GLAM/Newsletter/August 2023/Contents/Content Partnerships Hub report

This Month in GLAM – Volume XIII, Issue VIII, August 2023

Content Partnerships Hub report

Hub updates at Wikimania 2023; Supporting Wiki Loves Monuments teams

Hub updates at Wikimania 2023

At Wikimania 2023, Wikimedia Sverige's work on establishing a Content Partnership Hub was featured in several presentations by our staff members. Don't miss them if you're interested in updates on what we've been up to this year.

First off, the work of the Helpdesk was highlighted by Eric Luth. The Helpdesk is a support structure for members of the Wikimedia community who would like to engage more actively with content partnerships, such as uploads of files and data from GLAM partners. But how does it actually work, what happens when you submit a request, who makes the decision on whether it should be fulfilled and how? In this presentation, both the concept and the process of the Helpdesk are explained, so that you can get a better understanding of it. We want the community to not only be aware that the Helpdesk exists, but also understand how it can help them.

➡️ See this session on Youtube.

One example of the type of support we do is cleaning up and uploading data about the world's cultural and natural heritage to Wikidata. This is particularly appreciated by the organizers of the Wiki Loves competitions, as it makes it easier to organize and work with the data. In a short workshop, Alicia Fagerving provided an introduction to how the data on Wikidata can be used to enrich the photographs in the competitions using Structured Data on Commons. Linking photos to the items of the objects they depicts seems like a daunting task - there's a backlog of thousands of files and not everything can be done by bots. But the more people join in, the better! Through this session, we hoped to encourage more people to make their first steps as SDC editors.

➡️ See this session on Youtube.

We also spoke about our current experiments with Wikibase where we're making an attempt to build an infrastructure for storing organizational knowledge in a structured form. That is, data about everything a Wikimedia chapter does - edit-a-thons, projects, GLAM collaborations, documents and educational resources. Using a linked data platform for this sort of information makes it easier to query and analyze. You can see the platform itself on [1]. In the fall of 2023 we're going to fill it with the data about Wikimedia Sverige's activities and we hope this is just the first step towards making something bigger. If the platform does fulfill our chapter's needs, we would like to take it further and invite our chapters and user groups to also participate with their data.

➡️ See this session on Youtube.

Supporting Wiki Loves Monuments teams

Fall means Wiki Loves Monuments, and we have been working on improving the coverage of monuments on Wikidata in preparation for the competition. Two events are worth highlighting here. For one, we imported the data about monuments in Uganda from Wikipedia lists to Wikidata. Our collaboration with the Ugandan community has led to organizing a joint learning clinic as part of the Let's Connect program, which will have its first session on September 14. Its purpose is to introduce community members, especially those interested in running Wiki Loves Monuments or similar initiatives, to efficient use of Wikidata - all the way from making their first edits to working with OpenRefine to process large amounts of data.

We are also working with monument data from Ukraine, which will run its WLM in October. The majority of the data is still in the form of lists on Wikipedia, and there are a lot of Commons categories that are not linked to any Wikidata item. With over 90 000 monuments, and an impressive number of photos collected over the years of participating in WLM, there's a lot of material that could benefit from being better linked and organized. Our hope is to have those monuments on Wikidata before the competition starts, so that they're easier to find, search and analyze.

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