GLAM/Newsletter/June 2016/Single
Edit-a-thons and contest in Buenos Aires
New contest released
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Lago Traful
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El matadero
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Caminos rurales en Egaña
One of the goals of Wikimedia Argentina is to promoteed the work of other projects of the Wikimedia Foundation. For that reason we launched the WikiTour 2016. The first edition of WikiTour was conducted in 2014 and the main goal was to photograph natural landscapes of Argentina. In this second edition of the competition , Wikimedia Argentina doubles the bet and besides portraying natural landscapes and uploading those images to Wikimedia Commons we challenge our community to edit articles on Wikivoyage.
Just For The Record; Wiki Loves Art preparations
Just For The Record: Bots, robots, cyborgs
On both 10 June and 18 June a new session was organised in Muntpunt in Brussels by the Just For The Record team entitled Bots, robots, cyborgs, exploring the writing of non-human agents like the bots on Wikipedia.
If recent studies have shown that women represent a very small minority amongst the contributors of Wikipedia, other studies also show that a majority of its most active and founding contributors were and are non-human actors called bots, who seem to escape the gendered binary that we apply to human bodies.
Since the creation of the internet, some people have seen in the cyberspace a promise to go beyond gender, race and class. A space to construct an “empowering virtual reality”, as Essex Hemphill phrased it in his conference On the Shores of Cyberspace, Black Nations/Queer Nation? in 1995. In her Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Harraway presented the figure of the Cyborg as a post-gender, fragmented identity. She invited feminists to get involved with technology. Yet these same researchers noted already that off-line boundaries also exist in cyberspace. Since then researchers have noted the many ways in which on-line representations are structured around gender, race and class.
In our two upcoming events, we will take as object the Wikipedia bot: what is the gender of this denizen of cyberspace? Can the bot ever be, like Wikipedia wants itself to be, neutral? (project page)
Wiki Loves Art preparations
Wiki Loves Art, the two months long photo contest about art in Belgium that starts on 1 July, had a busy month full of preparations. A series of visits to various institutions (GLAMs) took place, and one central presentation for a number of organisations together in Brussels. This is the first time we organise Wiki Loves Art in Belgium, and with ten participating museums, this number is higher than we aimed at. Having experiences with Wiki Loves Monuments, Wiki Loves Art is a much more complex project due the diversity of the participating organisations - even while we have a basic set of guidelines that apply for them all. One of the biggest differences in comparison with Wiki Loves Monuments is that most of the museums are not open for two months long for Wiki Loves Art, only some are, mostly they are only open during special events. The first special event is coming up on 14 July.
New steps for the GLAM movement in Brazil
News of June
During the month of June, we had a few and good opportunities to develop new contacts with professionals and students interested in GLAM projects. We can consider this is a great step, since the movement still needs to be more known by the public in general and by the professionals as well.
One event certainly contributed to this scenario: the 8th Museums Conference that took place between June 13th to 15th [1]. Promoted by the São Paulo State Secretariat of Culture, the annual conference is already an event that traditionally gathers people from different places of Brazil and abroad to discuss the best ways to connect museums.
This year the event's theme was “Museums networks and systems: collaborative actions” and the agenda was very focused on throwing light on some of the contemporary concerns of the museum area. We can name some of them that has a direct impact on building open GLAM initiatives, like: collaborative collecting and professional and social network through social media.
While the event was happening, some of GLAM volunteers like one of the authors of this report herself and Claudia Porto (a museum consultant) started a conversation with other colleagues about an idea that maybe can help to spread the GLAM movement around here: a query about the status of museums holdings licensing. On one hand, this can be very important to understand what are the big obstacles and the real challenges for the institutions; on the other, this can be very helpful to establish a scenario where adequate proposals can be outlined to fit the contexts (and the capabilities) of the institutions. On July, we expect to bring more people to discuss the idea and, if everything goes right, to kick-off a project.
It is also important to say that during this month, professionals and students of a certification Museology course of São Paulo are starting a collaborative and voluntary work to help organizing data about Brazilian monuments. This has been done in order to organize data about Sao Paulo monuments for the next Wiki Loves Monuments contest. On this month also happened that Wikimedia Foundation allowed a budget for a 3-month Wikimedian intern to help GLAM projects in Brazil – news that was received by the Brazilian Wikimedia Group of Education and Research with huge enthusiasm.
« Veni, vidi, wiki ! »
Wiki Loves Archaeology !
The Saint-Raymond museum in Toulouse is the archaeological museum of the city located in the former Saint-Raymond school, near the basilica of St. Sernin. It offers visitors a rich collection of sculptures and artifacts from excavations done in Toulouse and his area. It develops a dynamic and daring policy of cultural action promoting participatory experience of the public as in the current exhibition " Archeo : An exhibition worth digging in! "
13 editors and 2 curators of Saint-Raymond museum gathered on June 18th in the museum library to enrich Wikimedia projects thanks to documentary resources available around the themes of archeology, the museum and its collections. This workshop was held as part of National Archaeology Days (17-19 June) which aim to promote the dissemination of knowledge about archaeology with the public , an ambition shared by the Wikimedia projects. Some editors worked to improve and enrich Wikipedia articles such as the one on Saint-Raymond museum, and others have created articles on key artworks from the collection. Photographers took pictures to enrich photos campaigns already carried out by Wikimedians on the occasion of temporary exhibitions, such as The Image and the power in 2012. « Veni, vidi, wiki ! »
Wikidata : a rising star
Shonagon did 2 successive Wikidata presentations. The first one took place on June 14th at the Institut national d'histoire de l'art (INHA), an Academic, Cultural and Professional Public Establishment under the supervision of the ministers of Higher Education, Research and Culture. It was entitled Wikidata : a new resource for Art History and is available in video. The second one was a one-day conference on June 24th, organized by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and AFNOR on Libraries , archives and museums in the hour of Open Data. Best practices, standards and experience feedback . From his perspective, there is a true growing interest for Wikidata from institutions in France : let's support this as much as we can !
