GLAM/Newsletter/March 2021/Single

This Month in GLAM – Volume XI, Issue III, March 2021

AfLIA Wikipedia in African Libraries report • Albania report • Brazil report • Finland report • Germany report • Netherlands report • Sweden report • UK report • USA report • WMF GLAM report • Calendar

Wikipedia in African Libraries

By AKibombo (AfLIA)

January 2021

After concluding with the pilot cohort in December 2020, we were also able to participate as a collective in January's edition of #1Lib1Ref and you can view the program statistics here.

A call was put out for the main cohort of and we received over 500 applications from both Anglophone and Francophone countries in Africa but no Lusophone applicant. English-speaking students form the bulk of enrolled students (333) while we enrolled 64 French-speaking students.

February 2021

The main cohort got underway on 4th February with a virtual opening session.

The project is conducted in the 3 working languages of AfLIA ie English, French and Portuguese meaning that we have been able to benefit from the help of experienced Wikipedians across the community in a number of ways for example User:Csisc translated the project's meta page to French in addition to translating the course introduction and supplementary materials with related illustrations from French Wikipedia. The reviews and various corrections of the french course content and facilitation of live sessions has been done with the help of other French-speaking Wikimedians such as :

User:GiFontenelle translated the project's meta page to Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese.

It has been an opportunity for us to engage Wikimedians from various countries in Africa as guest presenters who have shared their knowledge, experience and GLAM-related expertise.

March 2021

With live sessions held for English-speaking students on Tuesdays and Wednesday's for the French, there are the usual challenges of time, conflicting schedules, poor or no internet connectivity and no electricity.

There are some challenges we could not have imagined.For example, being a virtual course, a number of participants are able to attend from abroad and participate in virtual sessions and office hours. However, they are not able to engage with Wikipedia in terms of editing because of local legislation in the countries in which they are based.This negatively affects their participation in the course when it comes to assignments.

Community outreach

At this point in the course and beyond, course participants need the support of their local Wikimedia communities . To-date we have had at least 2 outreach/virtual meet & greet sessions between librarians and local Wikimedians from Botswana and Kenya. Others are still being planned and will be communicated.

Wiki Loves Folklore 2021; I edit Wikipedia

By Vyolltsa

Wiki Loves Folklore

For 2021, Wiki Loves Folklore was really fun and the outcomes showed a high participation of volunteers in contributing to uploading pictures from different aspects of the Albanian Folklore. Wikimedians of Albania Language User Group invited people to show the Albanian Folklore through places, people, dances, clothing, buildings and so on. This project has impact on social, cultural and educational aspects of Albania and Kosovo.

The category with all the uploads can be found here

File:Tava e kosit.jpg

I edit Wikipedia

On January 22nd, we kicked off the campaign “I edit Wikipedia” until February 21st. The goal of this campaign is to introduce new people to the Edit button, and the fact that anyone could edit articles. We had the opportunity to have new editors that appreciated and enjoyed the process of editing articles. This time we were able to have 223 total edits from 26 editors that contributed to the “I edit Wikipedia” campaign. At the very beginning, we held an online training session to train the participants how to edit Wikipedia. Everyone had the possibility to practice editing by choosing a topic. In the meantime they were able to ask questions and discuss as a group in order to ease their editing process.

Statistics can be found here

The Brazilian House is the theme of new GLAM dissemination activities

By Érica Azzellini & Marília Carrera

Wikicontest: The Brazilian House

For the second year in a row, Wiki Movimento Brasil is leading a wikicontest on Portuguese Wikipedia related to the Museu Paulista GLAM initiative. The main theme for 2021 is the Brazilian House in which the participants improve and create articles on subjects associated with the museum's exhibition and research. There are five main topics being covered: The Modern House, Decoration and Female and Masculine Identities, Kitchen objects, Interpreters of the Brazilian House and São Paulo dishware. As the Paulista Museum is an university museum, research and education are in its core activities. Wiki Movimento Brasil received support from museum scholars for curating the Wikipedia entries valid for the contest, totaling more than 800 entries available.

