GLAM/Newsletter/August 2026/Single
Hot August/Cold August
An update on Diff
Check out this article over on the Diff blog that neatly summarises the TMIG articles from the last quarter.
Global GLAM Calls Continued
There have been some great community calls in the last year. And August was no exception. Check the meta-wiki page for more information. Indigenous knowledge, data visualisation, Wikimedian in Residence Training!
Call for Proposals
Please submit your proposals for topics for future calls via the contact form, also on meta! Anything and everyone is welcome to submit topics. There are various timeslots and dates still this year to fulfill.
Wiki Love Monuments and new phase of Museu Paulista collaboration
Wiki Loves Monuments is back!
The national stage of Wiki Loves Monuments, the largest photography competition in the world, takes place between September 1 and 30. The initiative seeks to increase the visibility of monuments and built heritage in Brazilian cities by expanding their open-license records. Anyone interested can participate. The best photographs receive awards and move on to the international stage, where they compete for a new round of prizes.
To participate and contribute to the Brazilian stage, visit: Wiki Loves Monuments Brasil.
Wiki Loves Monuments Photo Walks
To encourage public participation in Wiki Loves Monuments, Wikimedia Brasil is organizing free photo walks across Brazil. Through this effort, participants can photograph historical monuments collectively and take part in a workshop on how to submit photos to the contest.
To join a Photo Walk, find your nearest event at Wiki Encontros page.
Partnership between Museu Paulista and Wikimedia Brasil gains new momentum with public funding!
The Center for Digitization and Intelligent Processing of Collections (CDTIC) is a facility aimed at expanding access to the collections of Museu Paulista. Structured around five main hubs, we highlight the initiative led by the Open Knowledge - Citizen Science Hub in partnership with Wikimedia Brasil, which has just received public funding. Through this effort, the Hub will make available more than 90,000 digitized items from the Museu Paulista Collection over the course of the project, which will be shared across Wikimedia platforms such as Wikimedia Commons and Wikisource. As a project output, we will create a collaborative interface for disseminating historical manuscript documents—an open-source software tool for transcribing and integrating historical documents into the digital environment through a participatory citizen science ecosystem that interoperates with Wikimedia projects. This action consolidates a long-standing GLAM partnership, which has already shared more than 30,000 items and receives over 1.5 million views per month.
View more of CDTIC in Centro de Digitalização e Tratamento Inteligente de Coleções/Núcleo de Conhecimento Aberto - Ciência Cidadã.
View more of the GLAM do Museu Paulista and past collaborations.
The Catalan public domain: An application to identify Catalan works in public domain
The result of the Residency: Catalan Public Domain app
This project provides an interactive web interface to explore data from the WikiProject: Catalan Public Domain directly from Wikidata using real-time SPARQL queries.
The Event at Konvent finished with a new app, to identify the Catalan public domain. You can see the gender distribution, the Wikipedia coverage, a timeline of publications and geolocation of works. The repo with the source code is available on Gitlab.
Explore the Colombian public domain app: Browse works an authors in the public domain
(En castellano más abajo)
Explore the Colombian Public Domain Viewer
In this web application, you can explore Colombian public domain works registered in Wikidata across various cultural and heritage institutions. Additionally, you can access the repository containing the viewer's source code to replicate, modify, or contribute to its development.
This initiative aims to provide a single point of access to digitized Colombian public domain works, showcase the progress of the WikiProject Highlighting the Colombian Public Domain, and identify which people or works are not yet documented on Wikipedia. It serves as a resource for working with cultural and heritage institutions that want to display their collections and offer different ways of access through Wikidata.
Explora el Visor del dominio público colombiano
En esta aplicación web, se pueden consultar las obras colombianas en dominio público registradas en Wikidata en diversas instituciones culturales y de patrimonio. Adicionalmente, se puede consultar el repositorio con el código fuente del visor, para replicarlo, modificarlo o colaborar en su desarrollo.
Esta iniciativa busca brindar un unico punto de acceso a las obras digitalizadas del dominio público colombiano, mostrar los avances del Wikiproyecto Visibilizando el dominio público, e identificar qué personas u obras no están todavía descritas en Wikipedia. Es una fuente para trabajar con instituciones culturales y de patrimonio que quieran mostrar sus colecciones y brindar diferentes formas de acceso a través de Wikidata.
