimedistas do Uruguai) and Karen Worcman (Museu da Pessoa) - watch it in PT-BR / ES
WikidataCon is being organized this year by Wikimedia Deutschland and Wiki Movimento Brasil with the theme "a sustainable future for Wikidata", which will include discussions around the project's technical infrastructure, data quality, community health and diversity. Besides the program of the conference, the partnership between the affiliates is working on making this remote conference as meaningful as possible for the Wikidata ecosystem, especially for those participants who usually wouldn't be able to attend the conference in person. Transbordados is one of the actions designed under this scope to better understand and envision possible paths for the empowered performance of historically marginalized communities in the Wikidata ecosystem. Besides the preconference, the organization team is also working on a grant for Latin American and Caribbean Affiliates and on the project Reimagining Wikidata from the margins. Join us! You can find more materials on Transbordados on Wikimedia Commons here.
New partnership with the Football Museum of São Paulo
Wiki Movimento Brasil is proud to announce a new GLAM partnership with the Football Museum of São Paulo. The Brazilian affiliate have collaborated with the institution in previous edit-a-thons on gender and football since 2019 and on the Abre-te Código hackathon - the Brazilian edition of Coding Da Vinci, in 2020. Our partnership will now include the upload of parts of their collection on Wikimedia and outreach activities, such as edit-a-thons. More news from this exciting partnership coming soon!
Uploads from recent GLAM partnerships
CMU - collection Fulvia Gonçalves
The works of the Fúlvia Gonçalves collection are now available on Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata, a result of the CMU - Unicamp Memory Center GLAM. The collection holds more than 200 works that portray aspects of the historical landscape of the city of Campinas in 1986, which is the largest city in the interior of the State of São Paulo. Check below some works by Fúlvia Gonçalves:
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Partial view of Campinas -
Metropolitan Cathedral of Our Lady of Conception -
Bandstand at Praça Carlos Gomes
Musica Brasilis - sheet music of Alberto Nepomuceno and Carlos Gomes
The Musica Brasilis Project proposes to rescue, catalog and disseminate Brazilian compositions of all times and musical genres. Through the Musica Brasilis GLAM, it was possible to upload more than 100 sheet music on Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata by the Brazilian composers Alberto Nepomuceno and Carlos Gomes, both patrons of the Brazilian Academy of Music. Alberto Nepomuceno was a pioneer in nationalism in Brazilian classical music, while Carlos Gomes achieved a distinguished career in Europe for his romantic style. Here are some renowned compositions by the composers:
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Brasileira, Alberto Nepomuceno -
O Guarany, Carlos Gomes -
A noite do castelo, Carlos Gomes
APESP - pilot upload
The pilot upload of GLAM APESP featured 40 historical archives of the State of São Paulo on Wikimedia Commons. The Arquivo Público do Estado de São Paulo (APESP) - the Public Archives of the State of São Paulo - has a collection of approximately 25 million textual documents and 2.7 million photographs. The pilot upload of shipment documents date from the 18th to the 20th centuries, and disseminate the story of the Brazil' slavery and imperialist past.
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Freedom letter granted to the slave Geraldo, with the condition to work for another six years (1883) -
Passenger list of the first Japanese immigrants who arrived in the State of São Paulo (1908) -
Certificate of purchase of 467 slaves destined for Santos (1821)
Glam-wiki 2021 10 Juillet en Côte d'Ivoire
The context
Always with a view to enriching articles on the history of the borders of Côte d'Ivoire and the settlers' route, Wikimedia CIV in collaboration with the Contemporary Museum Adama Toungara of Abobo has organized for more than three (3) hours, a contribution workshop linked to the 130 years of the Côte d'Ivoire project.
Participants and activities
During the workshop, we had recorded
- 6 articles improved
- 7 photos reused
Results
You can find the results via this link here
Wikimedian in residence; Some projects for this autumn
Wikimedian in residence
Nicolas VIGNERON started as Wikimedian in residence for 12 months in Clermont-Ferrand. He is based both at the Bibliothèque du Patrimoine de Clermont Auvergne Métropole (public heritage library) and the Bibliothèque universitaire Clermont Auvergne (University library).
