GLAM/Newsletter/May 2014/Contents/Germany report
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GLAM on Tour touring; WMDE Data fueling station
WMDE supported two GLAM events of volunteers:
Upper Lusatian Houses
One was a picture safari to a very special type of houses in Southern Saxonia. Almost 30 volunteers from 4 countries made their way to Lausatia and took more than 1.600 pictures on "Umgebindehäuser", the English term is Upper Lusatian Houses. These studwork houses only exist in that region bordering on Poland and the Czech Republic and they are threatened by decay. Now it needs bold authors to write articles about these houses. We gathered a virtual library on the topic. Whoever is interested in learning more about it and to participate can find more information on the project page.
Flying to the moon and beyond
The second event was a trip to space. Accompanying the German astronaut Alexander Gerst on his visit to the International Space Station at end of May, the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn launches a huge and multidiverse exhibition on "Outer Space". The catalogue to the exhibition quotes many Wikipedia articles and its register will refer to even more lemmata found in the Wikipedia. But as some articles were missing, Wikipedians met at the GLAM on Tour stop in Bonn to create new articles. The gallery received the participants with a well-equipped library and a full program. Check out what the colleagues mangaged to edit in less than 24 hours in the documentation. And if you want to edit feel free! Here is the register of the catalogue. Many articles are lacking in many languages. Read more.
Filling up
One really new thing had premiere in May. Have you ever thought about what will replace petrol in our century? Nuclear power, sunlight? Maybe, but the fuel of our time is data. But data is so hard to show and feel. It is difficult to picture it. This made us think about visualizing information as the fuel of our century. Out came the data filling station. On the biggest internet conference in Germany, the re:publica, Wikimedia Deutschland presented a transformed filling station to more than 6.000 visitors. Visitors were able to visit the station in order to download open data, e.g music, library catalogues, Open Street Map or open culture data in handy datasets on their smartphones, USB sticks or notebooks. Guess how much traffic we gained at our booth! It was a good opportunity to talk to people about free knowledge and to give the press an image for information. We are now working on expanding the data on the "Datentankstelle".
Museums congress "MAI-Tagung"
Wikipedia was invited by Landschaftsverband Rheinland (LVR) to held a presentation on the museums congress "MAI-Tagung" (slogan museums & the internet) in Völklingen, Saarland. Raymond (Raimond Spekking) participated on the congress and tried to convince the museums to work together with Wikipedians and to release their images under a Wikipedia compatible Creative Commons license. The slides are available on Commons: File:Museen & Wikipedia – Gemeinsam Kulturgut digital nutzbar machen – MAI-Tagung Völklingen 2014.pdf (in German only). The feedback on Twitter was very interesting: search term 1 and search term 2.