Wikimedia CR introduces new members of GLAM/partnership team
Ondřej Cakl, advocacy specialist
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Since April 2026, Ondřej Cakl has been collaborating with us on the advocacy agenda of the Wikimedia Czech Republic association. He has previously been involved in advocacy work at organizations defending civil rights, human and social rights, and the rule of law (Integria, Nepodmíněný základní kolektiv, Transparency International), and will now strengthen our team.
He has worked to defend free elections, curb climate corruption, combat hate speech online, train journalists and human rights activists (not only) in Burma, protect the climate, and advocate for the implementation of a universal basic income. We believe he will channel his experience into an effective advocacy strategy for the development of Wikipedia and related projects.
“Wikipedia is an effort to provide the power of information to all those who are denied it in a commodified world. In fact, one could even say that somewhere deep in its DNA, Wikipedia strives to challenge the notion that information is meant to confer power, and instead champions the idea that information should primarily serve to make the world a better place to live,” says Ondřej.
And it will be necessary to champion this cause. Wikipedia, like the global information space, faces a number of challenges. Among the most concrete are the incursion of generative AI language models into the globalized media sphere, the protection of children from the dangers of the digital world (age limit verification), and the defense of free access to information (specifically, for example, the protection of journalists from SLAPP lawsuits).
Lujza Kotočová, GLAM coordinator
In May, Wikimedia Czech Republic welcomed Lujza Bederka Kotočová as the new GLAM Program Coordinator.
With a background in art history, Lujza has spent several years working at the intersection of academic research, curatorial practice, and digital archiving. Throughout her career, she has repeatedly encountered the question of how to make institutional collections and research outputs accessible not only to the research community but also to the general public.
Vaclav Zouzalík, Wikidata/tech coordinator
As of May 2026, the Wikimedia Czech Republic Association has welcomed a new Wikidata/Tech Program Coordinator, Václav Zouzalík, to the team. He joins the association after several years as a Ruby developer and is also a long-standing member of the Wikimedia community and an active contributor to Wikimedia projects.
Egypt’s GLAM Team Brings Egyptian Postal History and Public Libraries to Wikimedia
As part of its ongoing efforts to expand and diversify GLAM activities in Egypt, the GLAM Team, affiliated with the Egypt Wikimedians User Group, has been exploring new ways to bring a wider range of cultural and historical resources to Wikimedia projects. Beyond museums and traditional heritage institutions, the team is increasingly turning its attention to specialized archives, documentary collections, and public libraries, where valuable materials often remain underrepresented online.
Throughout August 2026, this broader approach took shape through two complementary initiatives. One focused on Egyptian postal heritage, bringing together volunteers to document and upload historical airmail stamps to Wikimedia Commons. The other focused on books and libraries, combining field visits to branches of the Misr Public Library in Benha and Qena with an online workshop to identify valuable titles, create Wikidata items, and document selected works on Wikimedia Projects.
From August 12 to 16, the team members gathered online for a workshop dedicated to Egyptian postal heritage, organized by Sohila Elshaaer. Over five days, participants focused on documenting and uploading historical airmail stamps to Wikimedia Commons.
By the end of the workshop, the team added 96 airmail stamps to Commons, fully categorized and available under free licenses. These files help address content gaps in Wikipedia articles related to Philately and Egyptian Postal History.
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Airmail stamp issued by the United Arab Republic in 1963 (140 millimes) in reddish-orange and violet, depicting the Great Temple of Abu Simbel with an airplane flying overhead. -
A 1947 Kingdom of Egypt airmail stamp with a face value of 100 millimes, depicting King Farouk I. -
Egyptian airmail stamp (2 millimeZoo Tycoon: Marine Manias, orange/black) featuring an aircraft flying over the Giza Pyramids, inscribed "POSTE AERIENNE" and "ÉGYPTE".
Between August 26 and 30, the team held the first session of the Books & Libraries workshop, during which two of the team members visited two branches of the Misr Public Library—in Benha and Qena—to create book titles that did not yet have corresponding Wikidata items.
During the workshop, Amr F. Nagy and Ahmed Naji created book items and uploaded photographic documentation for the selected works. The batch highlighted notable historical and architectural titles, including Khaled Azab's "Walls and Citadel of Saladin" (أسوار وقلعة صلاح الدين) and Mohamed Abou El-Ghar's "The Egyptian Labour Corps" (الفيلق المصري), alongside political and cultural works by authors such as Mohamed Hassanein Heikal and Galal Amin.