People will be trained and contents will be imported on Commons and Wikidata and reused on Wikipedia and Wikisource, we'll keep you posted.
Some projects for this autumn
The next months new project will take place on and offline. We are finalizing the report on French Glam open content practices. A first restitution will be given this week and the report will be finalized until the end of September.
Second proofread competition starts on Bengali Wikisource in collaboration with the British Library
After the completion of a month long proofread competition on Bengali Wikisource which happened in collaboration with the Two Centuries of Indian Print (TCIP) project of British Library from mid-March to mid-April, 2021, another competition has started from 1 September 2021, which will run for the next 3 months. Like the previous one, this competition is also getting organized by West Bengal Wikimedians User Group in collaboration with the British Library. High quality scans of public domain Bengali books published during British colonial rule in India and digitized by TCIP are getting uploaded on Wikimedia Commons and after proper checking, indexing and adding data of those books on Wikidata, these books are being added to the competition. The detailed on-wiki documentation of the collaboration can be found here.
Summer school in July and two new WiRs in August
Summer School 2021
From 12th to 16th of July Wikimedia Italia organized the third edition of the "Wikimedia project for GLAMs" summer school, dedicated to operators of museums, archives and libraries and university students who intend to work within the cultural institutions. The summer school, that was held online, offers a complete overview of Wikimedia projects and their possible use in the sharing and dissemination of the contents belonging to the institutions. The students followed a full week about Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons and Wikisource and their uses in partnerships with cultural institutions. Here you can find the full program (in italian).
Guided by italian Wikipedian experts, participants learned non only the basic rules to contribute to Wikimedia projects, but also the main technical tools developed by volunteers active on Wikimedia projects to help professionals in the cultural sector to "free" their collections on wiki projects more easily, monitoring also the impact of the activity in terms of audience reached, calculating the views of pages, access and clicks on shared content in the form of open data.
Two new italian Wikimedian in Residence
In August two new WiR began to work with italian institution, BEIC (with whom we collaborate since 2014) and the University of Padua. The University of Padua is the first Italian university hosting at the same time two Wikipedians in residence, opening its classrooms and archives to the figures responsible for accompanying cultural institutions in the world of Wikipedia and all other Wikimedia projects. This collaboration has enabled us to giving space to Wikipedia tools in 40 university courses and involving over 1200 students in writing and reviewing hundreds of free encyclopedia entries in all fields of knowledge. This will allow to bring the results of the collaboration beyond Wikipedia, enhancing the historical and artistic heritage of the University of Padua, its libraries and museums, and developing new tools for teaching.
50 cool new things you can now do with KB’s collection highlights, and New old photographs of Algeria, Mali and Morocco by Angeline van Achterberg
50 cool new things you can now do with KB’s collection highlights
OlafJanssen
In this series of 5 articles we show the added value of putting images and metadata of digitised collection highlights of the KB, national library of the Netherlands, into the Wikimedia infrastructure. By putting our collection highlights into Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia, dozens of new functionalities have been added. As a result of Wikifying this collection in 2020, you can now do things with these highlights that were not possible before. Article by OlafJanssen, DanielleJWiki and 1Veertje_(KB)
See also this summary of the article.