Harmonia Amanda and Sylvain Boissel also made a Wikidata presentation on June 16th at the "Journées du réseau documentation archives des ministères sociaux", a day-long workshop about open data and digital archives by the French Ministry of Social Affairs, Health and Women's Rights. This short intervention was requested by the organizers of the event themselves, further showing the interest for Wikidata from the French institutions
Cycling for libraries
Have you ever heard of the Cycling for libraries movement ? It's an international conference bike for librarians and libraries enthusiasts. It aims to promote libraries and to make better known the services and resources that libraries offer to their audiences. In France and in French speaking countries, this project is called "Cyclo-Biblio". Symac - one of Wikimedia France's volunteer and a librarian too - gave on June 6th a presentation entitled Wikipedia, from the view point of a librarian in front of 50 librarians taking part in Cyclo-Biblio. A fun way to reach out to a crucial audience !
10th anniversary of quai Branly museum
To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the creation of the quai Branly museum, an edit-a-thon took place on June 25th. It is the 4th collaboration between Wikimédia France and the museum. This year, edits were mainly focused around current temporary exhibitions : Jacques Chirac ; Persona ; Mata Hoata ; Homme blanc, homme noir.Les représentations de l’Occidental dans l’art africain du 20e siècle. 7 Wikimedians were there to support and help visitors, several articles were created or improved.
Keep calm and carry on with the Musée d'Histoire Naturelle of Lille
Wikimedians from Lille in the North of France continue to work with the MHN : in June, they did a photo shoot of mineralogy colections. This was followed by another volunteer training session on how to upload photos to Commons, working on categorization, captioning images in multiple languages and making the partnership more visible. Experts will help to complete captions in a future work session.
GLAM on Tour is a format, is a statement, is a tag
40 volunteers and newbies at 2 GLAM on Tour events
In June, around 40 GLAM volunteers and newbies gathered at Landesmuseum Württemberg and Textilfabrik Cromford. From June 3-5, the tenth event of the GLAM on Tour project took place in Stuttgart. This time, the biggest museum in Baden Württemberg invited 20 Wikipedians to write new articles and take pictures for Commons on the occasion of the new exhibition "Antike • Kelten • Kunstkammer". The resulting free content for the Wikimedia projects can be seen on the documentation page.
From June 10-12, the Textilmuseum Cromford in Ratingen opened its doors for a guided tour an edit-a-thon and foto excursions to explore their antique fashion collections. A Wikipedia workshop for newbies and staff of the institutions was part of the programme, too. See the documentation page for the ongoing photo uploads and article-work (in German). In total, around 1.400 new free pictures from the museums have been uploaded so far.
Label: GLAM & volunteers
GLAM meet up at Wikimania 2016
Roundabout 20 GLAM coordinators and GLAM volunteers met in a meet-up at the Wikimania 2016 in Esino Lario. We have done so before. But this time it was different. One, because we now finally have a Wiki GLAM strategist at the Wikimedia Foundation: Alex Stinson, who will help GLAM internationally better coordinated in the Wikimedia movement. Which is good. And two: we agreed that sharing knowledge and experience becomes easier through structured information. So we will put more effort in filling the GLAM library with learning patterns and we will try to classify our GLAM activities in four fields: information, GLAM & volunteers; GLAM & licenses and GLAM & technique. It would be great to label the entries in this newsletter in this way. It would help to gather information on different formats in different countries through time in order to learn more how to address a specific need of a GLAM institution. Like what do other GLAM activists do to inform on their work. How do other chapters inform GLAMs on licenses or support the in technical matters. And of greatest interest the variety of formats bringing GLAM and volunteers together, as edit-a-thons, GLAM on Tour, WLM .... Thus we tagged our entry on the 2 GLAM on Tour stations in June as GLAM & volunteer. Please help us to improve the labels or propose better tags. Feed-back is welcomed.
Contemporary art and printer marks images from BEIC
Contemporary art and printer marks images from BEIC
Since June the BEIC digital library team has worked on some new projects to enhance modern and contemporary art and printer marks. In particular "GLAM/BEIC/Artisti" aims at creating and promoting relevant contemporary artists' articles making the most of the 17.000 images of the Paolo Monti Archive, while "GLAM/BEIC/Ex libris e marche tipografiche" deals with bookplates and printer marks. These informations and images are rare on Wikipedia due to shortage and copyright limitations. Eventually works are still being carried on the "Travels in Italy" collection which focuses on explorers of 17th and 18th century.
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Italian sculptor Angelo Ferreri at work in his studio. Photo by Paolo Monti, 1975 (Fondo Paolo Monti, BEIC).
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Geo-referencing with Locator-Tool the photos by Paolo Monti from BEIC digital library.
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First impressions on a tour upon the continent in the summer of 1818
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Ex-libris of the Rugby School in Warwickshire, England.
National library collaboration and Contemporary art on Wikidata
National and University Library "St. Kliment of Ohrid"
Shared Knowledge is pleased to announce that, after long negotiations, we have reached a comprehensive agreement for collaboration with the National and University Library "St. Kliment of Ohrid", the main national and deposit library of Macedonia.
The collaboration involves providing access and personnel to our Wikimedian-in-Residence that will be appointed to the library, who will both research material for our projects, and scan public domain works held in the library's vast collection and release them under a suitable licence. For this purpose, we were assigned four librarians, specifically tasked with helping the WiR to that end.
Moreover, the library has agreed to host public Wikipedia lectures on editing and projects, as well as various group editing activities resulting from them. They were happy to provide the logistics and PR necessary to attract the attention of the library users and involve them in our work, and they agreed to do the same with their own staff, whereby they may learn about editing and participate themselves.