In total, Session I resulted in 25 new titles created that previously lacked Wikidata items, along with 35 images and 2 new categories on Wikimedia Commons for the two libraries.
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A participant's workspace setup during the Books & Libraries Workshop at Misr Public Library in Benha. -
Field visit to Misr Public Library in Qena with a logo of the Egypt Wikimedia during the "Books & Libraries" Workshop. -
Cover of Mohamed Abou El-Ghar's The Egyptian Labour Corps, photographed during a visit to Misr Public Library in Qena.
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More Info
For more information about GLAM activities in Egypt, visit our page here.
The Musical Heritage of the Santa Cecilia Conservatory
The Library of the “Santa Cecilia” Conservatory of Music in Rome holds an important historical collection of music books and documents. In 2026, as part of the agreement between Wikimedia Italia and the Central Library of the National Research Council (CNR) for 2026–2027, Santa Cecilia launched, in collaboration with the Central Library of the CNR, an ongoing project dedicated to the digitization and sharing of this heritage.
The initiative has two main goals: to preserve and promote materials of great historical and documentary importance, and to make them more easily accessible for research, teaching, and musical performance. Through the global infrastructure of Wikimedia projects, the project also aims to support the international circulation of the musical heritage preserved in Rome.
The project focuses first of all on three important documentary collections.
The first consists of musical scores and sheet music from the “Diritto d'autore” collection. These materials came to Santa Cecilia as a result of the law on legal deposit, which in 1883 required musical editions from all over Italy to be sent to Santa Cecilia. This collection is an important record of Italian musical culture in the 19th century. The scores and sheet music are therefore not only materials to be preserved, but also documents that provide evidence of part of the musical production of the period.
The digitization work is currently underway. So far, 100 musical scores from the “Diritto d'autore” collection have been digitized and uploaded to Wikimedia Commons.
The second collection is the Silvestri collection, consisting of 118 volumes containing around 6,000 librettos for operas and ballets. The collection has particular documentary value because it makes it possible to trace musical performances held in the theatres of Milan and Monza from 1670 to 1885.
The third collection includes around 30,000 opera and ballet librettos from the 17th to the 19th centuries. Of these, 21,138 titles come from the collection of the Portuguese collector Manoel Peixoto d’Almeida da Carvalhaes, while 9,700 belong to the Government Libretto Collection. The latter documents the repertoires and activities of opera theatres throughout Europe.
Within the project, librettos therefore have a particularly important role. Their presence in such large collections makes it possible to document repertoires, performances, and theatrical activities over a very long period, from the 17th to the 19th century.
The digitization project could in the future be extended to other materials held by the Library, including the braille music collection, magnetic tapes, and photographic plates. This possible expansion would make it possible to work with different types of documents, continuing the process of promoting historical musical heritage through digitization.
New Zealand Thesis Project Update and the upcoming TDWG 2026 conference
New Zealand Thesis Project Update
The New Zealand Thesis Project is a Wikidata-based project to collect together metadata from all New Zealand tertiary institutions to create a virtual national repository. In 2022 the project ran its first upload, collecting data from all universities and several polytechnics, and creating a dataset of more than 66,000 theses and dissertations. We have just updated this dataset with a further 14,000 theses, which we will be linking to authors, advisors and main subjects over the coming months. The dataset now covers New Zealand theses from 1907 to 2025. You can read more about the project on our English Wikipedia project page or on Wikidata.
Funded by Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand, Ambrosia10 is preparing to attend the upcoming Biodiversity Data Standards (TDWG 2026) conference in Oslo. She has been collaborating with colleagues to organise the session Responsible AI, Open Digital Curation, and Round-Tripping for Biodiversity Data. Within that session she will be presenting on the recent work of the participants in Wikidata WikiProject Natural History Specimen Data Model to create a data model of Wikidata type specimen items.
She has also been invited to present in another session on Publishing and Communications Promoting Biodiversity, Natural History Collections, People, Data and Data Standards where she will be giving a brief presentation on broadcasting biodiversity data contributions via Wikidata and tools build or reusing Wikidata such as Bionomia, Scholia and Expeditia.
Finally a paper she is contributing to will be presented by her colleague Sabine von Mering on the Wikidata data model for research expeditions as created via the Wikidata WikiProject Research Expeditions.
