GLAM/Newsletter/March 2020/Single

This Month in GLAM – Volume X, Issue III, March 2020

Australia report • Colombia report • France report • Indonesia report • Ireland report • Kosovo report • Netherlands report • Serbia report • Sweden report • UK report • USA report • Special story • Wikidata report • WMF GLAM report • Calendar

Know My Name; Public libraries of Queensland join Wikidata

By Pru.mitchell

Know My Name Art+Feminism national campaign

As part of our contribution to the global Art+Feminism campaign, Wikimedia Australia is partnering with the National Gallery of Australia on its Know My Name project, to enhance the understanding and appreciation of work by Australian artists who identify as women.

Fortunately held the weekend before in-person event restrictions started in Australia, we co-hosted a series of edit-a-thons in galleries and libraries around Australia on the weekend of International Women's Day, 7-8 March 2020.

Thanks to amazing pre-planning and coordination by Caddie Brain and her team in each state, the weekend saw 125 (mostly first time editors) create 69 new articles about female creators. Across the 7 edit-a-thons, 757 references were added to Wikipedia, and participants edited 223 articles.

Our partners included:

Public libraries of Queensland join Wikidata

Wikidata now includes all public library branches in Queensland.

This is one of 30 datasets available from State Library Queensland and it was uploaded by State Library of Queensland's Coordinator of Digital Library Initiatives, Rachel Merrick. Data contributed includes library names, addresses, opening hours, contacts, geographic coordinates, website and online catalogue links.

There are 328 branches across 73 library services in the state of Queensland, including 24 Indigenous Knowledge Centres.

Gender gap, Wikipedia and Libraries from the GLAM team

By Hiperterminal

Wikimedia Colombia invite to edit a female librarian

The GLAM team from Wikimedia Colombia is inviting to make visible the work of the Colombian female librarians with "Gender gap, Wikipedia and Libraries". We are aware of the Wikipedia Gender Gap and from Colombia we are inviting to librarians to create or edit articles about female librarians in Spanish Wikipedia, joining initiatives from different projects.

WikiGoths; WikiTopia Archives

By Xavier Cailleau WMFr, VIGNERON & Christelle Molinié

WikiGoths

The workshop originally planned on March 21 around the exhibition "Wisigoths, Rois de Toulouse" ("Wisigoths, Kings of Toulouse") at the Musée Saint-Raymond, the archaeological museum of Toulouse, was re-organised and took place online. The objects exhibited were created on Wikidata (with the import tool OpenRefine) and the corresponding images uploaded to Wikimedia Commons (with Pattypan).

Since it wasn't possible to access the museum to take photos, the online public who visited the exhibition before the lockdown was asked to share his own images on WikiCommons to complete those uploaded by the museum.

Furthermore, Wiktionary entries related to the Wisigoths have been created and improved.

Step by step the workshop has been documented on a Twitter thread to let people discover the Wiki projects.

See the results on Crotos

More information (in French) on fr:Projet:WikiGoths au musée Saint-Raymond.

WikiTopia Archives

The contributive session on line planned on March 21 pursues the work begun in March 2018: uploading of unpublished letters from 19th century scholars held by private owners. In addition to put these new datas available to everyone, the objective is to lead to an early biography of erudites like Anatole de Barthélemy and Ambroise Comarmond.

See the results on ArkéoTopia's contribution and some transcriptions on Wikisource.

More information (in French) on fr:Projet:WikiTopia_party.

Volunteers' meet-up; Wiki Cinta Budaya 2020 structured data edit-a-thon

By Rachmat04

GLAM Indonesia volunteers' meet-up

For the first time, Wikimedia Indonesia invited all volunteers participating in GLAM activities since 2017 to a formal meet-up in Jakarta, on March 7–8, 2020. The event was held for two days to review the current digitization activities in several places such as Yogyakarta, Bandung, Medan, and Padangpanjang. Our goals were to discuss challenges and opportunities in partnership with several GLAM institutions, and increase the capacity of each participant in the digitization process.

