Jump to content

GLAM/Newsletter/December 2025/Single

Add links
From Outreach Wiki


Global GLAM Calls Continue in 2026

Happy 2026

We're excited to share that our GLAM Community Calls will be happening on the fourth Tuesday of each month throughout 2026. Mark your calendars for this month's call on January 27 at 13:30 UTC – you can register now on the event page.

smallpx
smallpx

The calls will continue alternating between 8:00 UTC and 13:30 UTC to accommodate community members across different time zones, with ongoing support from the Content Partnerships Hub and the Content Enablement Team at the Wikimedia Foundation.


We want to hear from you!

We're inviting everyone in the Global GLAM Community to submit your topic requests and proposals.

We're building our upcoming agendas around the five strategic pillars that were developed at GLAM Wiki last year, which form the foundation for GLAM activities in 2026 and beyond. By centering these pillars in our calls, we hope to help affiliates and contributors prioritize these themes in their own work and collaborate across time zones, countries, and languages to advance GLAM Wiki activities together.

We are also welcoming new hosts for the calls! If you are interested in getting involved as an organizer please use the form above as well. Looking forward to seeing you at the call!

All the best,

GLAM Community Call Organizers



Wikimedian in Residence, 2025, in Elbasan Albania

Wikimedian in Residence, 2025, in Elbasan Albania

The three-month Wikimedian in Residence project at the Qemal Baholli Public Library in Elbasan has officially come to an end. From September to November 2025, our Wikimedian in Residence, Beneta Dhima, focused on expanding and improving articles related to Albanian arts, history, movies, and artists.

Throughout the project, Beneta created 8 new Wikipedia articles, improved 54 existing ones, uploaded 38 media files to Wikimedia Commons, and completed a total of 268 edits on Wikidata. This collaboration has increased the visibility of the Albanian cultural heritage on the Wikimedia platforms and strengthened the library’s ability to engage with open knowledge initiatives.

Her hard work highlights the ongoing value of GLAM partnerships in Albania and encourages further work in making cultural content accessible to the public.

Social media

  • We have a public channel on WhatsApp of Albanian Language if you want to join and discuss Wikimedia projects.

If you want to see more about our activities, you can:



Resume of the year

Archivos en Vigilia

The fifth edition of "Archivos en Vigilia" took place on March, organized by Wikimedia Argentina and the Historical Archive of La Plata National University (UNLP). Last year's edition, we invited Wikimedia Brazil to participate and this year Wikimedia México also joined not only opening human rights archives but also giving awareness about the topic. Read more about this here.

In 2026 we will continue doing Archivos en Vigilia as an annual cycle, focused on how archives build memory as regards human rights, underrepresented communities, accessibility. We will have three different moments: on march we will upload documents, on june we will work improving their content and in December we will held an online session to show the edition's outcomes and invite people for the next one (2027). If you want to join this activity, feel free to contact us!


Codigo Cultura 2025 edition

This year, through "Codigo Cultura" proyect, the educational videogame "Guardianes de las Coplas" was created in collaboration with the Heritage and Museums Office of Catamarca province. It highlights the cultural heritage of Northwest Argentina through open access to knowledge: documents and pictures on Wikimedia Commons and information on Wikipedia articles. This strategy not only broadens the socialization of valuable historical and cultural content, but also strengthens the use of video games as an educational tool and for building identity. You can try the videogame, available in Spanish, here: https://wikimediaargentina.itch.io/guardianes-de-las-coplas. If you want to explore the uploaded content without playing the game, you can access the Wikimedia Commons category.

"Código Cultura" is an initiative that promotes the creation of video games using digitized collections from cultural institutions across the country. The program offers training, mentorship, and funding for the winning project, aiming to foster new ways of engaging with cultural heritage through technology. If you want to learn how we did it, contact us!


MIL: memory and local identity

The MIL Project was launched this year with ICOM Argentina. It aimed to strengthen the connection between communities and their cultural heritage through digitization and open access. During the last months, training and collaboration activities were carried out with Argentine museums to promote the identification, description and digitization of relevant collections so that they could be published on open access platforms such as Wikimedia Commons.