Connecting Culture and Free Knowledge - Wikimedia MKD’s GLAM Partnerships
During August and early September 2026, Wikimedia MKD continued to strengthen its cooperation with cultural institutions and organizations in Macedonia through its GLAM program. These partnerships play an important role in documenting cultural events, promoting free knowledge, and making cultural heritage more accessible through Wikimedia projects.
Two activities highlighted these efforts: the continued collaboration with the MakeDox Creative Documentary Film Festival as part of the international Wiki Loves Film initiative, and the recognition received from the Museum of the Macedonian Struggle for the successful cooperation established so far. Both activities reflect Wikimedia MKD’s commitment to building long-term partnerships with cultural institutions and expanding the availability of freely accessible cultural content.
Wiki Loves Film – Collaboration with MakeDox Film Festival
As part of the GLAM program of Wikimedia MKD and the international initiative Wiki Loves Film, Wikimedia MKD continued its collaboration with the MakeDox - Creative Documentary Film Festival in Skopje, Macedonia. The collaboration aims to document important cultural events in the field of film and make freely accessible visual content available through Wikimedia projects.
This year, the MakeDox Film Festival was held from 20 to 27 August 2026. MakeDox is one of the most recognized documentary film festivals in Macedonia, with international reach and an important role in promoting creative documentary filmmaking and bringing together filmmakers, artists, and audiences.
During this year's festival, Wikimedia MKD's GLAM Coordinator participated in the festival and documented its activities as part of the Wiki Loves Film initiative. Throughout the festival, photographs were taken of screenings, events, guests, participants, and the overall festival atmosphere.
As a result of this activity, approximately 430 photographs from the MakeDox Film Festival were uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. The photographs are freely licensed and available for use on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, contributing to the visual documentation of the festival and contemporary cultural life in Macedonia.
The participation also provided an opportunity to continue strengthening the cooperation between Wikimedia MKD and the MakeDox Film Festival, while promoting the importance of free knowledge and freely accessible cultural content.
Through its participation in MakeDox 2026, Wikimedia MKD continued its efforts to document cultural and artistic events in Macedonia and make them more visible and accessible to a wider audience. Activities such as this contribute to enriching Wikimedia Commons with valuable visual material while strengthening long-term cooperation with cultural institutions and festivals.
You can see the photographs uploaded on Commons, but also some of the photos are bellow:
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Day 2 Kurshumli-An - Countri in Focus: Spain, Miguel Eek & Xavier Marrades -
After the 'Good People' movie premiere -
Tamara Kotevska -
Thus wrote Ilinka - Zlatko Geleski & Petar Volnarovski -
MakeDox 17 (2026) - Press Conference -
MakeDox 17 - Milcho Manchevski & Toni Dimkov
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Certificate of Appreciation for Wikimedia MKD from the Museum of the Macedonian Struggle
As part of the activities of Wikimedia MKD, cooperation with cultural institutions in Macedonia continued through partnerships aimed at supporting the sharing and promotion of free knowledge. One of the institutions with which Wikimedia MKD has established cooperation is the Museum of the Macedonian Struggle in Skopje.
In recognition of the cooperation and activities carried out so far,оn 3 September 2026, the Museum awarded Wikimedia MKD a certificate of appreciation. The certificate was received on behalf of Wikimedia MKD by Bosa Filipović, Education Program Manager at Wikimedia MKD.
The cooperation with the Museum is part of Wikimedia MKD’s broader efforts to establish connections with cultural and educational institutions and involve them in activities related to Wikimedia projects. Through such partnerships, institutions have the opportunity to become more familiar with the Wikimedia movement and the possibilities for making cultural, historical, and educational content freely accessible.
The certificate of appreciation represents recognition of the cooperation established between the two organizations and the activities implemented within this partnership. It also provides a basis for continuing and further developing the cooperation in the future.
Wikimedia MKD will continue working with museums and other cultural institutions in Macedonia in order to support the documentation, preservation, and sharing of knowledge and cultural heritage through Wikimedia projects.
August in Wikimedia Serbia
Wikimedia Serbia and CPH
Wikimedia Serbia actively participated in the global Content Partnerships Hub, a key initiative uniting Wikimedia organizations and volunteers worldwide to foster partner collaborations for free knowledge sharing. The Hub aims to enhance cooperation with cultural, scientific, and international institutions, such as museums, libraries, and archives—making their assets accessible on Wikipedia and sister projects.