Participants that add images from the Museu Paulista GLAM to illustrate Wikipedia entries will receive a special score at the contest. There are more than 28 thousand images available on Wikimedia Commons. All edits on Wikipedia are being daily evaluated by the organization team.

Only three weeks after the start of the contest on March 15th, 490 already editors subscribed for the activity, creating 122 articles and improving 285 more -- with many more contributions to come until May 15th!

Edit-a-thon: The Modern House

On March, 26th the second edit-a-thon promoted by Wiki Movimento Brasil (WMB) user group and Museu Paulista in 2021 took place online. The main topic of The modern house edit-a-thon was the houses built between the late 19th century and the early 20th century in Brazil in the context of the rise of bourgeoisie society in the country. Historian Vânia Carneiro de Carvalho, who holds a PhD in Social History and works as curator and researcher at Museu Paulista, delivered a speech about domestic space and material culture.

Part of Museu Paulista GLAM-Wiki initiative, the event contabilized 14 editors, 22 entries edited on Wikipedia and 6 media files uploaded on Wikimedia Common. We invite you to join us on the next edit-a-thons:

April, 23rd: Decoration and female and male identities
May, 28th: Kitchen and its stuff
June, 18th: Interpreters of the Brazilian house
July, 9th: São Paulo dishware

Click here to watch the full event.

New objects collection batch uploaded

Wiki Movimento Brasil uploaded more 1777 images on Wikimedia Commons from the objects collection of the Museu Paulista. They resemble the visuals of daily objects in Modern Houses in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in São Paulo, a moment in which the architecture style changed from the colonial productive usage to a bourgeois aesthetic and functioning of the domestic private spaces. You can find below some of the new images uploaded:

An iron
A cookies can
An armchair
A piece of lace
Commemorative crockery for the 4th centenary of São Paulo
Commemorative crockery for the 4th centenary of São Paulo

GLAM Partnerships

Centro de Memória da Unicamp (CMU)

A partnership between Wiki Movimento Brasil (WMB) user group and Centro de Memória Unicamp (CMU) has been established recently, allowing the development of a new and prosperous GLAM-Wiki initiative. Founded in 1985, CMU gathers a vast collection of audiovisual, iconographic, sound, textual and three-dimensional documents related to Campinas and its metropolitan area from late 18th century until nowadays. The period pieces, in particular, have a great educational value to different fields of study, since they reflect the changes in the region from the sugarcane and the coffee economic cycles to the industrialization period in São Paulo. Besides, CMU also manages a library located at University of Campinas (Unicamp) that keeps rare titles and historical publications, such as antique magazines, newspapers and pamphlets.

Enriching indigenous items in Wikidata

By Yupik

There is a wealth of identifiers used on Wikidata items that link these items to other items and websites and the situation looks pretty good until you start to try to find ids for indigenous topics. Mainstream media tends to not discuss these topics and if they do, they rarely create tags for them, leaving users unable to easily locate related material. Sometimes this is used to delete items off of Wikidata as non-notable, when in reality the subject is notable, just invisible to the non-indigenous community. We decided to tackle this head on, by proposing that indigenous tags and ids be added as properties into Wikidata.

Ávvir (P9318)

We decided to kick this off by proposing that Ávvir tags be connected to Wikidata via a property. Ávvir is one of the most widely read Northern Saami newspapers and often covers topics not covered in mainstream newspapers or media outlets. They have been tagging their online articles for a while now, which means we now have identifiers that cover not only general topics but also indigenous topics that are not otherwise linked to in Wikidata. As it is a Saami newspaper, a large portion of the tags are related to Saami topics, but there have also been quite a few tags related to other indigenous communities as well.

While adding tags, I have learned that our coverage of certain indigenous topics is patchy at best and I have been formulating plans on how to improve and enrich these topics, which will make it easier for us to write articles about these topics on the Northern and Inari Saami wikipedias too. One unexpected bonus of adding this property to items was that missing labels and descriptions are also being added in Northern Saami and sometimes in other Saami languages as a result. Another unexpected bonus was the amount of placename-related tags that Ávvir uses, which we can then use to improve existing items and merge the unwanted bot-created doubles and triples littering Wikidata.