Processing raw scanned document to prepare for Commons upload
“Processing raw scanned document isn't a bad idea...”
Explaining how something should be done in the correct way
Staring the Elephant statue in front of the National Museum of Indonesia and why it is there in the first place
Group photo in National Museum of Indonesia

Small edit-a-thon to add structured data on Commons

For ten days, from March 20–29, 2020, we conducted a small edit-a-thon inviting Wikimedia contributors to add "depicts" data to photographs of Wiki Cinta Budaya 2020, a photography contest run by Wikimedia Indonesia focusing on cultural images of Indonesia. This contest gathered more than 1,000 images uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, and this edit-a-thon helped the images being machine-readable and more searchable.

Eleven participants (including the Campaign Manager) engaged in the edit-a-thon and resulted 3,165 contributions. Top three contributors (User:Devi pluto, User:S Kartika, User:Lnahdiya) will receive tokens of appreciation for taking part in the event from Wikimedia Indonesia.

For more overall statistics of contributions, please visit this Campaign page.

Some feedbacks we gathered from the participants are that they found the edit-a-thon was fun and entertaining. Two-third of total participants have never heard about Structured data on Commons before engaging in the event; however, there was a similar number of participants who gain little understand about the SDC still. They doubted if abstract entity should be added in the SDC or not. In the end, these feedbacks is a good start for Wikimedia Indonesia to grab where we should start to introduce SDC for the community in every workshop we will conduct in the future.

Video tutorials; Celtic Knot Conference 2020

By Slowking4

Video tutorials

Wikimedia Community Ireland and Rebecca O'Neill demonstrated editing Wikipedia and uploading images, on twitch, and facebook.

She was interviewed on Wikipedia Weekly.

Celtic Knot Conference 2020

The Celtic Knot Conference 2020 will be presented online, 9 to 10 July 2020 - Celtic Knot Conference 2020 - please check back for details.

WoALUG and NGO Germin call Albanian Diaspora to contribute to Wikipedia

By Miranda038

WoALUG collaborate with NGO Germin to make online campaign Diaspora Edits Wikipedia happen

Wikimedians of Albanian Language User Group during the past months joined forces with Germin, an NGO based in Prishtina which aims to connect and engage Diaspora in advancing the development of their home countries, to help make online campaign Diaspora Edits Wikipedia happen. Our intention for Diaspora Edits Wikipedia was to engage people from the large community of Albanian Diaspora to help enrichen the coverage of Albanian related articles in the Wikipedias of the countries where they reside. We compiled a list of articles consisting of Albanian personalities, traditions, events, etc. which have little or no coverage in other Wikipedias to give the participants a general idea of what they can contribute to.

Kicking off the campaign and hosting info-sessions for beginners

To begin with, we began the recruitment of the interested participants via an open call on our social media channels providing also a questionnaire for them to sign-up. Having in mind that our target audience might not have prior experience in contributing to Wikipedia, we agreed it is best to host two online info-sessions (we provided two options we evaluated to be best for different time zones) for beginners so they could learn the basics, have a space to have their questions answered and learn more about our UG's activities. After several discussions and meetings with members of Germin, we jointly agreed to start the campaign on the 21st of January and having it last until the 17th of February coinciding with Kosova's Independence Day date. However due to the request of the participants, this campaign was extended for two more weeks - so there would be more time to finish the articles. Members of diaspora from various countries signed up for the info-sessions, each lasting around 1.5 hours. After the sessions, they were asked to choose a topic from the list provided by us, or a topic of their choice (as long as it met the criteria of being related to their homeland).

Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen contributes to Wikimedia Commons again; Student research on GLAM-Wiki at Erasmus University Rotterdam

By DDJJ & SFauconnier

Two media donations by Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen

In March 2020, the Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen (the parent organization of the Tropenmuseum) has contributed two new collections to Wikimedia Commons.