Contemporary Art Museum of Macedonia - GLAM & Wikidata
Inspired by the Wikidata and GLAM workshop held at Wikimania 2016 and the work of our Dutch and Finnish colleagues, Shared Knowledge decided to initiate a a metadata collaboration with the Contemporary Art Museum of Macedonia, a venerable institution exhibiting a vast collection of works, representing 272 artists from Macedonia and around the world, working in the 20th and 21st century.
The museum prides itself in its exhibits and has meticulously documented their possessions. Now, they have expressed interest in providing all the information about their works to Wikidata in the manner already done at the Flemish art collections, Europeana Art History Challenge and other places.
This collaboration also opens the possibility of organising training and editing sessions in the institution, related to the artists represented in the National and International collection of the museum, possibly involving students of the arts.
Important old and rare works scanned at the MANU Library
The Wikipedian-in-Residence at the Library of the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts has a rare opportunity to have permanent and unlimited access to many old and rare writings of importance, such as works and books about Macedonia and the Macedonian people, national history, the struggle for freedom and liberation, as well as other documents written by Macedonian revolutionaries in late 19th and early 20th century, that serve as a clear proof and testimonies of Macedonian national consciousness and individuality. After the digitisation, and creating a new article about the entire book „Slavic Macedonian General History“ written by Gjorgjija Pulevski in 1892, which was scanned on 1005 pages with the facsimile of the original manuscript of its foreword on 8 pages at the end of February and the beginning of March, this month (June) the WiR completed the process of scanning and creation of the article about the book "Macedonian question - in the past and now" written by Vasil Ivanovski in 1943 on 152 pages, which has been started in May.
In addition, this month Shared Knowledge conducted a Wikiexpedition in the Železnik region (Demir Hisar Municipality), and the MANU library once again provided all the resources needed for researching and creating articles on settlements and regional heritage. Thus, the WiR scanned and shared 4 scientific articles with 66 pages in total, of which one is on a very interesting topic, little known for the broader public, such as the Secret language of the Masons from Smilevo. This article provided together with a table of words would be used further as a material for research and creation of a new article for the secret mason language of Macedonia.
Finally, the work of the Wikipedian-in-Residence at MANU, this June ended by creating 1 new and improving 17 other articles on Macedonian as well as Wikipedias on 8 other languages such as French, German, Norwegian, Russian, Belorussian, Danish, Bulgarian, Serbian, providing image content from different fields of sciences and arts such as portrait of personalities, old historical photos, geographical maps, tables for indicators in economy etc.
3 continuous days of art; Efforts against the Wikipedia Gender Gap
72 hours of continuous edits
The collaboration between Wikimedia Mexico and Museo Soumaya has been long and prosper, and now it can also be described as Officially amazing!
For two years now, Museo Soumaya has shown its commitment to free knowledge, opening its metaphorical doors (and its literal library) to Wikimedia enthusiasts eager to know about art. After breaking the in-house record of the longest editathon in the world, we were to take a big leap forward with an effort dubbed #72HorasConRodin (72 hours with Rodin)
During these 3 days, the museum staff became active editors in their areas of expertise (mostly about their research lines, art conservation and education in museums) while expert wikipedians assisted them in matters of style, technical issues and usage of the Visual Editor. Even though they didn't always write new articles, they had enough expertise to find out factual mistakes or misunderstandings in articles and to correct them with appropriate sources.
We also had the pleasant surprise of university students editing for the first time ever. Gina is a teacher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and she invited several of her students to come over and spend the night writing alongside art experts. Some of them have picked up the habit of editing about their class subjects.
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This time, we had two designs for the official shirts! Both are based on Rodin's works
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We had the honor of having Katherine Maher, (then interim) ED of the Wikimedia Foundation. She gave a talk about GLAM in Mexico and the world
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Wikipedians and Museum researchers working along, helping each other
Among our greatest surprises was our winner for most articles created, Itabsvaru, a young student in Computer Sciences at a local university. She came out of her own curiosity, without prior knowledge on Wikipedia, but eager to learn about how it's created. After 3 days, she managed to write 11 new articles with guidance from more experienced editors, such as Adrián.
She also contributed to our shared goal of narrowing the gender gap. During this editathon, about 60% of all editors were women, and female artists were one of the main subjects for us to write about.
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The Museum staff were eager to contribute with their shared knowledge of art, education, preservation and even pedagogy
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Educational detail of the upper section of La Porte de l'Enfer, shown at Museo Soumaya in Mexico City
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A detail of the figure that would be later known as The Thinker
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Wikipedia editors consult with the museum Director regarding Auguste Rodin
Sometime around the 48-hour mark, two gentlemen arrived to the scene and started writing down what we were doing, and how. They seemed pleased, walking between the tables. They went by almost completely unnoticed, except for a small badge in one of their jackets. Around the 60-hour mark they reappeared and the mystery was solved: they were representatives from Guiness World Records, making sure we were still editing without stopping. Our collective effort was about to be recognized by GWR. As their motto says, our editathon was officially amazing
Media coverage
- Wikimedia Mexico's Secretary Salvador wrote about what it means to edit for 72 hours at the Wikimedia Mexico blog.
- Note at Hipertextual
- Note at Código Espagueti
- Note at emeequis
- Guiness World Records recognized the team's effort via Twitter
Wikimedia Mexico continues its effort against the Wikipedia Gender Gap
In 2014, Wikimedia Mexico started one initiative to reduce the Gender Gap in Wikimedia, where one of ten Wikimedians is a woman. One of this initiative's activities consists in the organization of marathons editing Wikipedia and Wikidata, accompanied by a workshops in editing, named Editatona, an event designed by women for women to encourage them to learn about the Wikimedia Foundation projects, and most importantly, where they can collaborate and help reduce this Gap, which is also present in the contents of the encyclopedia. The editing topics have been feminism, prominent women, Mexican artists, and, in this fifth edition of the Editatona, women's rights.