The property was created in the middle of March and as of the 6th of April, it has been used on 534 items and there are approximately the same amount still waiting to be added. Each day brings new tags, so it will be interesting to see how connected these items are by the end of the year and if other external sites start recognizing that indigenous topics are important too.

Future proposals

As this property proposal has been a good idea, we are also planning on proposing other indigenous-generated ID properties later on this year. These will be more GLAM-based and include property ids for vocabularies and ontologies from indigenous museums and libraries.

We will also propose property IDs for databases covering indigenous movies and their actors, directors, producers, etc. as these are often missing from user-generated databases like IMDB. In addition to the Ávvir topic ID, we will also see if there are other indigenous media outlets using tags that can be added as a topic ID.

A virtual exhibition on 20 years of Wikipedia

By Holger Plickert (WMDE)

Together for Free Knowledge - A virtual exhibition on 20 years of Wikipedia - for and with the community

As a birthday present to Wikipedia, an anniversary exhibition was created in cooperation with the German Digital Library and went online just in time for the birthday of the German-language Wikipedia. The contributions of Wikipedians are at the centre of the exhibition. A team of three curators selected them from the submissions sent in by the community. The Wikipedians dug through their memories, dug out photos and videos and wrote texts.

In five chapters, the exhibition invites you on an entertaining walk that takes a look at milestones of free knowledge and Wikipedia, looks behind the scenes of the community's self-organisation and tells a variety of stories and curiosities from 20 years of Wikipedian commitment. The exhibition also deliberately takes a look at the negotiation processes: Because the discussions are part of Wikipedia's success story. The sixth chapter contains the collected congratulations of all those involved.

The exhibition is a gift to Wikipedia and to the community, to reminisce, perhaps discover something new and dare to look back with a wink. But the exhibition is also designed for people who are not yet Wikipedians themselves. Visitors who have been using Wikipedia for a long time will get an insight into Wikipedia from the perspective of their community.

To the exhibition.

Workshop "GLAM: Wikipedia and cultural institutions"

To mark the 20th birthday of the German-language Wikipedia on 16 March 2021, the big Wikipedia action week took place. A live workshop titled "GLAM: Wikipedia and cultural institutions", was held. We used the example of International Museum Day to show how GLAM projects work in the Wikiverse.

In the live workshop, we discussed the following questions together: How can GLAM projects be enriching for volunteers and institutions alike? What has proven successful, which expectations have been met, which have perhaps been disappointed and which new GLAM territories are worth exploring together?

We started with a short presentation of a successful cross-national and cross-institutional project on International Museum Day. The following open discussion round was designed to present - depending on interest - existing programmes in more depth, to address individual questions and to establish contacts for concrete entry opportunities. Debora Lopomo (Wikimedia CH), Raimund Liebert (Wikimedia Austria) and Holger Plickert (Wikimedia Germany) led the 60-minute discussion, which linked knowledge and culture. The roundtable was held with Google Meet and could be attended without registration. The presentation on the roundtable can be viewed here.

Wikimedians in Residence for Media Art Project LIMA, Wikimedia and libraries, Wikimedia training related to shared heritage

By DDJJ & SFauconnier

Wikimedians in Residence for Media Art Project LIMA

In March 2021, the first Wikimedian in Residence (WiR) started for the project Media Art on Wikipedia, specifically focused on a technical link between the data of Wikipedia and the online catalog Mediakunst.net.

At the beginning of this year Mediakunst on Wikipedia was launched, a project carried out by LIMA, Wikimedia Nederland and museum partners and knowledge institutions such as the Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and the Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed Amersfoort, a number of universities, NDE and DEN. The collaboration involves integrating the workings of Wikipedia with Mediakunst.net. The data of the artists on Mediakunst.net will be included in Wikidata and Wikipedia. In this way the information of - and with that the knowledge about - media art and media artists that was previously only available at specialized institutions will be made accessible on a national and international level for a broad public.