Collection Josephine Powell

On the occasion of International Women's Day 2020, the Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen has uploaded over 800 images to Wikimedia Commons, consisting of photographs of objects from the collection of photographer Josephine Powell.

Josephine Powell spent a lot of time in the muslim world. Thousands of everyday objects from that region, collected by Powell, have now become part of the collections of the Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen.

View, and help categorize, the collection on Wikimedia Commons.
Read a blog post about this media donation (in Dutch)

Embroidered women's shirt, Pakistan, before 1965
Wooden mirror, Pakistan, before 1965
Metal plate, Punjabi, before 1965
Spinning wheel, Punjabi, before 1965
Glazed tile, Morocco, 1968
Mosaic tile, Morocco, before 1968
Silver headdress for women, Turkey, before 1977
Amulet against the 'evil eye', Turkey, before 1977
Embroidered cotton tablecloth, Turkey, before 1977

Photographs related to the Netherlands and the world

A second media donation in March 2020 consist of more than 500 digitized photographs, taken between the late 19th and 20th Century. The photographs fit into Wikimedia Nederland's thematic project Nederland en de wereld (The Netherlands and the world); they depict people, culture and buildings in regions with which the Netherlands has historical connections. This specific set of photos includes historical images of Bengal, Southern Africa, Siberia and Ghana.

View, and help categorize, these images on Wikimedia Commons.

Bengali dancer, photo G.R. Lambert & Co., 1870-1923
Portrait of the young man Insizwa, Trappist Mission Mariannhill, Kwazulu, 1894-1897
Buildings in Chabarovsk, Siberia, photo F.A. baron von Lühdorf, 1855-1883
Group of men, region of Kara river, Siberia, photo F.A. baron von Lühdorf, 1855-1883
Sorting tobacco leaves, Rustenburg, South Africa. Unknown photographer, 1910-1940
Bengali girls with children in Ramna Park, Dhaka. Photo Henk van Rinsum, 1973-1985
Buddhist temple, Chittagong. Photo Henk van Rinsum, 1973-1985
Railroad near Darjeeling, unknown photographer, 1890-1905
Jacob Abraham de Veer, salesman in Elmina, Ghana. Unknown photographer, 1870-1890

Student research on GLAM-Wiki at Erasmus University Rotterdam

A group of students at Erasmus University Rotterdam, led by scholar Trilce Navarrete, has researched the value propositions for cultural institutions (especially museums) of working with Wikimedia platforms. Wikimedia Nederland has provided mentorship in this course.

March Highlights - Everything is postponed

By Gorana Gomirac (VMRS)

The importance of Serbian literature and culture editathon is postponed

In cooperation with the Adligat Organization, which is contained of the Museum of Serbian Literature, the Book and Travel Museum, the Lazić Library and the House of Legacies, we participated in the organization of an Editathon entitled The Importance of Serbian Literature and Culture. Unfortunately, the event was canceled due to the declaration of a state of emergency because of the COVID-19, but we look forward to maintaining it when the situation stabilizes or to organize it online.

Wikipedian in residence - Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Novi Sad

Wikimedia Serbia and the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Novi Sad have signed a Memorandum of Understanding within the GLAM program. Initial activities of this collaboration were planned for early April through the Wikipedian in residence project but it was delayed until the state of emergency is abolished. We are honored to have cooperated with the Institution, which has the second-largest library in the territory of Vojvodina. We are sure that the fruits of cooperation will be of great value to all of us.

Extension of activities with Belgrade City Library

After a very productive meeting with the representatives of the Belgrade City Library, an agreement was reached to expand the activities within the long-term cooperation. Due to the declaration of a state of emergency, the activities are postponed until the situation stabilizes, but we will not let it discourage us but will endeavor to use that time to plan the activities in detail.