The project reached out 50 museums, from which 28 finally participated in the initiative. They received advice on how to document collections in order to make them available con Wikimedia projects. They were asked to select at least 20 archives (pictures, documents) of objects as well as 10 pictures of the museum's building. We're currently working on corroborating all the knowledge so we can proceed to the upload.


Digitization

We continued working towards preservation of historical and cultural archives in all the country. This were our main content partnerships:

Academia Argentina de Letras

This year we uploaded 65 books, reaching 1574 digitized books so far, from authors like: Enrique Garcia Vellos, Rodolfo Fausto Rodriguez, Emma de la Barra, Carlos-Octavio Bunge, Leopoldo Lugones, Carlos A. Leumann, Jose Garmendia, Angel de Estrada, Jose Cibils, Alfredo de Arteaga, Alberto Ghiraldo, Martiniano Leguizamón, Luis Garcia, Luis D. Cabral, Robert Lehmann Nitsche, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Juan Bautista Gomez, Pedro E. Pico, Ricardo Monner Sanz, Manuel Ugarte, Jose Marmol, José Ingenieros, Francisco Sicardi, Enrique Richard Lavalle, Don Baldmar F. Dobranich, Francisco Soto y Calvo, Arturo H. Vazquez y Carlos Guido y Spano, Arturo Reynal O'Connor, Enrique Richard Lavalle, Godofredo Daireaux y Estanislao Zeballos.

Find more at: https://w.wiki/36S


Academia Nacional de la Historia

We only uploaded 13 photographs, but we have a many pending batches to upload, including books and archive documents, and ongoing work in the digitization of the institutional photos archive.

Find more at: https://w.wiki/6o9


Archivo General de la Nación

All batches from the digitization work done at the Archivo General de la Nación, has been uploaded. Around 5800 files (or 3000 photographs) belonging to the editorial dossiers of the "Caras y Caretas" magazine published in Argentina between 1898 y 1939.


Find more at: https://w.wiki/HMFy


Museo del Fin del Mundo and Museo de la Ciudad de Rosario

We still have to upload a batch from the Rosario City Museum of around 60 photos. And we uploaded a test batch of an biological collection linking them to GBIF repository.

Find more at: https://w.wiki/3KuT and https://w.wiki/HMFv

All these content not only remain accessible for everyone on Wikimedia Commons, but also were part of activities in which interested people improved information, categories, structured data and others on Wikimedia Commons as well as illustrating Wikipedia. This -socialization and reuse- will be a strategic pillar of our activities in 2026.

For instance, due to the Universal Access to Information Day (September) and Open Access Week (October), we held two workshops together with the National Archives, aimed at reusing digitized materials. At least 6 Wikipedia articles were improved with photographs from the collection and many of them were improved, adding structured data (depicts and coordinates mainly).


GLAM events

The Culture program of Wikimedia Argentina has been part of two important events this year to share local experiences as regards working with cultural partnerships, collections and projects.

On one hand, the "GLAM Cono Sur" initiative organized with Wikimedia Chile, Wikimedistas de Uruguay and the CDF of Montevideo has been an intensive two-day event for making advocacy, sharing knowledge and building strategic partnerships highlighting the need of having more open access policies inside institutions. Wikimedia Argentina invited cultural leaders to join the conversation: ICOM Argentina, Chaco province's Cultural Institute, and the Central Historical Archive of the National University of La Plata.


On the other hand, the "GLAM Wiki" held at Lisboa, Portugal, was a three-day conference in which Wikimedia Argentina was able to talk about different projects in lightning talks, roundtable and even "creative sessions" or workshops. At the same time, the team took part on the organization by being part of the scholarships committee as well as the program design.


2026 Culture program will continue working towards a more accessible local history, culture and science.. We will keep you up!


AMaGA partnership, signing the Open Heritage Statement and South Australian Museum Partner Project

AMaGA: Building Digital Skills, Sharing Stories, Sustaining Culture

In late 2025, Wikimedia Australia awarded Partner Project funding to the Australian Museums and Galleries Association (AMaGA). Heading into 2026, this project will deliver targeted training to AMaGA staff and volunteers on Wikimedia platforms, initially focusing on underrepresented regions of Australia. These newly trained users will then review and strengthen the representation of Australia’s regional, remote, and First Nations owned and operated galleries, museums, and keeping places on Wikimedia platforms. By engaging directly with cultural organisations, AMaGA will update and expand Wikimedia entries, ensuring that diverse local collections, stories, and knowledge are visible to both national and international audiences.