New old photographs of Algeria, Mali and Morocco from the 1980s and 1990s by Angeline van Achterberg, African Studies Centre Leiden
Hans Muller, ASCL Wikimedian in residence
The African Studies Centre Leiden has recently released another installment of hundreds of photographs of Africa to Wikimedia Commons. They mainly hail from a large image donation by the late Dutch social anthropologist Angeline A. van Achterberg. Some locations in Morocco still want identification. Therefore your help in specifying Moroccan landscapes, towns and villages would be highly appreciated, thank you! A sample:
- Algeria: Melika, Djelfa, Atakor, Ahaggar, Tamanrasset, Terhaouhaout and Youka Hafit in 1981, 1984 and 1987
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Boys playing a game on the tiles, Melika, Mzab -
A young lady is weaving a tapestry, Djelfa -
Three ladies and a boy in their best attire for a party, Djelfa -
Eroded vulcano rocks, Atakor -
A desert mosque of few stones, Ahaggar
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A dromedary race with jockeys at the November 1th independence celebration, Tamanrasset -
Dromedary jockeys about to encircle singing women and children, November 1th independence celebration, Tamanrasset -
Horizontal and vertical stratified rocks, Youfa Hakit -
Ancient Tifinagh Berber script on a rock face, Youfa Hakit -
Women and their children near a zeriba, reed hut, Terhaouhaout
- Mali: Timbuktu, Djenné, Teli, Ségoukoro in 1993
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Tuareg jewelry seller Abdullah and a boy, Timbuktu -
A smiling girl in front of drying loam bricks, Timbuktu -
Two bread ovens on the street, Timbuktu -
Two goatherds and some twenty goats in the desert near Timbuktu -
Ruins of loam houses, Djenné
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A young Bozo woman is selling jewelry, Djenné on the Niger River -
A grain store, Teli, Dogon country -
The village weaver at work, Teli, Dogon country -
A man at the grave of Bitòn Coulibaly, Ségoukoro -
A woman at the women's entrance of a small mosque on the Niger River, Ségoukoro
- Morocco: Fez, Meknes?, unknown locations in the 1990s
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A female weaver with girls at work on a tapestry, Fez -
Three men at a fruit shop in the souk of Meknes ? -
An electrical substation in the mountains, where? -
A small red and white minaret in the mountains, where? -
Pedestrians in front of a town gate, where?
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A man with a donkey cart near a town gate, where? -
A monumental town wall with towers and a gate, where? -
A smiling textile worker with a child, a spindle and wool combs, where? -
Two camels and a town, where? -
A town wall and kasbah seen from without, where?
A Wikimedian at New Zealand Opera
Collaboration with an opera company opens up new possibilities
In August I finished a stint as Wikipedian in Residence with New Zealand Opera – approximately two weeks of work spread over the last six months. More experienced GLAM Wikipedians are welcome to weigh in, but this seems to be the first time any opera company in the world has taken on a Wikipedian in Residence; certainly the first arts organisation in New Zealand to do so.
With the help of several volunteers 8 new articles were created, 14 more improved, 41 Wikidata items added and 14 improved, and nearly 200 photos of nine NZ Opera productions were added to Wikimedia Commons under an open licence. The photos are noteworthy, being by numerous professional photographers employed to take publicity photos of opera productions, usually at dress rehearsal, for publicity purposes. High-quality modern production photos of this type are hard to get, and it's a credit to New Zealand Opera that they were willing to release these to the Commons, and work with the photographers concerned to clear the image copyrights. These images have already found their way onto 76 pages or Wikidata items, viewed according to a GLAMorgan query by an estimated 100,000+ people a month. The article on The Turn of the Screw, for example (27,000 views/month) now uses a photo of the 2019 NZ Opera production. One set of backstage photos during a rehearsal of The Magic Flute have been used to illustrate new articles on people like soprano Madison Nonoa, director Sara Brodie, and costume designer Elizabeth Whiting, but they were also useful for articles about general topics like set and costume design.
