GLAM/Newsletter/May 2025/Single

This Month in GLAM – Volume XV, Issue V, May 2025

Albania report • Belgium report • Brazil report • Croatia report • Czech Republic report • Europe report • India report • Indonesia report • Italy report • Kosovo report • New Zealand report • Nigeria report • Poland report • Serbia report • Spain report • Switzerland report • UK report • Ukraine report • USA report • Biodiversity Heritage Library report • Memory of the World report • Calendar

Enhancing the LGBTQ+ content in Albanian Wikipedia

By Vyolltsa

Throughout the month of May, Wikimedians of Albanian Language User Group in collaboration with the ProLGBT organization in Tirana, Albania organized a series of 3 productive editathons focused on improving LGBTQ+ content on Albanian Wikipedia.

These meetings served to connect activists and Wikimedians in a shared effort to increase the visibility of LGBTQ+ terminologies in Albanian, making it easier for the public to understand and engage with these concepts through article translations and improvements. We created 17 new articles and improved 48 articles on Wikipedia and we had 35 total revisions on Wikidata.

This collaboration is a step forward in expanding knowledge on Wikipedia and Wikidata and in building a stronger connection between the Wikimedia community and LGBTQ+ advocates in Albania. It helps close content gaps and promote visibility for underrepresented communities.

Wikimedians of Albanian Language are grateful to Pro LGBT and everyone who took part in making this initiative possible.

Social media

We have a public channel on WhatsApp of Albanian Language if you want to join and discuss Wikimedia projects.

If you want to see more about our activities, you can:

Like our Facebook page, follow us on formerly Twitter or X or Instagram.

WhatsApp of Albanian Language Facebook page, or Instagram

Belgium Public Domain Day and Dance Heritage

By Caren Vervaeke

News from Wikimedia Belgium.

🎶 Looking back on 8 May - Writing session for PhD students in arts and musicology

On 8 May, PhD students from all over Belgium gathered for an inspiring writing and meeting day around research in the arts and musicology. The meeting offered young researchers the chance to present their work and engage in conversation about methodological, historiographical and artistic questions.

The session was not only a productive networking opportunity, but also produced nice concrete results on Wikipedia:

Results
A total of 12 participants 3 new pages were created A total of 18 edits 13 references were added A total of 61 contributions

The day once again demonstrated the potential of collaboration between academic research and free knowledge sharing. Thanks to all participants and faculty present for their commitment and valuable contributions!

🎉 1 January = Public Domain Day! Join Wiki Loves Public Domain!

On 1 January, we celebrate Public Domain Day - the day when copyrights expire and creative works become freely available to all. A wealth of images, texts and music then enters the public domain, available for Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata and Wikipedia, among others.

New this year: Wiki Loves Public Domain (WLPD)

To highlight this moment, this year we are organising the very first edition of Wiki Loves Public Domain: a challenge to make the public domain more visible and available on Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. And what exactly will WLPD look like? We will be happy to decide that together!

📌 Consider, for example, activities such as:

Writing Wikipedia biographies about creators whose work will soon become public domain
Uploading and adding work by creators who have just become public domain.

Stronger together - international as well
For this project, we are collaborating with Wikimedia Netherlands, Wikimedia France and, of course, partners such as meemoo, Koninklijke Bibliotheek (Belgium and the Netherlands) and Open Nederland.

🤝 Do you want to help?
We are looking for enthusiasts who want to help with:

Developing the project page and work lists
Promotion and communication
Uploads to Wikimedia Commons
Organising (online or live) activities

Interested? Let us know by sending an email to Michelle van Lanschot: vanlanschot@wikimedia.nl

Together we make the public domain visible - for everyone!

Santé on the heritage of Denderland!

From July 1 to September 30, we invite all heritage and photography enthusiasts to share images of Denderland's heritage via Wikimedia Commons.

🎯 Theme: breweries, distilleries & people's pubs 📍 Region: Denderland incl Aalst, Ninove, Erpe-Mere, Haaltert, Lede, Denderleeuw 🏆 Beautiful prizes & chance at expo as well as national recognition!