The Editatona Derechos Humanos de las Mujeres (Human Rights of Women) was held on July 2, organized by Wikimedia Mexico in collaboration with the Women's Institute of Mexico City InMujeres (Instituto de las Mujeres CDMX). In this Editatona participated 18 women, of which only 6 had a previous experience editing Wikipedia. In total, 99 editions were realized in 11 articles, of which 4 were created during the event, and more than 50,000 bytes were added to the encyclopedia
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Welcome Package
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Balbina Hernández's participation in the Inauguration
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Banners of the Editatona
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Members of the Presidium. In order of left side to right: Gloria Ramírez Hernández; Balbina Hernández Alarcón; Patricia Hernández Salazar and Carmen Alcázar
Were welcomed participants with a package of information leaflets on the Institute's activities and providing support to promote gender equality. After, the event began with the participation of Balbina Hernández Alarcón, Director of Development and Coordination Actions by InMujeres; Patricia Hernández Salazar, Coordinator of Postgraduate education in Librarianship and Information Studies of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM); Gloria Ramírez Hernández, founder and Coordinator of the UNESCO Cathedra of Human Rights at the UNAM, and Carmen Alcázar (Wotancito), Secretary of the Board of Wikimedia Mexico.
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Carmen Alzázar teach how include Wikimedia Commons's images in one article of Wikipedia
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Editing teams
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Participants editing Wikipedia
Before the edition of the articles, Carmen Alcázar gave a workshop in editing to teach the participants how to edit Wikipedia. Later, the participants divided for the topics that they were going to edit: women's rights in general; right to gender equality; right to education; right to information, right to health; right to the political participation; right to work; right to a life without violence; right to safe and healthy environment.
One of the most important aspects of this Editatona was able to collaborate with a goverment institution that is interested in contribuing in reduce the Gender Gap in the country's capital, and is willing to use media as Wikipedia to achieve this goal. But, as we can see in this and other events, there still much work to make it equal the encyclopedia.
Media Coverage
- Invitation of InMujeres
- Note at El Universal
- Bolletin of InMujeres
- Note at Página@bierta
- Note at El Mexicano
Image donation by the Museum Catharijneconvent; 1300 Dutch underground newspapers from WW2; Collaboration with public libraries
Image donation by the Museum Catharijneconvent
Museum Catharijneconvent (MCC), museum of religious art in Utrecht, has donated 573 high-res images of textiles from their collection. The collection can be viewed here.
Test-case for new batch upload tool Pattypan
The present image donation has also served as an important test-case for the new batch-upload tool Pattypan. This tool was built to allow batch-uploads of offline images with metadata supplied through a spreadsheet and was specifically designed to be simpler in use than the GWT. The MCC image donation with its very long object descriptions suggested an extension of the upload tool to allow them too, which the developer was able to implement promptly. As a result of this upload, it is expected that Pattypan will also play an important role in future uploads by Dutch GLAMs and WiRs.
"Wikipedia-plugin" for Adlib
During talks with the MCC, it was suggested that it might be useful for museums that work with the popular CMS Adlib to have a plugin that allows immediate export of metadata to a format that is supported by Wikimedia platforms, or even to immediately upload media files to Commons or other platforms. WMNL has contacted Adlib's publisher Axiell and they have shown interest in investigating that possibility. A talk will be scheduled in July.
1300 Dutch underground newspapers from WW2
The Dutch Wikipedia-community has been invited to participate in a project to describe all 1300 Dutch illegal newspapers from WW2 (May 1940 - May 1945). This project aims to systematically create uniform articles about these publications.
Over the last year the national library and User:GerardKuys converted a book on Dutch underground press into a database and generated 1300 stubs from it. These stubs can now be expanded into full articles.
Furthermore, the project aims to create articles about persons, families, publishers and printers that were related to these underground newspapers.
An extensive manual (in Dutch) is available for participants
See this presentation for further background info.
Collaboration with public libraries
This year Wikimedia Netherlands and the Dutch national library are running a project to strengthen the collaboration with public libraries. It aims to challenge visitors of public libraries to contribute to Wikipedia and Commons.
Last month the first activities took place in 4 cities (Amsterdam, Arnhem, Rijen and Amersfoort) and were themed around photohunts; inhabitants were invited to document their own neighborhoods and upload their photos to Commons. Because of the enthusiasm of the public libraries and the Wiki-volunteers these events were very well visited and resulted in 547 new uploads
Involving libraries in Wikimedia projects
Activities in libraries
Three different activities have been organized with libraries. On June 2 we held a Wikipedia workshop at the library of the Pontifical University of Salamanca. The attendees were mainly librarians but also students and professors. Besides learning how to edit Wikipedia and its main policies, they also created several articles about former professors of the university.
Between 6 and 14 of June were held at the Old Fishmonger of Gijón 4 Wikipedia sessions for librarians of Asturias. They were a continuation of the course for librarians celebrated in February, in Oviedo, in the context of BiblioWikiAsturias project, that seeks to involve the network of public libraries of Asturias in the Wikimedia projects for generate content about Asturian topics, local personalities, cultural heritage, etc.
Finally, on June 30, was celebrated the first of the sessions of the Wikipedia course at the library of the University of Cádiz.
Free pictures
In June we covered three events for obtaining pictures and upload them to Wikimedia Commons under a free license; two music festivals, Festival Utopía in Madrid, with the participation of several world-renowned DJs like David Guetta, and Palencia Sonora. Also a sport event, the Rally of Ourense.
Ballot papers for the Spanish general election
Due to the celebration of general elections on June 26, we have initiated a nationwide campaign to collect ballot papers from each circumscription, scanning and uploading them to Commons. The initiative has been a success and has mobilized many users from different regions of Spain. The files are in this category.