In April 2021, a second WiR will start that will focus on providing training within the organizations affiliated with the Media Art Project.

Wikimedia and libraries

Following the introduction session at the OCLC Contact Day, Wikimedia Nederland and OCLC are offering five webinars on the topic of "Libraries and Wikipedia. Sharing knowledge together in a digital world'.

During these five webinars, we will discuss in depth:

Reliable sources, how to recognize them?
The possibilities that Wikimedia offers for library objectives
Increasing visibility and the (visual) collection

The webinars are open to library directors, staff members and volunteers within the Wikimedia community who are interested in the collaboration opportunities between libraries and Wikimedia projects. The first webinar was on March 18, and we will conclude the series on April 8.

Wikimedia training around shared heritage - Suriname and the Dutch Caribbean

From the end of April until the end of June 2021, Wikimedia Nederland organizes an intensive and beginner-friendly Wikimedia training for people, initiatives and cultural organizations that manage heritage about the history of Suriname, the Dutch Caribbean and the Netherlands. During the training, a lot of attention will be given to 'sensitive' heritage which, for instance, relates to colonial history and to slavery.

The training consists of four masterclasses and one full day for editing and practicing. Most sessions will be held in Dutch but some parts will be in English. If you are interested in some of the topics or if you want to participate in the final (practical) day, don't hesitate to get in touch with Sandra Fauconnier who organizes the training.

23 April 2021: Masterclass 1 - Introduction to Wikimedia and Wikipedia
12 May 2021: Masterclass 2 - Wikimedia Commons
28 May 2021: Masterclass 3 - Wikidata
11 June 2021: Masterclass 4 - Sensitive heritage on Wikimedia projects + Wikisource
Saturday 26 June 2021: Full day of practice

The full program of the training, and times of the various masterclasses, are listed on Dutch Wikipedia.

GLAM in Sweden in March

By Axel Pettersson, Tore Danielsson, Josefine Hellroth Larsson & Alicia Fagerving

Working life museum courses

Following the tradition of giving courses to volunteers at working life museums every now and then it was time again this March. In two training sessions the volunteers learned both to edit articles and to upload files to Wikimedia Commons. This round had 12 eager students learning about conflict of interest and the necessity of providing sources while trying to improve the articles about their museums and adding images from their collections.

Students writing articles on cultural history in cooperation with the Nordic Museum

Upper secondary school students has to have a special project during their final year. In this case, students from Enskilda Gymnasiet in Stockholm and Anderstorpsgymnasiet in Skellefteå are writing Wikipedia articles on different topics connected to cultural history. The articles were published in February on Swedish Wikipedia, and have gained quite some attention since. The article on the the feminization of the teaching profession became the best new article of the month, and the article "shirt" became the best improved article. The Nordic Museum provides good sources from their archive and library, as well as providing topics for articles and support throughout the process. Wikimedia Sverige supports the students with the Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons knowledge needed, teaching them how the platforms work. This is a very successful cooperation and we hope to be able to do it again next year.

Structured data about old music

Ack fågel, varför sjunger du ej mer, one of the folk music recordings that have been enriched with structured data statements.

Structured Data on Commons, when added to files from GLAM collections, is a huge step towards making them more searchable and easier to analyze. That's why Wikimedia Sverige is making a focused effort to add SDC to some of the collections that we have previously uploaded as part of our partnerships. Recently we have been working on sound recordings from the Swedish Performing Arts Agency, converting data from the file descriptions such as performance date and artist to structured data statements.

Which GLAM collections do you think should have more structured data added?

Musical works from Swedish Music Heritage

There has previously been an upload from Swedish Musical Heritage with about 700 Swedish composers to Wikidata. We have made an upload and just over 5000 works are now connected to these composers. The website for Swedish Musical Heritage also has musical notes for many of the works. One goal is to increase information and availability for these musical notes that are not any longer in copyright and are public domain marked.

Wikimedia Wikimeet India – on SDC and GLAMs

Our presentation on SDC for GLAM collections at the Wikimedia Wikimeet India.