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The Magic Flute (2006) -
Faust (2006) -
Hōhepa (2012) -
Sara Brodie in rehearsals for The Magic Flute (2016) -
The Turn of the Screw (2019) -
Eight Songs for a Mad King (2020) -
The Human Voice (2020) -
2021 premiere of Ihitai 'Avei'a – Star Navigator -
Natasha Wilson as Purea in Ihitai 'Avei'a
This has also been a good case study for the value of collaborating with Wikipedia, with excellent feedback from the board and staff of New Zealand Opera. The message has been very clear that any arts organisation, literary festival, dance company, theatre group, or record label might be sitting on an archive of publications, press clippings, and photos and could do the same thing to improve the visibility of the arts in New Zealand. Currently I am drafting a grant proposal with NZ Opera to put their entire 21 years of productions into Wikidata, every performer and creative team member into Wikipedia, and photos from every show in Commons freely licensed for reuse. They would be the first opera company in the world to do this, and would create a repository of data and images that could enrich the coverage of opera throughout Wikipedia.
Villas and castles of Serbia
New cooperations!
A memorandum of cooperation was signed with the National Library of Pirot. With this step, plans for future activities have begun.
Wikimania 2021
With the Wikipedian in residence in the battle for cultural heritage session, we presented at Wikimania 2021 our results in this project, but also some tips&tricks for performing this project in a successful way.
Castles of Serbia
The Castles of Serbia, project by Color Media Communications, donated 423 photographs of castles and villas in Serbia, with which 14 articles were illustrated. Thanks to this project, the current condition of 25 cultural heritage sites is shown.
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Clerical High School of Saint Arsenije -
Castle Lazarevic at Veliko Srediste -
The complex of “Jodna banja” facilities in Novi Sad -
Kur salon at Banja Koviljaca -
Vila of dr Petrovic at Banja Koviljaca -
Vila Gucevo at Banja Koviljaca
History, history and future
Looking towards 2021 pictures from the history of Göteborg
In early autumn, Wikimedia Sverige is running a series of workshops with museum staff in Göteborg. The goal is to equip the staff with the skills and tools to mass upload files to Wikimedia Commons, so that they can do it without our support in the future, as well as share their knowledge with other GLAMs.
This is part of the project 2021 pictures for 2021, a joint initiative by four museums in Göteborg, Gothenburg Maritime Museum, City Museum of Gothenburg, Gothenburg Museum of Art and Röhsska Museum. 2021 is a special year in Göteborg, as we're celebrating the city's 400th anniversary. That's why the museums decided to share 2021 high-quality pictures documenting the city's history and culture on the Wikimedia projects.
We had our first workshop in late August, where we covered all the basics of how pictures work in the Wikimedia ecosystem – from how to add one to a Wikipedia article to how to organize categories, how to use the Upload Wizard and how to think about copyright. Later in the fall, we're going to use Pattypan to work with metadata and upload 2021 images!
Working with the unique history in Kalmar County
In the project Unika historiska Kalmar län (Unique Historic Kalmar County in English), we have had online meetings earlier in the year, but have now had a first small meeting at Kalmar County Museum. In the project, we collaborate with the Swedish local heritage movement and smaller local companies to develop and use the cultural heritage in the region in new innovative ways. One place where knowledge and information in an encyclopedic form fits very well is of course Wikipedia.
So our task is to take advantage of the work and transform it to knowledge and see if and how it also can be relevant on Wikimedia's platforms. We talk and discuss a lot here about local history and a main part of the work is spent finding good sources.
New portal for a content partnerships hub
Wikimedia Sverige are working towards creating a thematic hub for content partnerships. The aim of the hub is to create a place where the Wikimedia Movement can reach even further in successful collaborations with GLAM institutions and other organizations around the world, making even more material available on our platforms.
Check out the portal page to read more about the concept, the ideas and how you can contribute with your knowledge to the process! An important part of the work is a helpdesk, that you can reach out to if you would like to step up your own work on content partnerships. Do you know an institution that has a lot of great content for the platforms, but aren't sure about how to do batch uploads? Or do you know the technical parts but need a hand in how to write a contract? Reach out to the helpdesk to read more and get in touch! The hub will also have a general focus on capacity building, sharing ideas and knowledge between new and old, small and big communities around the world. We all have something to learn!
