GLAM/Newsletter/January 2022/Contents/WMF GLAM report

This Month in GLAM – Volume XII, Issue I, January 2022

WMF GLAM report

Wikimedia campaigns for librarians and museum workers; Community Wishlist Survey; and Wikimedia query services

1Lib1Ref

The 1Lib1Ref January 2022 campaign ended with 17,905 edits recorded on the Wikimedia Hashtags tool. This amounts to a 42% decrease in the number of edits in comparison to the January 2021 campaign. The leading language is once again Serbian Wikipedia and their leading editor Nikolina Šepić contributed 6,766 edits. The Catalan Wikipedia doubled their edit count from last year and jumped five places to become the second leading Wikipedia.

CEE organizer Gorana Gomirac said that the probable reason behind the decline in the edits was that “the participants are … tired of online activities.” She also added that “even though the results are lower than last year, we are grateful to have editors who put in a lot of effort for the campaign.”

Newcomer experience pilot

This semester, the GLAM & Culture and Growth teams at the Foundation are working on a series of events with Wikimedia Argentina, Wikimedia Mexico, and Wikimedia Chile. There will be four events in March and April, designed to:

Test the Add an image feature developed for the Newcomer experience pilot;
Further develop the GLAM-Wiki community in Spanish-speaking Latin America.

The Add an image task is an opportunity to engage new users with the visual culture of Wikimedia, helping to improve the connection between images on Wikimedia Commons and structured data on Wikidata to Wikipedia, and consequently, enhancing the appeal and readability of Wikipedia articles in Spanish. We believe museum professionals are uniquely qualified to judge the selection and captioning of images on Wikipedia, since they work with visual culture. Invitations to the event will therefore go to museum networks.

We're looking forward to evaluating the appeal and suitability of the Add an image feature for museum workers and will share what we learn. We’re also curious to see how events can support the adoption of the structured tasks developed by the Growth team and wonder if Add an image events have the potential to grow into an annual campaign, like #1Lib1Ref.

Community Wishlist Survey

Voting for this year’s Community Wishlist Survey closes on 11 February. This year, there are 326 proposals and 55 "larger suggestions". Every logged-in user can vote for as many proposals as they like.

Wikimedia query services

The Wikimedia Commons Query Service (WCQS) beta 2 is now live and available at commons-query.wikimedia.org (release notes). The main improvements are increased stability and real-time updates of structured data. Authentication is now required but the Search team will continue to work with the community to find a solution that allows us to maintain service reliability while keeping to our values of free and open knowledge. This release was designated as beta 2 to show that this is still a work in progress.

The Search team is also working to scale the Wikidata Query Service (WDQS). As part of this process, they want to better understand some of the use cases and needs you have. There will be feedback sessions on Thursday 17 February at 8:00 UTC and Monday 21 February at 18:00 UTC.

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