Read more: Partner Projects Announcement 2025-2026, Ali Smith, 5 November 2025.

Wikimedia Australia signs the Open Heritage Statement

Wikimedia Australia (WMAU) has proudly signed the Open Heritage Statement (OHS), joining organisations worldwide in calling for equitable access to public-domain cultural heritage in the digital environment. By signing this statement, WMAU reinforces its commitment to open access and to the free exchange of knowledge. This includes supporting initiatives that allow people to engage with, build upon and benefit from our shared cultural record.

Read more: Wikimedia Australia signs the Open Heritage Statement, Elliott Bledsoe, 31 October 2025.

South Australian Museum Partner Project wrap up

South Australian Museum staff, volunteers and Director Dr Hamilton with local Wikimedians

Spearheaded by Adam Moriarty, the South Australian Museum's digital transformation leader, this project finished up in late 2025 and was aimed at increasing the visibility of the Museum's research and collections on Wikimedia platforms.

Highlights have included:

  • increased collaboration between museum staff and volunteers and the broader Wikimedia editing community.
  • Mike Dickison developed a roadmap for engaging with Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Wikimedia Commons. This strategy prioritised inclusivity and ensured that contributions effectively represent South Australia’s history and culture.
  • a part-time Wikipedian-in-Residence (WiR) engaged with the museum for 100 hours to implement the roadmap. The WiR worked on priority areas to create and edit content, provide staff training, and engage the community.
  • an in-person hands-on workshop, a Wiki Day at SA Museum: From Photos to Facts, explored the Wikimedia Commons workflow for local wikimedians.
  • the work undertaken in the museum collections led to a remarkable increase in interest in polar explorer Sir Douglas Mawson. See An incredible 1 million new reads about Mawson.

This project has laid the foundation for sustainable long-term contributions by the South Australia Museum to Wikimedia platforms.

Read more about the project on the Wikimedia Australia website.

Image: South Australian Museum staff, volunteers and Director Dr Hamilton with Wikimedians by BindiS, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons


Public Domain Day 2026, Circus Heritage and Fosdem

News from Wikimedia Belgium.

Public Domain Day 2026 – Brussels, 15 January

Public Domain Day 2026
On 15 January 2026, Public Domain Day returns to KBR (the Royal Library of Belgium) in Brussels, bringing together GLAM professionals, researchers, policy makers and open knowledge practitioners from across Europe.

The programme features a plenary keynote and international updates from Creative Commons, Europeana and Internet Archive Europe, followed by parallel Belgian and European tracks on public domain policy, digitisation, creative reuse and community-driven initiatives. In the afternoon, participants can join practical presentations and hands-on workshops, including sessions on CommonsDB, Tapestries and creative crowdsourcing formats such as pattern-a-thons.

Participation is free, registration is required by 7 January.

👉 Register and join the conversation on the future of the public domain.

Wikithon: Documenting Circus Heritage at the Wintercircus

Programma Nouveau Cirque de Gand, 1895
As part of Smells Like Circus 2026, Circuscentrum and Huis van Alijn are organising a three-day Wikithon on circus history at the iconic Wintercircus. During these collaborative writing sessions, participants will document both the rich history and contemporary practices of circus culture across Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata.

Building on earlier collection uploads and newly created Wikidata entries, the Wikithon focuses on expanding, illustrating and connecting open knowledge about circuses, artists and circus professions. The event is open to everyone, no prior Wikipedia experience required.

📍 Location: Wintercircus
🗓️ When: 22–24 January 2026 (evenings & Saturday afternoon)
💻 Extra info: Bring your own laptop; registration required upfront
👉 Join us and help write circus history — together.

FOSDEM 2026 – Open Source Meets Community

FOSDEM Logo
FOSDEM 2026 (Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting) takes place on 31 January and 1 February 2026 at the ULB Solbosch campus in Brussels.

This free, non-commercial, volunteer-run event brings together open source developers, communities and organisations from across Europe and beyond.

With hundreds of talks, developer rooms and thematic tracks, FOSDEM offers a comprehensive overview of the latest developments in free and open source software.