Khalili Collections reaches 30 articles
Khalili Collections
The project reached 30 total new articles this month. Article 29 is an Arabic translation of the article on Sitaras - the sacred textiles of Islam. Article 30 is a biography of Muhammad Sadiq, the first person to photograph the holy sites of Islam. The Muhammad Sadiq article passed Did You Know review, becoming the 19th article from this project to do so. Two articles from the project are currently undergoing Good Article review. If they pass, the total GAs will go from four to six.
The bulk upload happened in July and the main work now is adding categories to the images and enriching the Wikidata representation of the objects. Images from this partnership can now be found in 582 categories on Commons (excluding hidden categories). This month there were no uploads of entirely new images, but eight uploads of cropped versions of earlier images (examples below). These images have helped to illustrate a range of articles relating to Islam in China. Many of the images in the bulk upload are folios from manuscripts of the Quran, or from other manuscripts relating to Islamic practice and pilgrimage. I am working on a rich description of these manuscripts in Wikidata, connecting the manuscripts to their literary works and enabling queries such as this one.
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Pagoda made from Islamic proclamations from a Chinese scroll -
The Kaaba photographed by Muhammad Sadiq -
Map of pilgrimage routes from China to Arabia -
Hilye (description of the Prophet Muhammad) from a Chinese scroll
British Library
Uploads are now complete for our pilot project with the India Office Records.
We have uploaded over 200 individuals to Wikidata. These individuals were Postmasters listed in the Indian Civil and Military lists from the 1880s. This completes the initial data cleaning and uploading work done by Sorbiodunensis and detailed at the project page. Please note that the project page has some updates pending to reflect work done in August.
A further three documents were uploaded to Wikimedia Commons:
India List Civil and Military, July, 1885
India List Civil and Military, January, 1886
India List Civil and Military, July, 1886
We are particularly cognizant of the work done to contextualise these works in a thoughtful context which actively works to reduce harm through the use of content warnings.
Wiki salons and Kearny Mesa
WikiWednesday Salon
Wikimedia NYC held a salon, WikiWednesday Salon, August 25
Wiki Salon
Philadelphia Wikimedians held a salon, Philadelphia/WikiSalon August 14
Kearny Mesa, San Diego
San Diego Wikimedians User Group held a meetup, San Diego 73 (Kearny Mesa)
Hack4OpenGLAM is ready to start
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GLAM School DayMonday 20 September will be a learning day of panels & tutorials. To follow the GLAM School Day, please register for the CC Summit. Registration fee is voluntary. |
Hacking togetherThe Grand Pitching Session is the highlight of the GLAM School Day. To present a project and join the hackathon, you need to register for Hack4OpenGLAM! You can register one or more projects, or join projects by others. The next 3 days are dedicated to independent working in between the sessions of the Creative Commons Global Summit. |
Final GalaOn Friday 24 September, we convene again for a Final Gala |
| Time in UTC | Panel sessions | Tutorials |
|---|---|---|
| 09:00–10:30 | Revitalizing endangered languages
Chair: Sadik Shahadu. Panelists: Satdeep Gill • Mali Brødreskift and more This panel brings together practitioners working with indigenous and endangered languages. It shows what tools and strategies are available for revitalizing the languages within the open ecosystem. |
OpenRefine tutorial
Instructor: Sandra Fauconnier An introduction to OpenRefine, a cross-platform open source tool for cleaning messy data. OpenRefine (previously Google Refine) is a powerful tool for working with messy data: cleaning it; transforming it from one format into another; and extending it with web services and external data. This tutorial demonstrates the basic functionalities of OpenRefine, and will also demonstrate how to reconcile data with Wikidata. Suggestions of interesting datasets to work with are welcome! |
| 11:00–12:30 | Vulnerable archives
Chair: Annet Dekker. Panelists: Lozana Rossenova • Ranjit Menon • Georgina Burnett • Mariana Ziku and more This panel looks at cultural heritage that falls outside existing systems of preservation and sharing and seeks new practices for broader inclusion of these bodies of knowledge. |
Using Transkribus - background to the tool and demonstration