Part of the legacy of Pavle Vuisić exposed in Adligat
Tibetian Prayer Wheel exposed in Adligat
Letter from Nikola Tesla exposed in Adligat

FindingGLAMs; Wikipedia in libraries; Art from the Thiel Gallery Collections; Kulturhistoria som gymnasiearbete

By Axel Pettersson, Tore Danielsson & Alicia Fagerving

FindingGLAMs – sharing learnings from the project

Wikimedia Sverige has published Expanding what is possible around GLAMs on the Wikimedia projects: A White Paper as Guidance for Future Work. The paper is a result of the work we did within the FindingGLAMs project, focusing on content partnerships with cultural heritage institutions both in Sweden and abroad. The aim of the paper is to present a sample of the wide variety of material we encounter in our partnership with GLAMs and use it as a starting point for discussions about the development of the Wikimedia platforms. What tools do we, and other community members, use to work with material from GLAMs? How can they be improved? What is missing, and how are we currently making do?

Since 2019, Wikimedia Sverige and Wikimedia Foundation have been working towards building a thematic hub for institutional content partnerships – a socio-technical support structure for GLAM communities of practice. We wrote the white paper with this ambitious project in mind, as our experience provides us with real, practical problems to solve.

We invite the Wikimedia community to read the white paper. You are more than welcome to comment and share your insights with us on its talk page!

Wikipedia in libraries – next step online meetings

The libraries in Sweden do not close their operations and commitments. Instead, they try to switch to digital channels as far as possible. We had planned to do regular editathons after the courses, which were conducted in five locations around Sweden. Here we have to think in other ways and the next step is to test editathons online. What generally applies to all libraries in Sweden is that they each have the best control over their local authors. So we didn't need that much time to discuss that it would be a good theme to start with. In addition, there is a structure and similar projects already on Swedish Wikipedia.

What you also can do is to make objects in Wikidata for the books and to link the content and the places described in books and novels – in cases where they write about the place or about another local history. There are also opportunities to take pictures from the places in cases where that can work in the articles. We have tested different tools for video conferencing and follow other online editathons to find out how they best work. A project site is often needed for the project on Wikipedia as it usually is for ordinary editathons. But it will be exciting to see what can be added through video meetings and that hopefully, we can start a new edit culture through these online editathons.

Art from the Thiel Gallery Collections

The Thiel Gallery in Stockholm has uploaded 780 images as part of the digitalization project ”The Home Museum as Digital Heritage”. Many of the works have never been published online before. Works by Carl Larsson, Edvard Munch, Anders Zorn and Eugène Jansson, but also more unknown works of art by Aron Gerle and Ester Almqvist to name a few. Some of the images and creators need additional categories and creator templates, so feel free to find your favorite images and give them a bit of extra love and add them to articles and Wikidata objects.

Albert Engström: "What the hell is a toothbrush for?
Attributed to Lucas Cranach the Elder: Portrait of St. Bridget of Sweden
Bruno Liljefors: Swans in Reeds
Ester Almqvist: A Farm House in Själland

Kulturhistoria som gymnasiearbete

During March the students working with project Kulturhistoria som gymnasiearbete since September published their articles and presented their work. The 35 students created 29 new articles and edited 52, and added 609k bytes data. They also uploaded 71 images to Commons with a lot of historical value. Boosted by a new article about the Spanish flu in Sweden, and a small addition of a link in the article about the Spanish flu the number of views for the articles are up to 387k so far. Our plan, both with Nordiska museet and all involved teachers, is to continue with the project next year but to expand the topics to make it easier for the students to find where they can make valuable contributions.

Colourful Kimonos from Khalili

By MartinPoulter

Khalili Collections

The Khalili Collections shared 34 high-resolution images of Japanese kimono, including four higher-resolution versions of images already uploaded, bring the total uploads to 50. Work continues on documenting the Japanese art of the Khalili Collections. In April I (User:MartinPoulter) will start making Wikipedia articles on individual masterpieces from the collections and uploading images related to damascened metalwork.