The Wikimedia Wikimeet India 2021 took place in February, and we took it as an opportunity to share our experiences from working with Structured Data on Commons. We see a lot of potential in SDC for GLAM collections, as it makes them easier to search, discover and analyze. The goal of our workshop was to showcase SDC and the different tools available for working with it, hopefully inspiring other Wikimedians to include it in their outreach and partnerships with GLAM organizations.

Refining open GLAM data with OpenRefine

OpenRefine is a fantastic piece of software that volunteers and professionals alike use to clean up their datasets and upload them on Wikidata. It's not surprising that more and more GLAM experts want to include it in their workflow, and Wikimedia Sverige is here to help. We are currently working with two Swedish GLAMs, the Nationalmuseum and the National Historical Museums of Sweden (an umbrella organization for several museums), on a larger project to align their authority data with Wikidata. This will include including the Wikidata ID's of historical people relevant to the museums' collections, such as artists, craftsmen and donators, in their own systems, as well as creating items for any of those that are not yet on Wikidata. OpenRefine is an obvious tool to analyze and work with the museums' large datasets, so we had a class to introduce the project group to it. It was exciting to see them go from loading their datasets into OpenRefine to finding problematic areas and duplicates in their data, to reconciling their entries and crafting Wikidata schemas. Hopefully they will be able to not only apply these new skills in their own work, but also to share them with other GLAMs!

Code4Lib – talking Wikidata and libraries

In March, Wikimedia Sverige participated in the Code4Lib conference, focusing on open technologies in libraries, museums and archives. We were there to talk about our partnership with the National Library of Sweden. We talked about the library's investment in Linked Open Data and our work to upload parts of its catalog to Wikidata. It was great to listen to other participants talk about Wikidata and see their enthusiasm for its possibilities.

Library pod participation

The regional library of Västerbotten dedicated an episode of their pod (in Swedish) to Wikipedia and Libraries. During the episode two of the librarians who participated in the training sessions for librarians last year talked about editing and organizing events and Axel Pettersson from Wikimedia Sverige talked about #1lib1ref, knowledge gaps, #WikiGap, the community and what a local chapter does.

Leeds Museums & Galleries, the British Library and the Khalili Collections

By Lajmmoore, EriedgenArc & MartinPoulter

Leeds Museums & Galleries

Rather than a monthly update, this is a long overdue summary of the work that's been ongoing at Leeds Museums & Galleries over the past 18 months. Apologies for not updating here previously - where does the time go?

In 2019 we ran a number of in-house "first editing steps" sessions for curatorial colleagues; we also recruited a project placement (User:Leedsproject2019) to start exploring the potential of our collections to add biographies to address gender gap, etc.
In 2020 we ran our first Wikithon - one at Leeds Industrial Museum on women in industry; Leeds Art Gallery also did a scoping exercise to see which how many artists from the collection were present here; we also introduced some volunteers to editing who are making changes to existing pages; we also collaborated with Leeds Libraries and the British Library on the Women in Leeds event.
In 2021, one volunteer's first new page was accepted (Violet Crowther) and we are hoping to run further training in the future as we know there's a keen appetite; we're also keen to explore ways we might be able to add images of our collections to Commons (slowly, tentatively and with thought) later in the year; we're also keen to hear from people with experience to share, since we have no official Wikipedian.

We're looking forward to the year ahead, potentially with the idea of getting more of our volunteers involved.

British Library: New Beginnings

This was the first month of my residency as the new Wikimedian-in-Residence at the British Library. As such, a number of introductory meetings have been held and we are looking forward to a productive year ahead!

Since the start of the month, a few things have happened:

An introductory blog, with links to my profile page and Twitter account was published on the Digital Scholarship blog;
We have been engaging with IFLA’s Wikidata interest group on collaborative plans for an event in May, as well as drafting a new introductory zine for Wikimedia beginners;
We were delighted to attend the launch of the latest Art+Feminism edit-a-thon with the University of Arts London and ARLIS;
We met with the India Records Office to discuss an upcoming project on Wikisource and Wikidata utilising a sample set of records from Bengal;
From 15 March – 14 April 2021 the Two Centuries of Indian Print project is running a competition to proofread text from Bengali books digitised by the project, now hosted on Wikisource. This is in partnership with the West Bengal Wikimedians User Group. In the first two weeks of the competition more than 1,000 pages have been worked on by contributors. The project hopes to engage more with this group in the coming year to events to broaden awareness, knowledge and use of Wikis in South Asia.