All sessions are live-streamed and made freely available afterwards, making the event accessible well beyond Brussels.

👉 Discover the full programme on the FOSDEM website.

Want to read our full newsletter? Click here


Preparándonos para celebrar el día del dominio público - Getting ready for the Public Domain Day celebration

(English below)

Empezamos a tener identificadores de autoridades de autor

Como parte del proyecto Visibiizando el dominio público colombiano, propusimos la propiedad de identificadores de Banrep Cultural ¡y fue aprobada! Ahora queremos que se apruebe la propiedad de identificador de la Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia. Nos puedes ayudar votando a favor de su aprobación.

Tenemos el primer identificador de autoridades de autor en Colombia pero nos faltan crear muchos más. Este identificador nos ayudará a que podamos tener mayor precisión a la hora de referirnos a las personas que crean obras desde Colombia, evitando la homonimia y haciendo más iteroperables los catálogos de las bibliotecas con el entorno Wikimedia, particularmente Wikidata.

We're Starting to Have Author Authority Identifiers

As part of the project Highlighting the Colombian public domain in Wikidata, we proposed the Banrep Cultural ID property and it was approved! Now we want the National Library of Colombia ID property to be approved. You can help us by voting in favor of its approval.

We have the first author authority identifier in Colombia but we still need to create many more. This identifier will help us have greater precision when referring to people who create works from Colombia, avoiding homonyms and making library catalogs more interoperable with the Wikimedia environment, particularly Wikidata.


Exploring Italy and Unlocking Its Heritage: Touring Club Italiano and GLAM Call 2026–2028

The Guide Rosse d’Italia on Wikimedia Commons

Plan of the Milan Cathedral
Map of Cortina D'Ampezzo

In 2025, the collaboration between Wikimedia Italia and the Touring Club Italiano reached a new and significant milestone, focusing on one of the most authoritative and recognisable editorial landmarks of the TCI: the Guide Rosse d’Italia (Red Guides of Italy).

Building on the work carried out in previous years on historical cartography, photographic archives, and visual materials related to Italian art, culture, and industry, this year’s project concentrated on the digitisation and open publication of the maps included in the Red Guides dedicated to Lombardy and Veneto, as well as in the standalone guides to Milan and Venice. The corpus includes area maps, city and neighbourhood maps, and detailed plans of monuments and architectural complexes, all made available on Wikimedia Commons under a free licence. see the Commons category

Maps and architectural plans from an authoritative source such as the Touring Club Italiano are particularly valuable within the Wikimedia ecosystem. Cartographic material available on Wikimedia projects is often, for copyright reasons, either very old and not always aligned with contemporary standards, or created directly by users, which, while extremely useful, is not always traceable to a historically and scientifically recognised source. The availability of carefully curated maps produced by the TCI therefore represents a qualitative step forward, strengthening the visual reliability of Wikipedia articles and supporting high standards of accuracy and verifiability.

The upload process was completed in October 2025, and early usage metrics clearly demonstrate the impact of the project. These materials are currently embedded in 759 pages across 38 different language editions, reaching over one million file views in November 2025.

Among the most viewed media are the map of Cortina d’Ampezzo and the plan of Milan Cathedral. The former has gained particular relevance in light of the upcoming Winter Olympic Games; the latter exemplifies how authoritative plans of iconic monuments can become stable reference points for the free encyclopaedia.

The 2025 project further confirms that collaboration between GLAM institutions and Wikimedia is not only about opening up collections, but also about making thoughtful editorial choices and ensuring that the materials shared can be effectively reused by global communities of contributors and readers. Work on the Red Guides will continue in the coming years, progressively expanding the availability of this extraordinary cartographic heritage and reinforcing its role as a shared resource for research, education, and public knowledge.

GLAM Call 2026–2028: A Triennial Opportunity to Share Italy’s Cultural Heritage

Agne Kuzmickaite, costume design for Die Zauberflöte by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Collage on paperboard, 2006

Since 2021, Wikimedia Italia’s GLAM call has supported Italian cultural institutions in digitizing and sharing their collections online. Created in collaboration with ICOM Italy and Creative Commons Italy, the program encourages free reuse of public domain and open access content, promoting research, creativity, and public engagement.