Instructor: Joseph Nockels This workshop enables participants to use the Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) tool Transkribus, a way of rendering historical manuscript material into machine-readable printed text. It showcases how to upload document images to the platform, run automated features like line segmentation and layout/document analysis, as well as how to train an AI-enabled model to automatically transcribe text. Once a trustworthy rendition of the text is transcribed as machine-readable text, institutions and scholars can begin to make the past readable and accessible through audio software and other digital methods. |
| 13:00–14:30 | Wake up-call for heritage at risk
Panelists: Majd Al-Shihabi • Evelin Heidel • Nassima Chahboun and more Cultural heritage buildings, monuments and sites are increasingly exposed to major problems and threats: armed conflicts and wars, natural disasters, climate change, pollution, mismanagement and uncontrolled activities. In this session, we will explore the possibilities offered by open platforms and tools to monitor and assess these threats, and raise awareness among local communities. |
Understanding Wikipedia and the Wikimedia movement
Instructor: Andrew Lih An introduction to key projects of the Wikimedia movement – Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikidata – in the context of GLAM and Creative Commons. |
| 18:00–19:30 | The Grand Pitching Session kicks off the collaborative work. All registered projects can be pitched in this program with lightning-short introductions. To present, please first register your project. | |
| 20:00–21:30 | Decolonizing metadata
Chair: Sandra Fauconnier. Panelists: George Oates, Flickr Commons • Zack Krida, Openverse • MHz Curationist and more This panel imagines how open media platforms can help underrepresented communities correct data about them in the metadata that accompanies the media files and why it is important. | |
OpenRefine starts SDC development
OpenRefine starts Structured Data on Commons development in September 2021!
The OpenRefine team starts development of Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons (SDC) support in September. This project is funded by a Wikimedia Foundation Project Grant. Eugene Egbe (developer of, among others, the ISA Tool) works as a contractor for this project, and he will develop several Wikimedia-specific functionalities: a Wikimedia Commons reconciliation service and an upload tool. In November, a second developer will come on board who will work more closely on the OpenRefine side.
This project runs until end June 2022; by then, OpenRefine should be enhanced with functionalities to (1) batch edit and (2) upload files with structured data on Wikimedia Commons. We are currently planning to have batch editing functionalities ready by January-February 2022, and batch upload functionalities by June 2022.
Input welcome!
We warmly welcome community feedback in this trajectory. Sandra will soon start reaching out to specific community members who already actively expressed interest in providing input, in testing and piloting new features. If you want to indicate that you'd like to be part of this feedback panel as well, feel free to fill in this form! We value your input!
Follow what we are working on
You can check the planning and milestones of the project, and short monthly reports, on Meta. Notes of the development team meetings are collected in this public Etherpad.
Work on this project will be tracked on Phabricator and on GitHub. Feel free to subscribe to, and participate in the discussions!
- Workboards related to development for this project on Phabricator:
- OpenRefine https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/openrefine/
- Reconciliation https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/reconciliation/
- Workboard related to development for this project on GitHub: https://github.com/OpenRefine/OpenRefine/projects/10
GLAM conversations and feedback for a better Wikimedia movement
Conversations during conferences
Wikimania
August was a very busy month in the Wikimedia community. Wikimania 2021 was the biggest conference the movement ever had, as it was conducted in a virtual environment. It had over 4,000 registrations and ran for five days, with sessions across different time zones, covering various topics. All the GLAM and Education sessions are available in this category.
The GLAM & Culture team, at the Wikimedia Foundation, also participated in two sessions. One was the Structured data on Commons: today and tomorrow, that was followed by a discussion table at the unconference, the Structured data on Commons and had presentations by Carly Bogen, Dominic Byrd-McDevitt, and Giovanna Fontenelle. Right now, you can watch the video on YouTube, but it will also be available on Commons soon.