Science's forgotten minds campaign
Through an campaign centered on science's forgotten minds, nine contributors expanded the Serbian Wikipedia with 16 new articles on overlooked researchers. Beyond these new biographies, participants expanded the desired-topics roster, laying a strong foundation for future initiatives and making a meaningful contribution to preserving scientific heritage.
Organizational preparations
Organizational preparations and planning for an upcoming Wikipedian in residence program scheduled before the end of the year are complete. This phase involved outlining preliminary work programs, setting execution timelines, and aligning on priority areas for digitization.
Summer, Follow-up in Aarau, CoCreation
Summer
This summer was quite hot. Green gras turned brown, people escaped to the water. It was difficult to buy fans as they were sold out in many cities. The summer break is always a time for reflection as well. Everything calms down, people get together and share their thoughts and worries about the climate and the future with all its destruction through wars, violance and environmental threads. Artificial intelligence remains a main topic. Wikimedia CH was an active agent at the panel about the Enzyklika «Magnifica humanitas» of pope Leo XIV at the ETH in Zürich. Different types of intelligences have been discussed. Themes are ethic challenges and the role of education for solidarity as well as digital literacy and the christian theory on social ethics. In GLAM the topic of Artistic Intelligence becomes important on conferences.
Follow-up in Aarau
End of August there was the Follow-Up of the GLAM-on-Tour at the Library and Archive in Aarau. Wikipedians continued their work with writing new articles, works on Wiki Commons and updating existing articles. A young archivist working on Jewish memorials in Switzerland joined and presented her project. It was a sunny day with a lunch break in the city. Aarau is a diverse city where different religions are praticised. It was the former political capital of Switzerland. The canton has a female history that the library aims to present and discover more. Different groups live well together. Wikimedians from different parts in Switzerland and abroad worked quite concentrated in the studio space. Original books on the history and the region were provided. The working results can be find here.
CoCreation
The CoCreation project with the PTT-Archive in Bern took part before summer. Informations can be found here. In August a manual was created to use it for other GLAM institutions. The pdf can be accessed on here on Wiki Commons. On the image you see the story of a 10-year-old war orphan and how he found his second family in Switzerland. The artwork is a collage of key images and a diary excerpt.
Wikimedia gets Gazetted + Islamic Calligraphy on English Wikipedia
The Gazette
Andy Mabbett has been appointed Wikimedian in Residence at The Gazette, the UK's official journal of record. This incudes the publications The London Gazette (first published in 1665!), The Belfast Gazette and The Edinburgh Gazette.
The project is scheduled to run until November. An online edit-a-thon will be announced soon. See the project page at en:Wikipedia:GLAM/The Gazette.
Khalili Foundation
30th Did You Know, 28th (and 29th?) Featured Image award, and 110th new article
Featured images
In a unanimous decision, the Composite Imaginary View of Japan has been given a Featured Image award by Hebrew Wikipedia, who included it on the front page on 30 July. This is our 28th Featured Image award in total and the first from Hebrew Wikipedia. That brings us to six different wiki platforms (Arabic, English, Hebrew, Indonesian, Persian, Wikimedia Commons) that have given Featured Image awards to the Khalili Collections.
An image of Firuzabadi's al-Qamus al-Muhit is currently being reviewed for Featured Image status on Arabic Wikipedia. The review has until 15th September to run, and if the image passes it will be on the front page of Arabic Wikipedia on 16th September.
Article improvements
The article on Amanat Khan Shirazi appeared as a "Did You Know?" on the English Wikipedia home page on 12 August. This was the 30th DYK related to the Khalili Collections. That article has now been submitted for Good Article review.
Dave Palfrey, a wiki volunteer based in Cambridge who does a lot of diversity work (and who I got to know at Wikimania), was inspired to create a new Wikipedia biography for the art historian Catherine B. Asher who wrote a paper about Amanat Khan. There's a Khalili connection because Asher reviewed the Leach "Paintings from India" catalogue.
I created a new article on Hilya on Simple English Wikipedia, by "translating" the English Wikipedia article. In the course of the translation, I discovered and fixed a number of minor errors in the English Wikipedia article. I then reused text from the new article in the Simple English Wikipedia article on Muhammad and the English Wikipedia article on Muhammad. Hilya is the 4th new article added to Simple English Wikipedia and the 110th new Wikipedia article related to the Khalili Collections.
On English Wikipedia, I expanded the Islamic calligraphy article by adding a section on calligraphy objects: muraqqa, tughra, and hilya, illustrated with images from the Khalili Collections. I also expanded the Talismanic shirt article.