Women & Editing in the time of virus

By Slowking4

International Women's Day San Diego

UC San Diego Library, Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind, SAID in STEM, and The UCSD Women's Center held a meetup, International Women's Day Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon

Smithsonian Women, Art, and Digital Visibility

National Portrait Gallery and Wikimedia DC held a meetup, Smithsonian Women, Art, and Digital Visibility

Art+Feminism and the New Museum

Art+Feminism and the New Museum held a workshop, Art+Feminism and the New Museum 2020, with a dashboard, livestream, and slack channel.

Virtual Wende Museum ArtAndFeminism 2020

Wende Museum held a virtual meetup; there was a dashboard

Wikipedia Weekly Network

Wikipedia Weekly has started up again live-streaming, you can watch Wikipedia Weekly Network. on social media of your choice.

COVID-19

By Pigsonthewing

While not a purely GLAM issue, many GLAMs have, of course been affected by the ongoing COVID-19 situation. Most GLAM-wiki events have been cancelled, or forced to move online.

We thought you'd be interested to see how the wider Wikimedia movement has been responding.

Pages edited

The Wikimedia Foundation research team have compiled a list of pages created or edited in connection with the pandemic (note: page is about half a megabyte!), in any language; it includes everything from major new articles on the topic to mentions in articles about notable survivors, such as Tom Hanks, and is updated automatically and regularly. Hopefully the tools for doing this will be available for deployment in other scenarios - albeit less dramatic!

With a GLAM focus, the English Wikipedia also has an article dedicated to the impact of the pandemic on the arts and cultural heritage sectors, featuring discussions of closures, impacts upon budgets and staffing, financial assistance, innovative digital responses, and new cultural works being created as a result. It is already nearing 200 footnotes-long, but we intend expand it further, to ensure proper coverage both geographically and by sector - and of course you can help.

Wikiprojects

Wikimedia projects are always collaborative, but WikiProjects give focus to that collaboration, and a venue where discussions can take place. For example, on:

Wikidata

Wikidata also has a large volume of relevant data on COVID-19. Wikidata Queries around the SARS-CoV-2 virus and pandemic is a free eBook to facilitate their use.

Press coverage

The movement's work in this area has come to the attention of the press. For example:

The future

If you're staying at home, don't forget there are many things you can do to improve Wikimedia projects - write or edit an article, fix some errors, find some citations, transcribe some text on Wikisource, or upload that backlog of photos you've been ignoring to Wikimedia Commons.

We wish you good health,

Lockdown Levellings

By Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing)

Note: A major database corruption hit Wikidata on 6 April, also affecting connected sister projects such as Wikipedia. A fix has been implemented, but it may take a day or two for things to get back to normal, especially for logged-out users.

Special Report: COVID-19

Wikidata meetups, including all those funded by Wikimedia Foundation grants, have been cancelled, or moved online, for the foreseeable future.

Wikidata's WikiProject COVID-19 is up and running. Wikidata already has a large volume of relevant data. Wikidata Queries around the SARS-CoV-2 virus and pandemic is a free eBook to facilitate their use.

News

New help page: Suggesters and selectors
EqualStreetNames.Brussels shows streets in Brussels named after men and women, visualized with data from OpenStreetMap and Wikidata
Internet Archive has launched a National Emergency Library and would like to work together with WikiCite
Upcoming:
- Wiki Workshop, researchers forum (fully remote), on 21 April. More information, registration
- The Celtic Knot Wikimedia Language Conference will take place fully remotely in July 2020. Call for submissions with remote formats is open until 30 April.