World Wide Wikipedia; Royal Library; Monuments database to Wikidata migration; Swiss Open Cultural Data Hackathon 2016
World Wide Wikipedia
In the beginning of June the World Wide Wikipedia tour, organized together with the National Heritage Board and the Swedish Exhibition Agency, moved on to Umeå and to The Museum of Women´s History. Around 15 participants the first day, and eight people joining in for the workshop day two.
Royal Library
The National library of Sweden, with help from Fæ and GWToolset, uploaded almost 2,000 images of old material in June. The Codex Aureus is a mid-8th century manuscript, the Ptolemaicæ avgmentvm is a book, including maps, from 1597 (stolen, and later returned) and the Suecia antiqua et hodierna is a 17th century collection of engravings and paintings.
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Codex Aureus
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Codex Aureus
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Ptolemaicæ avgmentvm.
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Map from Ptolemaicæ avgmentvm.
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Suecia antiqua
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Suecia antiqua
Monuments database to Wikidata migration
During Wikimania 2016 in Esino Lario staff from Wikimedia Sverige, in cooperation with a volunteer from the Netherlands, organized a workshop to prepare the move of data from the Monuments database (created for the Wiki Loves Monuments contest) to Wikidata. Volunteers that have worked with the national datasets helped with describing and structuring the data from countries they have expertise in. Staff also worked on a few important technical improvements to the Monuments database itself.
Presentation at Wikimania 2016
During Wikimania the work done in the GLAM field was presented, and especially about the project Connect Open Heritage. It was done in cooperation with volunteers from Austria and France that first presented about the future of Wiki Loves Monuments and the issues that need to be solved. Our hope is that the Connected Open Heritage project will address some of them. It was a popular topic with around 100 people in the audience and a lot of interesting questions at the end.
Presentation at the Swiss Open Cultural Data Hackathon 2016
In Basel a presentation about the work done as part of the project Connected Open Heritage was given. The aim was to engage more (volunteer) developers in the work with making more cultural heritage data useful and included in different tools.
Wellcome
Wellcome
Alice White's residency at the Wellcome Library continued into its second month. Alice has been organising in-house training, and working with staff to create a training pack for Wellcome-funded researchers on why and how they should write about their open access research on Wikipedia.
Alice has also worked on improving categorisation of Wellcome content on Wikimedia Commons, and making Wellcome Resources easier to find using the residency project page.
London-based (and visiting) wiki-editors at the London Meetup were very supportive of the residency and have made some excellent suggestions. There have also been several visits and discussions with expert practitioners in the field of psychiatry and mental health about the residency and how to improve wiki-coverage of the history of psychiatry and mental health. This is building towards a series of events, edit-a-thons, and content-improvement starting in September to coincide with the opening of an exhibition on Bedlam: the Asylum and Beyond.
June is busting out all over
Wiki Loves Pride 2016 Museum of Modern Art.
Wikimedia NYC had an editathon at the Museum of Modern Art, on June 29, 2016.
National Archives LGBTQ Editathon
Wikimedia DC had a Loves Pride 2016 editathon at the National Archives Innovation Hub, on June 16, 2016.
Environment and American Art Edit-a-Thon
Wikimedia DC had a edit-a-thon at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, on June 11, 2016.
TED
Jane Darnell (User:Jane023) and Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing) continue their stint as remote-working Wikipedians in Residence at NY-based TED (see last month's special report). A number of TED staff have been trained to edit Wikipedia and Wikidata. The TED speakers challenge has been extended for a week, and will run until 13 July. Wikimedians are invited to write or improve Wikipedia articles and Wikidata items about the 1,800+ speakers in the dataset donated by TED. Prizes are offered!
WikiConference North America 2016
Planning has begun on WikiConference North America, scheduled to be held at San Diego, on October 7–10, 2016.
Open Science Fellows Program; OA Signalling
Open Science Fellows Program
Wikimedia Deutschland and the Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft have launched the Open Science Fellows Program, an initiative to encourage researchers to familiarize themselves with open science by pledging to do some of their research in the open for a limited amount of time, with the support of experienced mentors. Application deadline is July 15.
OA Signalling
While the Open Access Signalling project is concentrating on building and improving Wikisource- and Wikidata-based workflows around the signalling of the openness of references cited on Wikipedia, a number of discussions have sprung up independently as to how such signalling might look like at the Wikipedia end:
- m:Grants:IdeaLab/An open license text reuse tool for the Visual Editor toolbar
- en:Template_talk:Open_access#why_is_the_lock_orange.3F
In the meantime, all references that were cited via their PubMed Central ID on the English Wikipedia by the end of last year (as per this dataset) have been imported as items in Wikidata (example).
Recent uploads: A marine snail in 3D, insufficiently labeled sausages, testing rhythm perception in birds
The following represents a selection of the files that have been uploaded this month from open-access sources. Most of these came from PubMed Central through the Open Access Media Importer — whose uploads now total over 21,900. If you can think of wiki pages where these files (or other files from the same source articles) could be useful, please put them in there or let us know.
Books & Bytes
In this Books & Bytes issue we announce two new global branches and a new partnership. Our global pageviews analysis is unveiled. We spotlight recent research and upcoming events. As always, we have a roundup of news and community items related to libraries and digital knowledge.
New global branches
We are very happy to announce two more global Wikipedia Library branches:
- Hebrew Wikipedia Library, created by Daryag
- Sindhi Wikipedia Library, created by Jogi don
We'd also like to take this opportunity to highlight the Global Wikipedia Library on Meta. This portal showcases the projects and accomplishments of each of our language branches. New and growing branches also have their own Meta planning pages to coordinate and track their progress, for example: meta:The Wikipedia Library/Portuguese. If you're interested in helping to start a branch on another language Wikipedia, please get in touch! wikipedialibrarywikimedia.org
New accounts
We're excited about a new research partnership:
- Nomos, a German-language publisher of law, social sciences, and humanities books and journals.