More info through: Wiki Loves Denderland 2025

Video resource on Wikimedia Brasil and Casa de Oswaldo Cruz Partnership Released

By Juliana Cunha

Casa de Oswaldo Cruz Partnership Released

In July 2023, Wikimedia Brasil launched a GLAM-Wiki partnership with Casa de Oswaldo Cruz/Fiocruz (COC/Fiocruz), a technical-scientific unit of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation created in 1986 for valuing institutional memory and disseminating the history of science and public health policies in Brazil. Since then, the COC's GLAM project has aimed to expand free access to its archival, bibliographic and museological collections, and to promote activities for disseminating reliable information about history, science and health in Brazil.

This year, Casa de Oswaldo Cruz/Fiocruz focused its efforts on sharing knowledge about the history of health by making the bibliographic collection of its patron, Oswaldo Cruz, more accessible. As part of this initiative, over 70,000 images from 400 books in the personal collection of Oswaldo Cruz will be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. The Wikimedia Brasil team is working in collaboration with librarians from COC/Fiocruz on the wikification and upload of this valuable collection, an important resource for the history of science and health.

So far, we have uploaded the metadata of 61 books to Wikidata, which has resulted in 21,000 files on Wikimedia Commons. This initial batch, corresponding to 122 books, will amount to a total of about 50,000 files.

História, Ciências, Saúde – Manguinhos (History, Sciences, Health – Manguinhos)

Meanwhile, through the partnership with the institution, we launched a series of activities with the quarterly publication História, Ciências, Saúde - Manguinhos, a division within the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation devoted to documentation and research in the history of science and health and also to science communication.

As its first initiative in the Wiki universe, the journal hosted an edit-a-thon on March 25 aimed at improving the quality of information on Wikipedia based on its publications. The campaign dashboard is available here. They also plan to upload to Wikimedia Commons the covers of their issues, which have been published continuously from 1994 to the present.

A video resource about our partnership and 2025 activities

With these ongoing activities and others in the planning stages, we decided to produce a video resource about our partnership, in collaboration with Casa de Oswaldo Cruz/Fiocruz’s communications team.

In the video, Roberta Cerqueira, the journal’s executive editor, shares her goals for integrating the publication into the Wiki ecosystem; Marcus Vinícius Silva, a librarian at Casa de Oswaldo Cruz/Fiocruz, discusses the unique features of Oswaldo Cruz’s bibliographic collection which are being uploaded to Wikimedia Commons; and Juliana Cunha, from the Wikimedia Brasil team, explains how GLAM-Wiki partnerships work in Brazil, detailing each step of the process of uploading a collection to Wikimedia Commons and making it accessible with the support of Wikimedia Brasil. The video is in Portuguese and available to watch starting this month.

See the Casa de Oswaldo Cruz-Fiocruz's GLAM page and the uploaded media.

New platform for measuring reach and impact

For a long time, reach and impact data from our GLAM-Wiki partnerships have been unstable. Traditional tools used to track these metrics have shown failures and inconsistencies, and around the world, GLAM institutions and Wikimedia affiliates have been working to address these issues. Since the beginning of the year, we at Wikimedia Brasil have been developing an open, public, and reliable tool to help us measure the impact of our GLAM-Wiki partnerships.

This tool, called GLAMWiki Brasil, gives our GLAM partners the autonomy to track their digital collections across Wikimedia projects. It allows them to download monthly reports on media views and usage on Wikimedia Commons, access a general overview with the number of views per project, uploaded files, Wiki pages, and Wikis using the files, and identify the most viewed media; such as the one featured in this newsletter, the second most viewed among our partners, with 23,584,490 views. It is a 1950 photograph of Maracanã Stadium from the collection of Arquivo Nacional.

Hopefully, in the near future, it will also support tracking quantitative metrics from initiatives such as edit-a-thons and contributions to other projects like Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikisource, and Wikibooks.

See the Arquivo Nacional's GLAM page and the uploaded media.

SPRINGing back activities

By Zblace (report text) & Hana Gaon (photos)

Missing in (Winter) Action

After revisiting some of the joys/successes and some of the disapointments/failures in/around Wikimedia in 2024, we found it hard to advance much in Winter...hence producing the longest void in our reporting (past 6 months). Individually we worked on/with/around Open GLAM wiki and sustained some communication internally, but only from March got back to the drawing board and made some plans to work on Zagreb cultural centers (in Wikimedia) and continue supporting local Independent cultural archive running its own MediaWiki+Wikibase in cloud of Wikimedia Deutschland.

