GLAM/Newsletter/May 2019/Contents/UK report

This Month in GLAM – Volume IX, Issue V, May 2019

UK report

Data Week and Data Joy

Oxford and Bristol

My (Martin Poulter's) contract as Wikimedian In Residence at the University of Oxford comes to an end at the end of July, so recent meetings have been about looking into future directions for the residency. Hopefully I will be able to make an announcement about this soon. The proof-of-concept applications will continue to be hosted for at least a year, and I will spend some of the remaining time of this contract in packaging up their code and HTML into something that can be preserved long-term.

I have been looking at the problem of dead links on Wikipedia and Commons. The Bodleian and Ashmolean have changed their platforms over the years, and there are domains being linked to which are out of date- totalling hundreds of links. It would be nice to have a tool that, for all Wikipedia articles about a certain collection or all Commons files that are linked in Wikidata to a given collection, scanned all external links and filtered on particular domains. Wikidata could be used to suggest up-to-date links as replacements. I have been trying to do this with SPARQL queries, but limitations of the SPARQL version of the MediaWiki API make this impractical. I have been learning about the MediaWiki API and the Phabricator process for reporting bugs and suggesting improvements. To make this tool, I may have to create some PHP or Javascript code to make multiple calls to the APIs.

Welcome Japan Search to the Web of Linked Open Data is a new blog post about connecting the Ashmolean data set on Wikidata with the Japan national cultural aggregator.

Events

11 May: Half-hour presentation on the Wikidata Query Service at the PastNet Hackathon hosted by The Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities: an audience of 20 researchers and postgraduate students. Very few had heard of Wikidata before and they weren't prepared for how impressive Wikidata is - both in terms of the extent of its data and the ease of use. What really impressed them was how helpful the query service is: the ctrl-space auto-suggestion, the multiple download formats, the visualisation options, the examples. It really stood out from other sites humanities researchers use that are supposed to make data accessible. My impression was that Wikidata became the most talked about single topic at the event. My favourite bit of feedback was "You've ruined my productivity for the next month because this is so addictive". This researcher had made a map of birthplaces of notable people with his given name, then one for his wife's given name, and kept thinking of things to make maps of.
20 May: Two hour training workshop on the Wikidata Query Service, a public event as part of Data Week at the University of Bristol: 5 trainees
24 May: Presentation and workshop for the National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, hosted at Maynooth University, Ireland. Eight trainees, including tutors and researchers from universities in the Republic and Northern Ireland, learned about educational assignments on Wikipedia. We looked at article assessments, Wikiprojects, PetScan and the events dashboard.

Disability Arts event

An editathon on the topic of the Disability Arts Movement was held at the University of Leicester on 29 May, by Attenborough Arts Centre in conjunction with the National Disability Art Collection & Archive and Wikimedia UK. Andy Mabbett gave an overview of Wikimedia projects and trained ten new volunteers (eight students and two staff) to edit Wikipedia. See pictures on Twitter.

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