New coordinators and call for volunteers
We would like to welcome as a new account coordinator and as a metrics coordinator on our team!
We are looking for a Interlibrary Branch Coordinator. This is someone who would work with and across global branches to discover and disseminate learnings, stories, best practices, ideas, and challenges. Using surveys, email, Wikipedia talk pages, the wikipedialibrary mailing list, this newsletter, and the WMF blog, the coordinator would help share these findings. Please sign up if you're interested, especially if you are comfortable working across language projects (in English) and even better if you already have worked on a global Wikipedia Library branch.
New volunteers for this or other roles are always welcome. If you have benefited from a TWL account or are interested in helping out, .
New TWL Pageview Analysis: 1 million views per year!
By using the incredibly convenient Wikipedia Tools add-on for Google Sheets, we've been able to collect monthly page views for Wikipedia Library pages across all language Wikipedias dating back to August 2015. This has revealed that over the past 10 months TWL pages have been viewed on average a total of 85,000 times per month, combining to over 1 million predicted page views for a 12-month period! While the majority (~94%) of these views come from English Wikipedia pages, the next highest view count comes from the Polish Wikipedia (~2000 views per month) where editors have created categorised pages for editors to collate and share their resources.
Other recent findings include the statistic that 40% of all TWL signups are from an editor active on a non-English Wikipedia.
CrossRef finds Wikipedia the #6 highest referrer to DOIs online!
Crossref has been an increasingly important ally of the Wikimedia community, supporting improvements to Wikipedia's citation ecosystem, and helping sponsor WikiCite 2016. In the past few months, they have also been helping the Wikipedia Library team on reaching out to their members, following a blog that we helped them post in April – helping us contact some of the most needed publishers for various communities, especially partners that have hard-to-find academic research about non-Western communities.
In May, Crossref released more research on Wikipedia and academic citations by Joe Wass, in the blog post entitled "HTTPS and Wikipedia." Following the HTTPS conversion of Wikipedia in June 2015, Dario Taraborelli of Wikimedia Research and Wass, worked to convert Wikipedia's usage of Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to HTTPS by default. The transition operated smoothly, and in tracking the incoming traffic over the course of nearly a year, Wass and Taraborelli discovered that Wikipedia had risen to become the 6th top referrer to the DOI resolver – a tool supported by Crossref that helps researchers access research articles. The increase pushed Wikipedia past Google as one of the most useful tools in helping academics.
#1lib1ref think-piece explores the intersection of Wikipedia and social technologies
"This campaign was more than an outreach effort: it helped us to explore new technologies that facilitate diverse communities to participate in Wikipedia. To support a clear call to action for librarians, we incorporated three social technologies to grow the campaign: social media, hashtags (both inside and outside of Wikipedia), and microcontributions. Together they helped us share an inviting and compelling story of collaboration between Wikipedia and libraries..."
Read the full piece on the WMF blog:
Engaging librarians (and others) through social technologies: A #1lib1ref think-piece
Events
Alex attended WikiCon in Berlin to talk with community leaders about the opportunities for developing branches in more language communities. He also had a poster presenting the results and impact of the #1lib1ref initiative from last January.
Jake attended WikiCite 2016 in Berlin to discuss how Wikipedia's citations can be better structured and shared. His particular projects looked at a long-requested means of exposing open-access scholarship. OABOT is the result of tremendous work by Dissemin developer and Wikipedian W:EN:User:Pintoch (Antonin Delpeuch). It queries core databases that contain thousands of repositories looking for free-to-read versions of paywalled articles linked in citations. A bot will soon be proposed to run and add these links (and possibly some phrase or icon indicating their open-ness).
The Wikipedia Library team also reserved a booth at the International Federation of Library Associations conference in Ohio in August. The booth will include updated and internationalized outreach materials from the Library's bookshelf on Meta.
If you want to share some of the library outreach your community is doing at one of these conferences, please email Alex at astinsonwikimedia.org.
Bytes in brief
Community roundup
- Engaging librarians (and others) through social technologies: A #1lib1ref think-piece
- The Women Archivists Roundtable (WAR) Wikipedia Edit-a-thon
- Improving constructed languages: Dietrich Michael Weidmann
- Journey of a Wikipedian - from TWL's founder
- Celebrating 13 years of the Kannada-language Wikipedia
Newsworthy
- Leaking 70,000 OkCupid Users' Personal Data In Name Of Science??
- First British Council digital library launched in Lahore
- Winter Park to envision library of future
- Proposals to slash library opening times in Barrow and South Lakeland
- EU Research ministers will move to make open access the default by 2020
Worth reading (or watching)
- Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone
- How Australia produces $30 billion worth of 'grey literature' that we can't read
- Vice President Biden Calls for Open Access, Open Data, & New Research Incentives for Cancer Research
- The Cloud Catalog: One Catalog to Serve Them All
- A new approach to scholarly and scientific publishing of open science
- What's a citation good for, anyway?
- Project Librarybase
- Project uses peer pressure to encourage open research
- Ways to fund your open access publication
- HTTPS and Wikipedia
- The Human Fear of Total Knowledge
- How Two Artists Turn Old Encyclopedias Into Beautiful, Melancholy Art
Wikidatamania
Tech developments
- The Catalan and Polish Wikipedias will show Wikidata descriptions on the mobile website starting soon. More Wikipedias will follow. (See phabricator:T135429)
- Want to see Wikidata changes in the history of a Wikipedia article? There is a user script that needs your feedback.
- Maps are now enabled on Wikidata
- EasyQuery is a new gadget that you can enable in your preferences. It gives you an icon next to each statement value. That gives you a list of other items with the same statement.
