GLAM/Newsletter/June 2026/Contents/Mexico report

This Month in GLAM – Volume XVI, Issue VI, June 2026

Mexico report

Open GLAM in Puebla

Strengthening the Open GLAM Programme at BUAP

The opening night on June 10 was used to get the participants acquainted with the core ideas behind Open GLAM and the hackathon methodology. Beat Estermann and Sandra Palacios presented the plan on how to strengthen the Open GLAM Programme at BUAP: The existing two pillars of the Open GLAM Programme, the annual hackathon and the CultureFLOW method are to be complemented by a WikiClub and by an Open GLAM Competence Network: While the WikiClub is oriented towards encouraging university-wide contributions to Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikidata, the Open GLAM Competence Network is intended as a community of practice among local heritage institutions and service providers, offering mutual assistance to local institutions in adopting and implementing open data and open access policies. These four pillars will be complemented by a Wiki Loves Collective Memories campaign to channel the outreach efforts and sharing of know-how both on an international and on a national level.

Outreach Among Heritage Institutions Around the World

In the run-up of this year’s hackathon, heritage institutions with Mexico-related holdings in a variety of countries were invited to provide data and to submit a hackathon challenge. Two institutions decided to give it a go:

Museum Rietberg (City of Zurich) uploaded high-resolution photographs of 681 pre-Columbian artifacts from the Anne-Marie und Caspar Reinhart Collection, while publishing their metadata on Wikidata, thus providing a nice showcase for data publication that can serve as an example to other ethnographic museums in the future.

The Wereldmuseum (Dutch National Museum of World Cultures) pointed the hackathon participants to an interesting textile collection with valuable items of traditional handicraft in the Sierra Norte de Puebla, neighbouring Oaxaca and further States, some of them representative of rare pre-Columbian techniques.

Apart from these very specific suggestions, the hackathon participants were pointed to the online catalogues of approx. 40 heritage institutions with Mexico-related holdings in Europe and the Americas that make content available under free copyright licenses or at least grant open access to their collection catalogues. The Wikidata-based monitoring of institutions, initiated at the occasion of this year’s hackathon, will serve as a basis for further outreach efforts to heritage institutions around the world. The goal is to promote open access to collections with a focus on ethical sharing, especially among institutions whose holdings are international in scope and therefore of special value to a variety of communities worldwide.

Highlights from this Year’s Hackathon Projects

During the two hackathon days, the 68 participants, mostly from computational and artistic backgrounds, worked in 12 groups on an interesting kaleidoscope of projects, covering the following aspects:

Exploring the Large Diaspora of Mexican Cultural Artifacts

Four teams worked on the development of online applications for the exploration of Mexico-related heritage artifacts in collections around the world: Amatohtli (the term signifies “map” in Nahuatl) is an app presenting a collection from various perspectives, including games. The team managed to develop a fully-fledged prototype running on real data from Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons (visit this link and click on “Colección” to start exploring the 681 objects in the Anne-Marie und Caspar-Reinhart Collection). Three other teams proposed interesting extensions or variations on the same theme.

Another team elaborated a concept for the implementation of an expert sourcing campaign to enhance and complement the catalogue entries of approx. 200 items from the textile collection gathered by Irmgard Weitlaner and Bodil Christensen during their travels in Mexico in the 20th century. Several domain experts have been located, and photographs of the collection items have been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by the Wereldmuseum. In addition to complementing the object metadata, the domain experts will be invited to contribute their know-how to improve related Wikipedia articles.

And finally, one team tackled the challenge entitled “Through the Eyes of Strangers”, which takes the short biographies of several anthropologists / ethnologists who visited Mexico during the 19th and 20th century as a starting point to study their attitudes and perspectives on the people and cultures which they encountered. As has been observed by various hackathon participants, the differences in character, attitude, and methodological approaches among the “visitors” from abroad are striking. The idea is to present an artistic treatment of the different portraits in the context of an application showing the itineraries and places visited, alongside the objects and/or information collected.

A Wiki Club to Help Fill the Contributor Gap

The initial members of the Wiki Club used the hackathon to get organised and to plan their activities throughout the rest of the year. A series of activities were listed that new contributors could engage in. One of them, the completion of Wikidata entries about Mexican museums based on the official database of the Ministry of Culture, was tackled by another project team whose members got acquainted with Wikidata and OpenRefine in order to be able to conduct mass data ingests. A possible starting point for contributions to Wikipedia are the above-mentioned biographies about anthropologists and archaeologists who visited Mexico and left their traces in various heritage collections. A first example is the newly created article about the Austrian-Dutch physician and amateur archaeologist Hans Feriz.

One of the key goals of the Wiki Club is to recruit new active contributors from Mexico in order to help fill the contributor gap. Currently, in comparison to the speakers of other major European languages, speakers of Spanish and Portuguese are among the least likely to contribute to Wikipedia (Spanish Wikipedia only has 7.5 active editors per million speakers, compared to 26 for English, 40 for German, 17.5 for French, or 10 for Russian). Furthermore, among the Spanish speakers, Mexicans are among the least likely to contribute to Wikipedia (Mexico only counts 5 active contributors per million inhabitants, compared to 45 for Spain, 17 for Argentina, 7 for Colombia, or 13 per million speakers of Spanish worldwide).

Sources: Wikimedia Statistics; Most Spoken Languages in the World (Berlitz); List of countries and territories where Spanish is an official language (English Wikipedia). The Wikipedia Statistics are for May 2026. Note that there are important discrepancies in the official Wikipedia Statistics between the total number of active editors of Spanish Wikipedia (4200 editors with at least 5 edits per month) and the number of active editors of Spanish Wikipedia per country (totalling 6830 editors with at least 5 edits per month).

Chatty Mascots and Relatable Organisational Identities to Capture the Attention of Gen Z

The Historical Archive of the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (BUAP), which was founded in 1587 as Colegio del Espíritu Santo and thus ranks among the oldest institutions of higher education in the Americas, is looking for a brand mascot that is appealing to the younger generations and can be used across a variety of online offers and communication campaigns to raise awareness about the archive’s holdings. Two hackathon teams responded to the challenge, proposing the mascots “MUMUR” (a savant-looking elf) and “MINO” (alluding to the Roman goddess Minerva, featured in the university’s coat of arms) respectively. The latter team also reflected on how the character could be used in the context of a chatbot, which would translate the information contained in a knowledge base in order to engage younger users in a colloquial interaction about topics related to the university’s history.

A third visual identity, a Calaverita (a Día de Muertos style skeleton) travelling the world in the search of Mexico-related heritage holdings, was proposed by the project team “Umbrales” – it may be used in connection with one of the apps featuring Mexico-related artifacts from heritage holdings in other countries or as the mascot of the Wiki Loves Collective Memories campaign in Mexico.

The video recordings of the final project presentations can be viewed on our YouTube channel.

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