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Here are some new articles, created by volunteers, that use images from the Khalili Collections. It's hard to track all uses, so this is likely incomplete.
- Korean: Qajar art
- Armenian: Islamic calligraphy (second image)
- Indonesian: Amir al-Hajj
I also created a new English Wikipedia article for the Ghana Memory of the World Register. That is discussed in the Memory of the World report.
Khalili Foundation on MEOW
MEOW, created by Wikimedia Sweden, is an overview of activities to improve Wikipedia and other Wikimedia platforms. It points to articles (including monthly reports like the one you're reading), blog posts, slide decks, videos, and other resources. So it is not mainly for the general public, but for Wikimedia contributors, partner organisations, and potential partners. The site gives lots of different ways to summarise the underlying database, and everything can be tagged with keywords. It's great for identifying the major projects and seeing what they have done.
A month ago, there were just two items tagged with "Khalili Foundation"; now there are 107. I have been adding tags to existing items as well as adding videos, blog posts, and project pages that were not yet known to the database. I have been corresponding with Alicia at Wikimedia Sweden to get project pages (such as Khalili-Wikimedia UK partnership and UNESCO Memory of the World project) added and visible in the interface.
Metrics
The Impact Visualizer is a tool that shows overview statistics about a group of Wikipedia articles. I've created a view of 37 articles on English Wikipedia relating to the Khalili Collections. It shows that these articles together get 1,230 visits each day (around 450,000 visits per year), they have 55,000 words in total, and most are at Good Article quality.
The stats server reports 3,412,471 image views for August. These numbers usually increase as school and university courses start again after the summer holiday.
OpenGLAM Summer 2026 in Ukraine
Summer 2026 was a particularly productive season for GLAM-related activities in Ukraine.
OpenGLAM training course
In the second half of June 2026, Wikimedia Ukraine held the first part of a training course for GLAM professionals as part of the OpenGLAM in Ukraine project.
Open GLAM in Ukraine-Training program (OGU-TP) is Ukrainian-Swedish project aimed to equip Ukrainian GLAM institutions with the knowledge and skills to use Wikimedia platforms in their work.
One of Wikimedia Ukraine’s partners and project participants, the War Museum, provided the venue. Other institutions taking part include the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine, the State Archival Service of Ukraine, the Crimean Institute for Strategic Studies, the “Ancient Chernihiv” National Architectural and Historical Reserve, the “Hetman's Capital” National Historical and Cultural Reserve, the Korolenko Kharkiv State Scientific Library, and the Center for Digital History.
The project is run in partnership with Wikimedia Sverige and funded by the Swedish Institute
The course brought together 23 representatives of Ukrainian archives, museums, and libraries. The course programme included an introduction to Wikipedia and its sister projects, training in Wikipedia editing and article creation, as well as hands-on work with Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata.
Over five intensive days of training, participants:
- created 58 new Wikipedia articles
- edited 179 articles and added 527 references
- uploaded 65 files to Wikimedia Commons
Most participants had no prior experience working with Wikimedia projects, so the course started with the basics — from exploring the fundamental rules and principles of Wikimedia projects to hands-on work across projects ranging from Wikipedia to Wikidata.
Wikimania
At Wikimania 2026 in Paris, Svitlana Vyslinska, project manager of OpenGLAM in Ukraine, shared insights into the situation of GLAM institutions in Ukraine during the war and presented the project's experience and activities.
She:
- Took part in the panel discussion “Open Knowledge under Attack: How Knowledge and Heritage Institutions Can Build Resilience under the Rise of Right-Wing Populism,” together with representatives from Germany, Sweden, the United States, the Netherlands, and Colombia (recording)
- Presented “Empowering GLAM Institutions Through Wikimedia: A Ukrainian-Swedish Training and Leadership Programme” as part of the Lightning Talk Showcase (recording)
- Prepared and presented the poster “Not the Right Time? Ukraine GLAMs’ Openness During War”
Looking ahead
The second part of the training course for GLAM professionals is planned for November. In 2026, we're running the first cohort of the course; next year we'll repeat it for one more cohort of GLAM professionals from other institutions.
For any questions about the project, contact us at glam
wikimedia.org.ua
GLAM USA Report (Past & Upcoming)
WikiBento: Roll our your own GLAM stats dashboard
Have you ever wanted to make your own dashboard to track your GLAM wiki or Wikimedian in Residence assets? A new project WikiBento allows you to do this and more. It is now open in alpha testing mode for those in the GLAM wiki community to modify and create their own dashboards.