Press, articles, blog posts

The WikidataCon 2019 grant report
Investigating Software Usage in the Social Sciences: A Knowledge Graph Approach ("we linked the entities of the knowledge graph to other knowledge bases such as the Microsoft Academic Knowledge Graph, the Software Ontology, and Wikidata")
Wikidata as a knowledge graph for the life sciences, Andra Waagmeester et.al.
Tensor Decompositions for Temporal Knowledge Base Completion ("Additionally, we propose a new dataset for knowledge base completion constructed from Wikidata ... for evaluating temporal and non-temporal link prediction methods.")
Wikimedia Foundation’s Knowledge Infrastructure with Grant Ingersoll, CTO of Wikimedia Foundation
Improving Neural Named Entity Recognition with Gazetteers - "describes how to generate gazetteers from the Wikidata knowledge graph"
Knowledge Graphs on the Web -- an Overview - Nicolas Heist, et al.
- Some issues with this paper's reporting of Wikidata are identified in this Twitter thread
The List Revolution: Creating dynamic lists using linked data, by Alex Stinson
Video:
- Live SPARQL editing in French by Vigneron
- Live editing in English by Ainali and Abbe98: Youtube, Twitch, Periscope, Facebook
- Introduction to Wikidata video available both in English and in Welsh
- Video of the live Wikidata Querying

New tools

IdentifierInput: when adding identifiers, it lets you paste the full URL, and extracts the ID part
Wikidata knowledge imbalance dashboard - Alpha release

Technical matters

All identifiers are now sorted mostly alphabetically according to the RfC regarding the sorting of identifiers, which remains open if you have improvement proposals. Feel free to comment here!
QuickStatements change (announced 4 March). QuickStatements is now executing "run in background" batches with the same priority as direct batches run from the browser. Background batches may now run many times faster than they previously did.
News and discussions about Structured Data on Commons SPARQL endpoint
Querying the URL datatype with haswbstatement is now possible (phab:T243693). It will take two to three months before URLs are indexed for all Wikidata items.

Other news

For all other Wikidata news, new properties, etc, see:

Mapping GLAM-Wiki collaborations

By SGill

Update regarding mapping GLAM-Wiki collaborations

It has been previously reported that as part of the collaboration between Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Sverige, a project to map all the GLAM-Wiki activities in the movement in a structured format has been started in November 2019. By the end of the first week of April 2020, a phase of this project has been concluded.

This phase largely includes substantial research and prototyping of a database to host the gathered data. Data being gathered from various sources on and off Wikimedia projects has been populated to four broad categories - GLAM Wiki collaborations, GLAM-Wiki events, GLAM-Wiki conference participations, and GLAM-Wiki tools. The first category of projects are comparatively large projects, the second category mostly contains single/stand-alone events ranging one day to a few days such as edit-a-thons, and the last category where the Wikimedia community engaged with conferences and other similar activities in the sector.

Sources that have been researched through for gathering the data are as follows;

This Month in GLAM: January 2011 to February 2020
Grant reports submitted to the Wikimedia Foundation: Rapid Grant, Conference & Event Grant, Project Grant, Simple Annual Plan Grant, Annual Plan Grant through Funds Dissemination Committee process^[1], Individual Engagement Grant, Project and Event Grant, and Travel and Participating Support.
Wikimedia Foundation’s Affiliate reports: Reported via pages and subpages linked from Meta:Reports.

By the end of this (the first) phase of research and data gathering, a total of 884 GLAM-Wiki collaborations, 1,340 GLAM-Wiki events, and 344 conference participation/presentations, have been recorded. It is to be noted that these may contain duplicates and umbrella projects, which might be cleaned up and further processed in the next phase. In addition, it is also to note that there are significant data gaps, which are to be dealt in the next phase.

As the final objective to be achieved is to migrate this data to a website based on Linked Data architecture i.e. using Wikibase. Before proceeding with an actual site, Wbstack service has been used to create a test site (https://programs.wiki.opencura.com/wiki/Main_Page) and a substantial testing of data models and properties has been done in the time available. Learning from this testing would be used in later stages.

Details of later stages of the project would be communicated in the coming months, as required.

You are encouraged to review, provide feedback and also help us in filling gaps in the documentation sheet linked below:

GLAM-Wiki Activities Mapping - Community Review and Feedback Sheet

Notes

Only ‘Impact reports’ have been researched due to time limitations. ‘Progress reports’ which are submitted mid-term have not been covered, unless specifically required in a few cases.

April's GLAM events

Explore Wikimedia-GLAM history by browsing through the archives.

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