Starting in 2026, the GLAM call enters a triennial phase, with applications open annually from January 14th to February 28th until 2028. Grants are open to all cultural institutions, such as, but not limited to, museums, archives, libraries, both public and private. (Here the call (in Italian))

Past projects illustrate the diversity and impact of GLAM initiatives: from digitizing cetacean skeletons at the Natural History Museum of Pisa, to making Sapienza University’s anatomical teaching plates publicly available, to publishing stage designs and costume sketches from the Teatro Regio in Turin. Smaller institutions, like the Museo Civico Alpino in Usseglio or the Centro Studi Baresi, have shared rare manuscripts, historical documents, and natural history collections previously difficult to access. These efforts allow scholars, enthusiasts, and the public to explore Italy’s cultural heritage freely and contribute to the global dissemination of knowledge.

Selected institutions also benefit from online training and expert mentoring, supporting them in publishing their content on Wikimedia platforms and OpenStreetMap. All materials are shared under free licenses, ensuring the creation of a reusable, openly accessible digital heritage.

Applying to the GLAM call is an opportunity not only to enhance institutional collections but also to actively contribute to Wikimedia Italia’s mission: making knowledge free, open, and accessible for all.


ASBS 2025 Conference follow-up Wiki webinar & Auckland Museum student update

Follow-up outreach at the ASBS 2025 Conference

Heidi and Siobhan with their personalised ASBS conference mugs

Recent outreach undertaken by Ambrosia10 and Stitchbird2 at the Australasian Systemic Botany Society 2025 Conference as part of the Wikidata WikiProject ASBS 2025 was detailed in last month's newsletter, including the main aims and other events in our suite of outreach activities for this project.

Our final event as part of this package was to to hold a follow-up webinar on the 9th of December. The first half of the webinar covered additional topics that were brought up at the previous webinar and in-person workshop, attracting 23 sign-ups, with 9 joining in on the live presentation.

We covered more advanced topics and questions that came up during our previous webinar and in-person workshop:

  • In Wikipedia, how to create a new article, how to use and edit templates, infoboxes and the talk page, and tips on correcting bias,
  • In Wikimedia Commons, how to upload specimen images from GBIF and correct species names in image files, and
  • In Wikidata, how to streamline your editing with several practical tools, and how to add qualifiers and references to statements.

The slides and script area available in Zenodo and Commons (slides) and script. The recording of this part of the webinar was recorded and is available on Commons. This recording and slides were also emailed to all those who signed up for or participated in the previous onboarding webinar or in-person workshop.

The second half of the follow up webinar was a non-recorded discussion and Q&A session that also served as a check-in with editors, some of whom had commenced contributing to the Wikiverse during our WikiProject.

Update on the Bioeconomy Science Institute Wikimedian in Residence

Handwriting sample of botanist Leonard Cockayne

Ambrosia10 recently completed a site visit to the Manaaki Whenua - Landcare Research (MWLR) group in Lincoln meeting the collection manager and curators at the Allan Herbarium. As a result of this meeting Ambrosia10 prioritised the uploading of handwriting samples of notable New Zealand and international botanists collated from specimens and archives held by the herbarium. See the Allan Herbarium handwriting sample category in Wikimedia Commons. Having such an accessible and reusable collection of handwriting samples can help herbarium both in New Zealand and internationally to accurately identify specimens collected and curated by those botanists. This upload has led to discussions with both Auckland Museum and Te Papa staff about further uploads of handwriting samples held by herbaria in those institutions.

After the Lincoln site visit librarians supplied Ambrosia10 with a list of publications authored by scientists affiliated with the Manaaki Whenua - Landcare Research Group. After selecting articles published in scientific journals, cleaning the metadata relating to those publications, and reconciling the articles against Wikidata to reduce the risk of duplication, Ambrosia10 used OpenRefine to create over 4000 Wikidata items for those publications. Work continues to disambiguate article authors and add further identifiers to the Wikidata items for those articles.