Warming up for 2025

After a slow start in 2025 during April and May we picked up the speed in collaborative work. We again started addressing Content gap on Croatian culture in Wikimedia through collaboration with KNAP - Cultural center in Peščenica/Zagreb and its Gallery Događanja. Our Aim is establish exemplary content on this particular context, as well as publish some media and data (both from their archive and new) in order to set/test structure for future content donations from this and other cultural centers and galleries in Zagreb and Croatia. Check out examples at Wikimedia Commons.

National Library of the CR events and important guests

By Pavel Bednařík

Visit of Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the National Library

National Library of the Czech Republic is a venue of many important visits, as it is one of the prominent institutions of the Czech culture. In May 2025 the National Library hosted a special guest – during his Prague visit, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukrainian president, and his wife Olena Zelenska were part of the discussion and a guided tour through the library building and facilities (details here). Visit is documented also on Wikimedia Commons.

Library hosting GLAM and educational events

With its 8+ wiki-residents, National Library belongs to one of the most active GLAM partners of Wikimedia Czech Republic. During May and June 2025 we co-organised (together with SKIP (Association of Library and Information Professionals of the Czech Republic) one webinar related to 1Lib1Ref challenge. During June 2025 there is a repetition of SPARQL workshop aimed at librarians from the whole Czech Republic. More information to be found here.

DARIAH DHwiki WG coming activity

By Olea

Here we share the next public events related with DHwiki WG.

DARIAH-EU Working Group DHwiki at DH2025: FAIR data in the Wikibase Ecosystem workshop and tutorial

DARIAH-EU Working Group DHwiki is delighted to announce a full-day workshop in the pre-conference programme of the DH2025 Digital Humanities Conference in Lisbon, Portugal. The workshop combines a tutorial and use-case presentations of the free and open Wikibase software, which is the software underlying Wikidata. In addition, participants will get individualised support in a “Wikibase Onboarding” hands-on session. The workshop will be conducted by members of the DARIAH-EU Working Group “DHwiki” and Wikimedia Portugal.

Date: Monday, July 14, 2025, Universidade NOVA, Avda. de Berna, Lisbon, Portugal
Registration: The workshop is part of DH2025 and registration is done when registering for the main conference.

DARIAH-EU Working Group DHwiki at DARIAH Annual Event 2025: MediaWiki-based tools and services in Digital Humanities workflows

Included in the program of the annual event of DARIAH-EU there is a panel representing the DHwiki WG, the speakers will provide an introduction to the concepts mentioned above. This will be followed by short presentations, which loosely correspond to the chapters to be included in the planned white paper. Finally, in the public Q&A part of the panel, questions like the following can be addressed: What are requirements from a DH perspective to use an approach based on the software provided by Wikimedia, and what are requirements for further development of the platforms and related tools? How to connect the DH and Wikimedia communities? The feedback from the audience will be used for refining the white paper. This is the set of short presentations:

Date: Monday, June 19, 2025, Göttingen State and University Library (SUB Göttingen), Göttingen, Germany.

About DARIAH-EU Working Group DHwiki

DHwiki is a space for discussion and dissemination of use case experiences and best practices around Wikibase and Wikidata in a digital humanities (DH) context, and for contributions to further developing the Wikibase software and related tools.

In a general context where GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) and research data become open and FAIR, an increasing number of projects rely on deploying software provided by the Wikimedia Foundation and related initiatives, and public infrastructures such as those run by Wikimedia emerge as important or even central repositories of cultural knowledge. We are witnessing more and more fruitful collaboration between DH researchers, GLAM institutions, and members of the Wikimedia movement. This Working Group is a bridge between these three backgrounds, and it understands its work as a contribution towards Open Science and the Commons.

The working group is funded by DARIAH ERIC, the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities. DARIAH was established as a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) in August 2014.

GLAM project starts with Nanda Talukdar Foundation at Jorhat, Assam

By JyotiPN

GLAM Project with Nanda Talukdar Foundation, Guwahati, Assam

A few members of the Assamese Wikisource community have started a GLAM project in collaboration with the Nanda Talukdar Foundation. Asom Sahitya Sabha has also extended its support, and the digitization work has begun at the Sarat Chandra Goswami Library of Asom Sahitya Sabha, Jorhat Bhawan. This library is one of the century-old libraries in Assam. A scanner and a laptop were provided by the Nanda Talukdar Foundation for the purpose of digitization, and a volunteer from the Assamese Wikimedia community is currently working on the project. So far, it remains an unpaid initiative.