The table was joined by 20 people, the maximum allowed, who provided feedback and had a 30 minutes discussion around the depicts guidelines produced by the GLAM and Culture team to improve the modeling page for Structured data on Commons. During the conversation, the guidelines were available on this sandbox page, but now are published on the main page, with some open questions and issues available on the talk page.
The other session was the State of GLAM Wiki in 2021 and its video is available here. Fiona Romeo, from the WMF GLAM and Culture team, opened with a short intro to GLAM-Wiki and, at the end of the session, presented how the team is thinking about visual knowledge, especially considering the millions of high-quality images the movement’s partnerships with libraries and cultural institutions have brought to the Wikimedia projects and how we can make sure the files GLAMs contribute are well described, discoverable, and used to enrich other projects, more Wikipedia languages and Wikisource.
The session also covered topics such as a panorama of the GLAM-Wiki activities in New Zealand, by Siobhan Leachman, and the social and technical overview of the Digital Public Library of America GLAM-Wiki initiative, by Dominic Byrd-McDevitt.
Another very technical presentation was shared by Éder Porto, from the Wiki Movimento Brasil User Group, who gave a talk about the technical developments and challenges involved in the , during a data roundtripping project.
Brazil was represented twice and Érica Azzellini, Communications Manager of the user group, introduced the , which is helping to fill the Wikimedia knowledge gaps of a very underrepresented part of the country. Susanna Ånäs, the GLAM coordinator at Wikimedia Suomi/AvoinGLAM, also talked about knowledge equity and ideas around the recent activities of AvoinGLAM, as a GLAM manifesto.
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GLAM Wiki in New Zealand -
Technical Developments and Challenges in GLAM-Wiki Initiatives: Museu do Ipiranga -
Wiki Loves Bahia: Addressing local knowledge gaps
Hack4OpenGLAM and CC Global Summit 2021
Susanna Ånäs, who presented in the State of GLAM Wiki in 2021 session is also organizing the Hack4OpenGLAM, a 5-day culture hack event, part of the Creative Commons Global Summit 2021 (20–24 September), that intends to use creativity to build projects with open cultural heritage. This year's theme is knowledge equity and some very interesting schemes are already available.
During the CC Global Summit main program, the GLAM and Culture team is also participating and presenting a few sessions:
- What does the Future Hold for Open GLAM and Creative Commons?
- Monday, September 20, 3:30pm - 4:30pm (UTC)
- Speakers: Andrea Wallace, Brigitte Vezina, Giovanna Fontenelle, and Susanna Ånäs
- Monday, September 20, 3:30pm - 4:30pm (UTC)
- Attributing Public Domain Materials: From Best Practices to Standardization
- Wednesday, September 22, 1:00pm - 2:00pm (UTC)
- Speakers: Brigitte Vezina, Deborah De Angelis, Fiona Romeo, and Sarah Pearson
- Wednesday, September 22, 1:00pm - 2:00pm (UTC)
- Introducing Wikisource: The Free Digital Library
- Friday, September 24, 11:00am - 11:30am (UTC)
- Speaker: Satdeep Gill
- Friday, September 24, 11:00am - 11:30am (UTC)
- Spreading CC's message for GLAMs during a pandemic
- Friday, September 24, 12:30pm - 13:30pm (UTC)
- Speaker: Giovanna Fontenelle
- Friday, September 24, 12:30pm - 13:30pm (UTC)
Technical conversations
In the last months and weeks, the GLAM team has also been very active in more technical conversations, especially on Phabricator. In this newsletter, we would like to highlight some of them.
- OpenRefine:
- Design a file format to represent Wikibase edits (T282796)
- Add Structured data on Wikimedia Commons support to OpenRefine (T289971)
- Create a reconciliation service for (Structured Data on) Wikimedia Commons (T289803)
- Minimal prototype for the Commons recon service (T290310)
- Structured Data on Commons reconciliation service accepts Commons category names as input (T290089)
- Describe typical user workflows for batch editing and uploading structured data on Commons (T290296)
September's GLAM events
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