Auckland Museum student update

The Auckland Museum summer student programme for 2025-2026 is well under way. The cohort of six are being supervised by Winnieswikiworld alongside supervisors from MOTAT, NZMM and The Fletcher's Trust Archives. The students have been busy creating and enriching Auckland local history content, filling knowledge gaps and utilising their institutions research and collections. Some new articles created include:

Some new Wikimedia Commons uploads include:

GLAM project pages have been created and updated:

The Auckland Museum students have started a Wikiquote project with our librarian to support the #Shesaid campaign. So far, they have created pages with quotes from important women in Aotearoa:


As part of the programme, the students have been joined by a number of guest speaker Wikimedians Wing Chan, Lucy Moore and Alice Woods where they have gained valuable insight into the variety of work being done across Wikimedia platforms. They have also had tours of Auckland Museums Documentary Heritage and Collection Care departments, a session about Teu Le Va, the Museum's Pacific dimension and a tour of MOTATs offsite storage.

The students are in the midst of organising an Edit-a-thon which will be held at the Auckland Museum Research Library on Saturday 31st of January. The event will focus on working women of New Zealand, supporting the Women in Red Wikiproject. The goal will be to edit stub or start-class articles about New Zealand women who have worked or still work in three key areas- Arts, STEM and Law & Politics.

For updates about the student's progress, follow the project page.


Public Domain, Conferences, and Conversations on Open Culture

Wikimedia Poland at the University Library in Wrocław Jubilee Conference

the University of Wrocław Library building

On 4–5 December 2025, Wikimedia Polska participated in the jubilee conference “When Tradition Meets Technology”, marking the 80th anniversary of the University Library in Wrocław and 20 years of its Digital Library. The event gathered representatives of GLAM institutions and academia to discuss cooperation, digitisation, and future challenges.

During the second day, Kamila Neuman, Open Culture Manager at Wikimedia Polska, moderated Panel V: GLAM – Shared Heritage, Shared Future, focused on cross-sector collaboration, data interoperability, and public digitisation strategies. Recordings (in Polish) are available here:

After the panel, Ada Skirło, Senior Technology Specialist at Wikimedia Polska, led a practical workshop on using Wikidata to connect cultural and academic data. The session attracted strong interest and high participant engagement, especially during hands-on work with data from the Digital Library of the University of Wrocław.

We thank dr Dorota Siwecka, Director of the University Library in Wrocław, and Tomasz Kalota, Rector’s Plenipotentiary for Regional GLAM Cooperation at the University of Wrocław, for the invitation and collaboration.

Kamila Neuman on the Sektor 3.0 Podcast

Kamila Neuman, Open Culture Manager at Wikimedia Polska, was a guest on the Sektor 3.0 podcast in an episode titled “130 Million Free Images? Open Culture and Copyright for NGOs”, hosted by journalist Filip Jędruch. In the conversation, Kamila discusses how open online resources fit between commercial content and AI-generated media, why maintaining the flow of free knowledge matters for civil society, and how NGOs and cultural organisations can find and responsibly reuse openly licensed materials, using Wikimedia Commons and the wider Wikimedia ecosystem as practical examples.

Watch the episode (in Polish):

Sektor 3.0 is a Polish initiative (run by the Information Society Development Foundation and supported by the Polish-American Freedom Foundation) that helps organisations use digital tools and new technologies for socially beneficial work, sharing knowledge through publications, events, and a podcast series.

Polish Creators Entering the Public Domain in 2026

  • Jerzy Kossak
    Jerzy Kossak
  • Zofia Stankiewicz
    Zofia Stankiewicz
  • Wanda Kossecka
    Wanda Kossecka
  • Jan Czernecki
    Jan Czernecki
  • Roman Gineyko
    Roman Gineyko
  • Maria Płonowska
    Maria Płonowska

Public Domain Day 2026 marks the moment when works by creators who passed away in 1955 become free for everyone to use, share, and reinterpret. Alongside internationally recognized figures, we encourage the global GLAM-Wiki community to explore the works of Polish creators whose legacy has now entered the public domain. Below, we highlight a selection of Polish artists whose works became part of the public domain in 2026.