The Problem: The observabilty of Wikimedia content and its usage has always been tough to track. We have a diverse range of metrics and reporting tools from Magnus Manske, the WMF, or other contributors, but they are not unified in any single view. And some faciliites like the Wikimedia Commons Impact Metrics API have never had an official user interface at all. This inadequate measurement and evaluation tools have been highlighted by the GLAM wiki community for many years.
The Solution: With WikiBento, users can display statistics, top 10 lists, SPARQL queries, individual Wikipedia articles or large image galleries, all in a customized view that can be saved and shared. Inspired by the rectangular compartments of Japanese bento boxes, WikiBento reads in a configuration of widgets and actions from a JSON file that can be generated from the authoring interface. After the user configures what they want, WikiBento can output the JSON file so users can store it on-wiki to be loaded again in the future.
Examples
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A WikiBento board can explore a particular Commons category (ie. Images from Metropolitan Museum of Art) and display the statistics and content related to it. Each bento box corresponds to either an API call or a tool call, displaying its output. |
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A project like WikiPortraits can use WikiBento to track not just a category, but track popular Wikipedia pages and their status, such as with the article about skater Alysa Liu: |
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WikiBento boxes can go beyond just displaying content: they can be interactive and feed info from one to another, so that you can set up a sophisticated chain of events (currently a work in progress). Here is an example where you can select different GLAM institutions, and get the stats to change: |
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Ever had a bunch of Wikidata SPARQL queries you want to keep an eye on? You can configure each WikiBento box with a different one and show them in a dashboard. In fact, you can even query Wikimedia Commons using the third-party QLever endpoint and get statistics on Commons files: |
Future work
WikiBento is a work in progress and was initially built for a specific need – to provide a unified way to display output from the many tools in GLAM wiki work, while providing a much needed interface for API calls. As work on the dashboard function progressed, more features started to emerge. Connecting widgets provided a powerful way to chain capabilities together, providing a way to experiment with interactive multimedia.
To try it out, users can load one of the examples above and then click on the "gear" icon to change parameters – set it to a category you are interested in, or change the article to the one you care about. The idea is to experiment, drag, or reconfigure it for your uses.
WikiBento started as a simple dashboard but has grown to be something more. It is simultaneously:
- A Grafana dashboard
- An interactive Pinterest board
- A clickable HyperCard-like interactive space
- A Yahoo Pipes workflow.
So is it an activity monitor? A content platform? A multimedia browser? An exploratory storytelling experience?
You don't need to choose. It can be all of these, in any combination. That's what we are trying to find out and experiment with.
I also invite others to try it and provide feedback on the project at its Github repository, or contact Andrew Lih (User:Fuzheado) directly.
Addendum: This project was made possible with the coding assistance of an agentic coding system: Pi agent and Deepseek V4. More details can be found at the github repository.
Upcoming events
Online
A monthly online meet-up for people interested in community archiving.
- Date: Thursday, September 10, 2026
- Guest speaker: Camille Lawrence, Black Beauty Archive
- Time: noon PT, 2:00pm MT, noon CT, 3:00pm ET
- When: Saturday 12 September, 2026
- Time: 12:00-2:00 pm EDT
California
San Diego
San Diego Wikimedians User Group will be hosting a salon/edit-a-thon at a San Diego County Library in El Cajon, California.
- w:Wikipedia:Meetup/San Diego/September 2026
- Date: September 27th, 2026
- Time: 12:30PM - 4:00PM PDT
- Location: San Diego County Library in El Cajon, California
- Potential agenda topics: National Hispanic Heritage Month.
San Francisco
- Bay Area WikiSalon September 2026
- September 15, 2026
- Time: 6.30 PM
Temecula
The Wikimedians of Los Angeles & San Diego Wikimedians User Group will be partnering with the Riverside County Library System library in Temecula, California to hold a salon/edit-a-thon.
- w:Wikipedia:Meetup/Riverside/September 2026
- Date: Saturday, September 19, 2026
- Time: 2:00PM - 4:00PM PDT
- Location: 30600 Pauba Road, Temecula, CA 92592
Illinois
Chicago
Wikicurious will be in Chicago at the Richard J. Daley Branch of the Chicago Public Library with Wikimedians of Chicago on September 19, 2026.