Khalili Collections

There were 23 new images uploaded up to 1 April, plus three higher-resolution versions of previously-uploaded images, plus three cropped versions of previously-uploaded images. The new images are related to Islam and the Hajj. The bulk upload of hundreds of Islamic art images is expected in June.

The biography of Spanish metalworker Plácido Zuloaga passed Good Article Review, making it the second GA from this project. The Khalili Collection of Hajj and the Arts of Pilgrimage article appeared on the Did You Know section of English Wikipedia and a volunteer translated a summary of it into Arabic, creating the 23rd new article from this project. The 24th new article is Sitara (textile), about sacred textiles used in Mecca and Medina.

Women's History Month in the US

By Fuzheado

Met x Wikipedia for Women's History Month (March 6)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art hosted an online edit-a-thon for Women's History Month, focusing on Wikidata entries for prominent women artists. The meetup was held online using Streamyard, which sent the video feed to Youtube, Facebook and Twitter simultaneously. Attendees/watchers were able to interact with hosts Richard Knipel and Andrew Lih from the Wikimedia community and with Jennie Choi from The Met. The session had more than 600 watchers at its peak, and had more than 300 attendees halfway through the event.

A video feed can be found on Youtube.

National Museum of Women in the Arts/Wikimedia DC Black Women Artists Matter Art + Feminism Edit-a-thon (March 6)

On March 6, the National Museum of Women in the Arts and Wikimedia DC hosted a Black Women Artists Matter Art + Feminism Edit-a-thon. During the event, 27 editors edited 32 articles. 4.89K words and added 65 references were added. The article work list was compiled by NMWA's librarians. Editing training was led by Wikimedia DC's Ariel Cetrone. The edit-a-thon was the eighth collaboration between NMWA and Wikimedia DC.

Smithsonian American Women's History Initiative (AWHI) edit-a-thon (March 25)

On March 25th, the AWHI along with the Smithsonian Institution Archives and the Biodiversity Heritage Library, hosted a virtual edit-a-thon about American women in science. Our worklist was populated from the Funk List. Throughout the course of the 2 hour event, 3 new articles from the Funk List were created and over 3,600 words about women in science were added to Wikipedia. Kelly Doyle (Open Knowledge Coordinator for the AWHI) gave an overview to Wikipedia and she and Andrew Lih conducted a live editing demonstration. Wikimedia DC supported with training new editors.

Closing the Gap: Women's History Month edit-a-thon (March 29)

Wikimedia DC hosted an edit-a-thon with the White House Gender Policy Council & the White House Domestic Policy Council aimed at closing the gender gap online. Ariel Cetrone led the training, compiled the worklist, and assigned an article to each attendee from the three girls advocacy organizations in attendance: Girls Who Code, Girls Inc., and Girls for Gender Equity, Inc. Kelly Doyle from the Smithsonian AWHI gave remarks on the gender gap on Wikipedia and the importance of participation on the site to make Wiki more equitable. The attendees created many new high-quality articles about notable women, like Portia Gage and Julissa Arce.

Wiki World Heritage User Group training (March 28)

Wiki World Heritage User Group - Wikidata Query training (March 28, 2021)

The Wiki World Heritage User Group (WWHUG) started off their capacity building and training series with a talk by Andrew Lih on the basics of Wikidata Query, including a basic tutorial on Wikidata. The attendees also spent time analyzing and figuring out the best practices to model all the UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Wikidata. Some of that work and open tasks people can help with can be found here:

See the full training schedule and videos.

Food Safety Modernization Act

National Agricultural Library, and Wikimedia DC held a meetup, FSMA Edit-a-thon.