  • Jerzy Kossak – a Polish painter best known for historical scenes and battle paintings, continuing the artistic tradition of the Kossak family.
  • Zofia Stankiewicz – a painter and graphic artist, a feminist, and one of the first Polish women artists to study in Paris and work professionally as a printmaker.
  • Wanda Kossecka – a textile designer and artist, recognized for her designs inspired by folk art.
  • Jan Czernecki – a publisher, bookseller, and photographer.
  • Roman Gineyko – a painter whose work contributes to the diverse landscape of Polish 20th-century art.
  • Helena Roj-Kozłowska – a folk artist and writer, closely connected with the Podhale region.
  • Maria Płonowska – a painter known for landscapes and portraits.
  • Jadwiga Simon - a painter whose clandestine drawings made in the Ravensbrück concentration camp were shown after the war at the Malmö Museum. Her works are held in the Moderna Museet.

Their works are now part of the public domain, opening new opportunities for digitisation, reuse, and inclusion in Wikimedia projects worldwide.


GLAM on Tour Bellinzona, Xmas Event, GLAM Wiki Group

By Medea7


Participants of the GLAM on tour Bellinzona 2025 at the Cantonal Archive and Cantonal Library at Palazzo Franscini.

GLAM on Tour Bellinzona

The GLAM on Tour took place at the first weekend of December in Bellinzona, Ticino. People from Swiss main languages (Italian, French, German) participated. The state archive opened their magazines and books collections. Besides their were intervies with art spaces and visits at the library. The programme shows the diverse activities and the different locations. The Wiki work has been created in different languages. Ticino has a rich cultural heritage. With the GLAM on Tour event this heritage can be digitized and saved.



Xmas Event

Progr
Progr

This was the last event related to the UEFA Women Football games that took place in summer. Women football means creating teams of solidarity and supporting one another. There were four events in four different cities. Descriptions can be found here.





GLAM Wiki Group

The GLAM Wiki Group in Switzerland is a group with partners from GLAM institutions. There are three online meetings and one xmas event in person each year. It is manged and coordinated by the GLAM team of WMCH. The aim is to support exchanges between the different institutions and to give advice for the work on the wiki projects. Sometimes collaborations develop out of these meetings as for Example the GLAM-on-Tour at the library in Aarau. Group members are also involved in the GLAM Hack as in 2023 at the ethnographic museum in Geneva.


2025 in review

Khalili Foundation

Most of the work this month has been on the Memory of the World project, for which there is a separate report. There was also a Christmas break. There were no new articles or translations about the Khalili Collections in December.

The stats server reports 4,121,866 image views in December. Currently 481 different images from the collections are used across 1,294 pages on a total of 121 wikis.

Review of the Year

Textile artwork featuring embroidered Arabic text in silver thread
"Panel from the Sitarah of the Door of the Ka'bah" became a Featured Image on Arabic Wikipedia

This year the Khalili Collections achieved:


December meetings

Free Culture Friday

Wikimedia New York City held a meetup, Free Culture Friday December 2025.

Wiki Salon

Philadelphia Wikimedians, held a salon, WikiSalon 2025-12-13.

Meetup/Seattle

Seattle Wikimedians held a meetup, Meetup/Seattle.

Meetup/San Diego

San Diego Wikimedians held a meetup, San Diego/December 2025.


Public Domain Day 2026

Random selection of images

See for all restored and newly uploaded files the gallery at: c:Commons:Public Domain Day/2026

See also

If you upload more files because they entered the public domain, please add them on Commons to c:Category:Media uploaded for Public Domain Day 2026.


Updates on work by BHLWiki Working Group members

Transition update

The most recent blog updating the wider community on BHL's transition away from being hosted by the Smithsonian and towards independence has been published.

Like many GLAM related institutions, BHL is having to rely on additional sources of funding to sustain its existence. One of the major challenges during this transition is ensuring BHL's financial resilience. This blog discusses some of the actions take by BHL to attempt to achieve this.

Wikidata property proposals relevant to the BHL-Wiki working group

Brodie Hoare from the Auckland War Memorial Museum and Siobhan Leachman continue to collaborate on drafting a data model for type specimen Wikidata items and also a data model for Structured Data on Commons used on specimen images. The WikiProject formed for this collaboration can be viewed at this link. As part of this work two Wikidata properties that had been proposed by Brodie have been accepted. These are the collection date property and the specimen classifier property. Siobhan and Brodie continue to work on the proposed data model for type specimens and to map that model to the Darwin Core data standard terms. Documentation and workflows are currently being drafted and once complete will be open for feedback from the wider Wiki community.