- SQID now shows references when in expanded view (example; click on the ">" symbol for any given property)
- New visualization options have been added to the query service.
- You can now embed query results from query.wikidata.org in other websites (example)
GLAM news
The twelfth Wikimania (the annual international conference of the Wikimedia movement) was held on the beautiful town of Esino Lario, Italy on 22-28 June. Unsurprisingly, Wikidata and GLAM issues featured prominently. The Wikidata-related parts of the program, including slides and notes, can be found on the Wikidata Wikimania page and the user digest session explaing the trend towards data donation on Wikidata with examples of a Sparql query generated map, ListeriaBot and GLAMorgan is here.
Other news:
- The TED speakers challenge has been extended for a week, and will run until 13 July. Wikimedians are invited to write or improve Wikipedia articles and Wikidata items about the 1,800+ speakers in the dataset donated by TED. Prizes are offered! Preliminary findings are here: TED conferences/TED speakers challenge/Lessons learned
- The Europeana280 Art History Challenge has ended
- A Swiss Open Cultural Data Hackathon was held
- It seems we already have almost 0.4% of the current population of Finland on Wikidata.
- Two new plain-language guidelines advise individuals and institutions, respectively, how to add their (or their staffs') ORCID iDs to Wikipedia, via Wikidata:
- for individuals
- for institutions
- Please translate them!
- Meanwhile, there is a new discussion about whether to display ORCID iDs on the German Wikipedia.
- Documentation has been added to a Wikidata list that keeps track of the scholarly literature around the ongoing Zika virus outbreak. The information can be visualized in several ways, e.g. as a co-author network.
New GLAM-related properties
- HKMDb film ID
- Shakeosphere person ID
- reserve number (Canada)
- FamilySearch ID
- day of week
- publication interval
- Eldoblaje Movie ID
- Swedish county letter
- minimum age
- Molendatabase verdwenen molens ID
- Beer Advocate brewery ID
- RateBeer brewery ID
- SecondHandSongs song ID
- SecondHandSongs artist ID
- MSBI person ID
- ECARTICO person ID
- COAM ID
- PO Box
- label in sign language
- month of the year
- Great Russian Encyclopedia Online ID
- INSPIRE-HEP author ID
- language used
- parliamentary term
- Pleiades place type identifier
- Catalogus Professorum Rostochensium ID
- Munk's Roll ID
- Dailymotion channel ID
- warheroes.ru ID
- Plarr ID
- British Book Trade Index ID
Also:
- Vice county was recreated, after a wrongful deletion.
A Wikimania Reflection, GLAM Phabricator Queues, and a WMF Update
Reflections on Wikimania
For Wikimania, I (Alex Stinson) helped run a number of sessions, including
- A Tools Rotation for Category Tools at the Learning Days
- A talk on Verifiability which is an outgrowth of my work with The Wikipedia Library
- A session on The Wikipedia Library
- A Session with Jaime Anstee about how to develop more community leaders
I also attended, and recommend the notes and conversation from:
In general, I was really happy with and engaged by the large number of people talking about the importance of cultural heritage for the movement. The growing consensus among our community leaders is that there needs to be a coordinated and systematic effort, beyond GLAM-Wiki or Wiki Loves Monuments, to align our collective impact on the cultural heritage space (as is broadly defined by organizations like UNESCO to include non-material heritage and natural heritage alongside our more traditional emphasis on GLAM). I found the conversation at the Wiki Loves Monuments and Connected Open Heritage meeting particularly useful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwkI7iNidXk . Well done John Andersson, Axel Pettersson, André Costa, Philip Kopetzky and Jean Fred Berthelot!
Hopefully, in the next year we can use my new position with the WMF to help provide an advocate for that conversation, and especially as we look to integrate it into the movement strategy conversations that Katherine Maher described as an important part of her new tenure as WMF Executive Director. Staff at the Foundation are increasingly looking for ways to think about GLAM and other programs. A big part of my job will be building awareness in those other teams, especially the technical teams, so that both volunteer and partner GLAM-Wiki stakeholders can benefit from WMF projects.
Their was also a meetup of GLAM-Wiki coordinators at Wikimania, and we talked about the shared needs of the GLAM-Wiki community at the moment. The conversation led to several very clear conclusions on next steps for my role at the WMF: we need to make sure that our communication and documentation channels are clear amongst GLAM-Wiki folks, and that we need to find ways of developing our shared support needs/requests as GLAM-Wiki coordinators (see the next section).
Other highlights for me include:
- A lot of very interesting conversations about and desire to support WikiSource, and significant software improvements for WikiSource including integration of Visual Editor into the Proofread Page Extension. WikiSource is very important for our long-term GLAM-Wiki strategy: emerging communities or communities with small supplies of digital records need these source materials before they can participate in other parts of our communities.
- Lots of interest and positive energy for structured data in general, but also structured data on Commons: I think almost every session I was at mentioned the need for structured data on Commons – and it's in the works (phabricator:T68108). If you have the energy or interest in helping the Wikidata team please reach out.
- Emerging communities are communicating new and different approaches to working with cultural institutions and working with cultural heritage. I hope to help integrate those model projects more with the best practices developed in the early Europe-centered GLAM-Wiki documentation.
Starting Phabricator Projects for GLAM-Wiki
One of the conclusions of the GLAM-Wiki coordinator meetings at Wikimania, was a need for better communication about who needs what help in the GLAM-Wiki Community. Part of this will be overhauling the portal on Outreach to make it easier to find the best contact information and communication channels. I will be coordinating a documentation consultation in the coming months to help us find the best existing material, and identify what needs to be done to improve those materials and make them easier to access.