- Sign-up here: w:Event:Wikicurious: Windy City on Wikipedia (Chicago)
New York
- When: September 19, 2026
- Who: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
- When: September 30, 2026
- Where: Prime Produce
- When: September 25 – October 12, 2026
- Who: Planned coverage by WikiPortraits
- When: October 30, 2026
- Where: Pratt Institute School of Information
Washington DC
- When: September 14, 2026
- Where: Smithsonian National Museum of American History
- What: Panel appearance by Ariel Cetrone, Institutional Partnerships Manger, Wikimedia DC
Recently past events
Puerto Rico
- Arte y Cultura (Puerto Rico)
- Wikicurious in Puerto Rico organized by Wikimedia NYC and the Puerto Rico Museum of Art, in collaboration with WikiLatinos, WikiPortraits, and the North American Wikimedia Hub.
- When: August 28-29, 2026
- Where: Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, San Juan
Washington
- Seattle Wiknic 2026: August 22, 2026
Updates on work by BHL-Wiki working Group members
Upcoming TDWG 2026 presentations
Siobhan Leachman (Ambrosia10), Sabine von Mering (S.v.Mering)and other members of the BHL Wiki working group are preparing a variety of presentations for the upcoming TDWG 2026 conference. Although not specifically presenting on BHL, several presentations will mention BHL or BHL identifiers related to the topics being presented on, including the Wikidata type specimen data model and the Wikidata and TDWG working group data model for research expeditions.
WoRMS Wikidata WikiProject
Siobhan and Sabine have also been contributing to the Who is who in Marine Taxonomy WikiProject. This recently formed Wikidata WikiProject has been initiated by the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) and aims to use Wikidata to store, structure, link, and openly share information on the people who described marine species. This work aligns with and can leverage off the disambiguation of BHL creators undertaken via their Wikidata items. Once disambiguated those creators can then be linked to their publications, assuming those publications also have Wikidata items. The Wikidata property WoRMS source id can be added to the Wikidata items for those publications, often joining the BHL publication id or BHL part id. This work has the potential to help WoRMS link to BHL in the WoRMS website.
BHL identifiers in Wikidata
Work is continuing by multiple editors on Biodiversity Heritage Library creator id mix’n’match dataset with new Wikidata identifiers being created for BHL creators without an existing Wikidata item.
Ghana national register
This is the twenty-second monthly report of the ongoing work to improve the representation of the UNESCO Memory of the World international register on Wikimedia projects. This is supported and fully funded by the Khalili Foundation, with the involvement of UNESCO and Wikimedia UK.
New articles
A new addition this year to the Memory of the World Programme is the national register for Ghana. This is a short list, so it was easy to create an English Wikipedia article for it as well as a Wikidata item. I have also updated the Memory of the World Register in Africa article to mention the African regional register and the Ghana national register.
Three articles about individual inscriptions were created by volunteers:
- Russian: Archivo General de Simancas
- Persian: Karatepe Bilingual
- Latin: Treaty of Tordesillas
Metrics
The Massviews tool reports 3,198,774 views for pages on English Wikipedia that link to the MoW International Register.
The Commons Analytics server reports 119 million views for images related to the MoW International Register. Due to imperfect tagging, this is an approximate figure.
Media loading change affects Commons Impact Metrics and GLAM analytics
In a recent report by Tech News 2026, issue 35, the Media Platform Team shared an important update on the work they are accomplishing with images and thumbnails.
“In order to improve page performance, images now load when they are viewed. This means images lower down an article will not load if a reader never scrolls to that part of the page, which may affect some image-related metrics.”
This work could be tracked under Phabricator ticket: “Enable native image lazy loading on desktop” and is connected to the Wikimedia Foundation's annual plan, in the section related to thumbnail infrastructure, under KR PP3.6: Image thumbnailing.
This change allows pages to load lighter and faster, consequently enhancing readability. Since April 2026, this change has been enabled on mobile devices, but now it has also been enabled on desktop.
The update will likely reduce media-level metrics delivered via Commons Impact Metrics, therefore impacting some pageviews data reported by cultural heritage (GLAM) institutions using the API. Other data delivered by CIM, like page-level metrics, should remain the same.
If you have any questions or concerns, please contact gfontenellewikimedia or leave a comment on the Phabricator ticket or on the Commons Impact Metrics discussion page.
September's GLAM events
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Wikicurious in Chicago
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