Error report from the December 2025 BHL harvest of Author and Title identifiers from Wikidata

In December the BHL technical team again undertook their three monthly harvest of Author and Title identifiers from Wikidata. The error report of identifiers needing checking/fixing can be found here. Any help given to resolve these issues would be gratefully received.

A new GLAM joins BHL

In December it was announced that the University of Florida Libraries had joined BHL as a member organisation. For more information on this see this BHL blog post.

Improvements to the BHL2Wiki tool

Rod Page continues to make improvements to the BHL to Wikidata tool. This is a tool many in the BHLWiki working group use frequently in their editing workflows and as a group we are extremely grateful for Rod's efforts in maintaining and improving this tool.


2025 in review

By User:MartinPoulter & Clara Weber

This is the fifteenth 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.

Video from GLAM-Wiki conference

Martin's talk at the Lisbon conference is online here (from 28:20 to 38:44).

Representing the register

Karatepe open-air museum, Turkey, now tagged as the location of a Memory of the World inscription

This month the English Wikipedia and Wikidata representations of the MoW International Register were updated with the 74 additions from 2025. The lists and numbers are now up-to-date.

In the course of updating these lists, Martin:

  1. improved information about the institutions where inscriptions are located;
  2. connected the new data to existing representations of the inscriptions;
  3. replaced outdated links to the register on English Wikipedia.

There are still some institutions mentioned in the UNESCO data set that do not have a representation on any of the wiki platforms: some of these will be left as tasks for the wiki volunteer communities.

New Wikipedia articles

Terengganu Inscription Stone: subject of a new article on Korean Wikipedia
  1. Thai: The Golden Letter of the Burmese King Alaungphaya to King George II of Great Britain
  2. Korean: Terengganu Inscription Stone

Thanks to the updated data set, we can now find Wikipedia articles that were created earlier in the year but which we did not detect at the time:

  1. Swedish: Karl Tirén's collection of sami yoik
  2. Swedish: Ravensbrück archive in Lund
  3. Persian: The Archives of the Planet
  4. Japanese: Karatepe Bilingual
  5. Chinese: Ravensbrück archive in Lund
  6. Thai: Galle Trilingual Stele
  7. English: Treaty of Fribourg (1516)

Page and Image views

The Massviews tool reports 4,033,074 views in December on English Wikipedia articles that link to the MoW International Register.

The GLAMorgan tool reports 127 million image views in December for images related to the MoW International Register. This is likely an overestimate.

Summary of the year

The Wikipedia and Wikidata representation of the register has been totally transformed this year. Several hundred outdated web links have been removed and hundreds of correct links added across all wiki platforms. All 570 inscriptions have entries in Wikidata with their years of inscription; nominating countries or organisations; names and links in English and French; and other relevant properties. These data are already being used to generate list articles in multiple language versions of Wikipedia.

Through the year, we have found Wikipedia articles that are relevant to the International Register but had no mention of it: we have added links to the Wikipedia articles about UNESCO and the Memory of the World, as well as external links to the register itself. This has cumulatively led to the four million per month figure above and to the Memory of World International Register being one of the most popular parts of the UNESCO web site.

At the start of the year, the wiki platforms still confused the international, regional, and national registers. As well as making this distinction in Wikimedia Commons categories and Wikidata statements, I created the English Wikipedia articles Australian Memory of the World Register and Memory of the World Aotearoa New Zealand Ngā Mahara o te Ao to keep these national lists separate from the international register.

This year included the MoW Wiki Challenge in which volunteers created new Wikipedia articles, updated web links, and translated labels on Wikidata. Information was added in a total of 43 languages.

The huge numbers of image views and page views establish Wikipedia as the main way in which the public find out about the Memory of the World International Register and its individual inscriptions and a main conduit of traffic to the online International Register.


January's GLAM events

<<< previous month view · talk · edit January 2026 next month >>>
Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday
29
 30
 31
 1 2
 3
 4
5
 6
 7
 8
 9
 10
 11
12
 13
 14
 15 16
 17
 18
19
 20
 21
 22
 23
 24
 25
26
 27 28
 29
 30
 31
 1



Retrieved from "https://outreach.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=GLAM/Newsletter/December_2025/Single&oldid=274946"