But there is also a broader need to share the problems we are facing as GLAM-Wiki outreach folks, and at the Wikimania GLAM Coordinators meetup we decided on trying an experiment: shared Phabricator projects for GLAM-Wiki support needs.
- A General GLAM workboard, for tracking support needs related to GLAM program activities, documentation, communications support, or other kinds of non-technical skills
- A GLAM-Tech workboard, for tracking technical needs related to GLAM, both in the core MediaWiki software, in external apps/tools used for GLAM-Wiki projects, or help with templates, Wikidata, or some other kind of more technical on-wiki skills.
How does this work?
Phabricator is a task management system designed by engineers for both project management and bug management. In the Wikimedia community the system has largely been used by developers; however, in the last year, more and more other projects in the movement have started using Phabricator for non-technical task management. Among these non-software uses: the Wikipedia Education Collaborative has created their own Workboard to track shared projects that require collective experience beyond what one Education Coordinator can support. Education leaders submit tasks to the workboard, and then other Education leaders who are part of the Education Collaborative work on those tasks. This time on collective tasks is becoming part of how those Education Coordinators schedule their time.
To get a task in the GLAM-Wiki queues, create a new task in Phabricator (plus sign at the top right), and in the field labeled "Tags" add GLAM or GLAM-Tech. Once in the queues, other GLAM-Wiki coordinators and practitioners can sign up ("Claim") the task if they can commit to solving the problem; moreover the comment section of each task allows us to talk through complications or challenges with those tasks (see for example this recent conversation about the possible reuse cases for dynamic Maps outside of Wikimedia projects). This kind of collaborative task list allow GLAM-Wiki leaders to get support beyond local volunteer communities and personal contacts. This also helps folks who coordinate between communities, like myself as WMF GLAM-Wiki Strategist, to better learn about and coordinate support for GLAM program leaders who need mentoring, documentation, learning materials, or help from someone else in our community.
If you are unfamiliar with Phabricator, the Education Collab has created a great Introduction to Phabricator. Please give it a try: shared work queues only work if you both contribute needs and spend time working on tasks submitted by others.
During the Documentation overhaul, better instructions and use cases will be integrated into the outreach portal.
June WMF GLAM Highlights
Some quick highlights of the work I (Alex Stinson) have been doing as GLAM-Wiki Strategist at the Foundation:
- Wrapping up responsibilities with the Wikipedia Library, including advocating for and supporting a number of relationships and partnerships.
- Consultations
- IFLA: consulting on development of White Papers for IFLA World Congress in Columbus, August 2016
- Corresponded with Ivan Martinez and Wikimedia Mexico for outreach to a university library
- Met with Liam Wyatt about strategy with Europeana and European coordinators; regular correspondence with several European Coordinators
- Wikimania consultations with dozens of people, including:
- Parithi, Tamil Wikimedia work
- Mounir Touzri of Wikimedia Tunisia
- WIRs Jason Evans, Ewan McAndrews, and John Cummings
- Mina Theofilatou of WikiTherapy
- Andrea Zanni and Wikisource meetup group for WikiSource
- Arne Wossink and User:Yarl for work on commons:Commons:Pattypan, as part of work to develop meta:Grants:IEG/Batch uploader for small GLAM projects/Midpoint
- Maartan Dammers, Susanna Ånäs, and Sandra Fauconnier for Wikidata + GLAM workshop and strategy
- GLAM-Wiki Coordinators meetup and WIR meetup
- Had a number of meetings with others, throughout the conference, on request.
- Helped prep guidelines for new Program Grants for GLAM, and revision questions for planning GLAM and content donations at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/Plan . Also consulted on several requests for PEG and IEG.
- with Dominic Byrd-McDevitt led program for GLAM-Wiki Bootcamp hosted by the National Archive of the United States. Documentation is at . Was invited to help teach the event, since in the United States and a short trip for me. Refined the 2013 curriculum to include better coverage of Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, and changes in different models being used to develop GLAM-Wiki partnerships. Consulted with 15 attendees and Wikimedia DC on GLAM work. Working over the next several months to internationalize for other contexts (initial discussions to do this in Tunisia) – if other communities are interested please reach out to astinsonwikimedia.org. I hope to help local communities pilot more GLAM-Wiki training around the world in the next several years.
- Attended the Diversity Conference (https://wikidiversity.org/wiki/Main_Page ) since it coincided with the GLAM-Wiki Bootcamp. A number of interesting conversations about representing global and gender diversity in GLAM-Wiki, and how valuable the contributions of GLAM partners is to creating greater diversity. Because of the short timeline for planning the conference, attendance was very U.S.-focused.
- Attended Wikimania (see review above).
- Working with WMF Community Tech Team to GLAM-Wiki identify needs for technological developments – currently talking with the team about supporting the Programs and Events Dashboard (being spearheaded by the WMF Education Program team), WikiSource, and Structured Data on Commons.
- Developed partnership request with WMF Strategic Partnerships for access to Googles OCR tools for WikiSource. Currently, Community Tech is evaluating the API for that tool for solving the Community Wishlist Ask https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T120788
What's next?
- Design and get ready to launch documentation consultation: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T139464
- Begin investigation of best practices for digitization in non-Western contexts – if you are interested in this topic, please reach out to me.
- Work with Community Tech and other teams to further work on structured data on Commons and other technical needs
- Support Wikimedia Blog posts being developed by volunteers/GLAM Coordinators on:
- Wikimedia Netherlands & helping GLAMs release colonial collections
- The Case for Wikidata + GLAM
- Continue discussions with IFLA, ARL, OCLC, etc. as part of relationships developed during the Wikipedia Library work
- Prepare for IFLA conference in Columbus, Ohio
- One-on-one consultations as needed – if you need help on anything related to GLAM-Wiki, please reach out: astinsonwikimedia.org.
July's GLAM events
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15 Wikimedia Mexico participates in Aldea Digital, Mexico City
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