Links of the project:

GLAM Project with Jagannath Barooah College, Jorhat, Assam

A GLAM project with Jagannath Barooah College, Jorhat, Assam is about to start from 1st week of June, 2025. Principal Dr, Utpal Jyoti Mahanta has approved the permission letter for the project.

GLAM Wiki Month 2025 in Indonesia

By Rahma Azizah

Since 2024, Wikimedia Indonesia has hosted GLAM Wiki Month (Bulan Wiki GLAM), a thematic annual event held every May. This dedicated month features a series of activities related to Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAM), and also celebrates International Museum Day on May 18th. While museums are a focus, this year's event expanded to include the #1Lib1Ref Campaign, Wikidata training, a Datathon, Wiki Loves Museum, and GLAM Talk.

1Lib1Ref

1Lib1Ref is a Wikipedia campaign that encourages librarians, researchers, book lovers, and knowledge enthusiasts to enrich Wikipedia articles by adding references from libraries and other literary sources. This edition of #1Lib1Ref encourage contributors to add references to articles about Indonesian galleries, libraries, archives, and museums on Indonesian Wikipedia.

Wikidata training & Datathon

WikiLatih Wikidata is a training activity focused on editing Wikidata. During GLAM Wiki Month, Wikimedia Indonesia is holding a Wikidata editing training session on the theme of "Indonesian Cultural Heritage Diversity" data items. While Datathon is a competition to make as many Wikidata edits as possible on a specific topic. Participants are challenged to edit data related to museums in Indonesia.

GLAM Talk

GLAM Talk is a sharing session related to GLAM initiatives both in and out of Wikimedia projects. This year, we invited our grantees of Micro Grant for GLAM Indonesia to present their projects.

We had Ahmad Ginanjar Purnawibawa presented his project Digitization of Nias Ethnographic Collections in Italy. This project is an effort to decolonize and restore the access of the Nias community’s ancestral heritage stored in Italian museums through open catalogs and databases.

The output of this project includes digitized Nias ethnographic collections from Florence's Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology, and a catalog book named Ono Niha Cultural Heritage in Italy. All final project materials can now be accessed via this category page on Wikimedia Commons.

Adu zatua ancestor statue
Bola nafo (betel leaf pouch)
Adu Siraha Salawa ancestor statue
Tacula tefao (War helmet)

Regina Dwi Salsa & Widiatmoko Putranto presented their project Open Access in LAM: Research Studies on National LAM of Indonesia. This research explores the potential and risks surrounding the situation of digitizing cultural collections in Indonesian national LAM (Libraries, Archives, and Museums) institutions at the intersection between the work needs of preserving collections and the demands of providing access to information.

And the last, Faizzatus Sa’diyah, Syefri Luwis, and Dina Serevina Sinaga with their project Inquiry and Digitization of ICOM Indonesia's Trajectory Archives. By tracing ICOM Indonesia's documents and archives from Paris to Jakarta, this project aims to reconstruct Indonesia's role in the international museum network and enhance public and cultural community access. A book will be the project's output

Wiki Loves Museum

Wiki Loves Museums (Wiki Cinta Museum) is a photowalk and edit-a-thon event designed to increase information and content about Indonesian museums on Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, and Wikipedia. This activity was held collaboratively and in parallel by six Wikimedia Communities across Indonesia: Wikimedia Community Bandung, Madura, Banjarnegara, Manokwari, Medan, and Palembang. They are altogether visiting their local museums and historical site on May 18, 2025 to celebrate International Museum Day.

All the photo resulted from the event are available in this category: Category:Wiki Cinta Museum 2025

Artifact of Majapahit Kingdom
Painting of the Exile of Sultan Mahmud Badaruddin II
Afgani Afganistan
Jesus the King of Mansinam statue
Muhammad TWH personal archive
The Barongan, mythical character in Lengger dance
Palembang traditional wedding stage
Newspaper collection at Museum Perjuangan Pers North Sumatera

From charts to concrete

By Marta Arosio

Opening science through art: the parietal charts of the G.B. Grassi Museum

On May 16, 2025, the Sapienza Museum of Comparative Anatomy and Wikimedia Italia held a webinar titled Between Science and Art: the Parietal Charts of the G.B. Grassi Museum. The event explored the history and digital future of the museum’s striking hand-painted educational wall charts, created between the late 19th and early 20th centuries to support natural science teaching.