Philadelphia WikiSalon

Wikimedians in Philadelphia held a WikiSalon, on March 13, 2021, WikiSalon 2021-03-13.

Planetary Wiki edit-a-thon

WikiDonne, Women in red and Europlanet Society, held a meetup, Planetary Science Wiki Edit-a-thon March 26th meeting

Media Search, Image Suggestion API, and Project Grants

By Fiona Romeo, Giovanna Fontenelle & Carly Bogen

Making cultural content more visible

Several product teams at the Foundation are working hard to improve image discovery and reuse on Wikimedia projects. Two new releases show the potential of these developments for libraries and cultural institutions. The first is the new Media Search on Wikimedia Commons, by the Structured Data Across Wikimedia team, and the second is a proof-of-concept Image Suggestion API, by the Platform Engineering team.

Searching across languages

Media Search (or Special:MediaSearch) is an image-focused interface that makes it easier to find what you’re looking for on Wikimedia Commons. Most importantly, the search results are language agnostic. Given a search term like "zonnevlek" (Dutch for “sunspot”), Media Search won’t just return the one file on Commons that uses that term, it will search Wikidata for relevant entities and then find all files with that term and any of its aliases or translations. For the “zonnevlek” example, the number of images returned increased from one file to more than six hundred files. Media Search will make the millions of images contributed by libraries and cultural institutions much more accessible to a broad global audience.

You can try the new search here. It became the default search landing page for anonymous users on 1 April, 2021, and for all users in May, 2021.

To increase the search relevance of your files, you should include a descriptive title and detailed description, use the relevant Commons categories, and add depicts statements and a caption as Structured Data.

Suggesting images for Wikipedia

The Image Suggestion API is a service that will generate a list of unillustrated articles for any language version of Wikipedia, and then suggest up to 10 images for placement on those articles. The API will be powering a planned ‘add an image’ structured task for newcomers to Wikipedia but could also be used to drive image reuse campaigns, such as Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos.

Right now, the API is only a proof of concept and is still being developed. You can try it at API Documentation and learn more on the MediaWiki page. If you can imagine using this API in your work with images, share your ideas on the Talk page.

The API uses algorithms that simply aggregate existing information from Wikidata and Commons, drawing on connections already made by experienced contributors. There are four main ways that it suggests matches to unillustrated articles:

Look at the Wikidata item for the article. If it has an image (P18), choose that image.
Look at the Wikidata item for the article. If it has a Commons category associated (P373), choose an image from the category.
Look at the articles about the same topic in other language Wikipedias. Choose a lead image from those articles.
Search MediaSearch for the title of the article. If an image ranks high enough in the results, choose that image.

To make your files available to the Image Suggestion API, you should use the relevant Commons categories and add depicts statements as Structured Data.

Learn more about the benefits of using Structured Data on Commons by reviewing the updated documentation and joining our April office hours on Monday, 26 April, 3.30pm-4.30pm UTC, and on Tuesday, 27 April, 11.00am-12.00pm UTC.

Research and Technical Project Grants

Grant proposals for research and technology projects are out for community feedback. We’d like to draw your attention to the following proposals:

April's GLAM events

<<< previous month	view · talk · edit	April 2021				next month >>>
Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday	Sunday
29	30	31	1	2	3	4
5	6 LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call (9am PT / 12pm ET / 17:00 UTC / 6pm CET)	7	8	9	10	11
12	13	14	15	16 Swiss Open Cultural Data Hackathon 2021	17 Swiss Open Cultural Data Hackathon 2021	18
19	20	21 Fostering Connections: Wikimedia and Libraries Global Meetup (12:00 p.m. UTC)	22 Coventrypedia (2-5pm BST)	23 WMNL Masterclass for heritage from Surinam and the Dutch Caribbean, part 1: introduction to the world of Wikimedia and Wikipedia (12pm UTC)	24	25
26 WMF GLAM team office hours: Structured Data on Commons (3.30pm-4.30pm UTC).	27 WMF GLAM team office hours: Structured Data on Commons (11.00am-12.00pm UTC)	28	29 Coventrypedia (2-5pm BST)	30	1	2

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