As one of the winners of the 2025 MAB grant, the museum launched a project to digitize and share 100 of these charts on Wikimedia Commons, making them freely accessible to a global audience. The initiative, which involved librarians, artists, photographers, and Wikipedia volunteers, showcased the power of GLAM–Wikimedia collaborations to preserve and promote scientific and artistic heritage through open knowledge.

The webinar was recorded and will be made available on the YouTube channel of Sapienza’s museum network.

Wikipedia meets concrete: students at Tor Vergata improve knowledge on the construction industry

From March to May 2025, students from the University of Tor Vergata took part in a training course on Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects, thanks to a collaboration between Wikimedia Italia and Federbeton, the Italian federation representing the cement, concrete, and construction materials sector within Confindustria. The course aimed to improve the quality and depth of Wikipedia content on the concrete supply chain, a strategic field for civil engineering and construction.

Participants received training on how to edit Wikipedia, contribute to Wikidata, and upload media to Wikimedia Commons, developing digital and open knowledge skills.

The final edit-a-thon will take place on June 7 at the MAXXI Museum in Rome. The event will be open to the public and will bring together students and experts to collaboratively improve Wikipedia articles related to construction materials, significant designers, and engineering topics.

Traditional Albanian Food Photography Competition 2025

By Ritamaliqi

Traditional Albanian Food Photography Competition 2025

From April 1st to April 30th, 2025, the Wikimedians of Albanian Language User Group organized the fourth edition of the Traditional Albanian Food Photography Contest. This annual competition invites participants to document and celebrate the rich culinary heritage of Albania and Kosovo by sharing photographs of traditional dishes and drinks.

Throughout the month-long campaign, contributors from not only across the region uploaded images that showcase the diversity and authenticity of Albanian cuisine, helping to visually enrich Wikimedia projects and preserve cultural knowledge through open access.

As always, the goal of the contest is to inspire people to participate in the Wikimedia movement while celebrating and preserving food traditions that are an important part of our shared identity.

We are currently in the process of reviewing submissions and will announce the winners soon.

Some photos from the campaign:

Update from Auckland Museum; Let the Wikifying Commence; Listful Thinking

By Winnieswikiworld, Giantflightlessbirds & DrThneed

Update from Auckland Museum

Auckland Museum Wikimedian in Residence User:Winnieswikiworld and Collections Online Data Analyst User:Dactylantha held a session at the Auckland Writers Festival 2025. The Wikipedia Edit-a-thon- Aotearoa Authors Edition is part of a larger initiative to spotlight underrepresented topics and enrich Wikipedia with more diverse content and help support how Aotearoa's literary heritage is represented online. The session covered; what is Wikipedia?, why contribute?, impacts of Wikipedia, addressing bias & representation, the five pillars, notability, reliability & neutrality, conflicts of interest, copyright & plagiarism, talk pages & user pages, setting up your user page, visual editor and making your first edit. New Wikidata items were created for authors and their works as well as photographs of authors which will be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons.

Christchurch WikiCon

Aotearoa New Zealand's fifth national WikiCon was held at Ara Institute of Canterbury in Ōtautahi Christchurch over 16–18 May. There were 32 attendees, including the Wiki team from Auckland Museum (User:Winnieswikiworld,User:Dactylantha & User:Prosperosity). One of the sessions facilitated by Auckland Museum staff was Attracting Younger Editors, on the impact of the Wikipedia summer studentships, the possibility of setting up NZ wiki youth support groups and catering editing events to younger tertiary student audiences. Other sessions included batch uploading to Wikimedia Commons, the role of Wikipedia in fighting disinformation, tools like like Pattypan, OpenRefine and Quick Statements, the metrics tracker GLAMorgan, OpenStreetMap and how it can be used in infoboxes, modelling Māori ethnicity and tribal affiliation correctly in Wikidata, Commons templates, making lists from Wikidata, and getting reliable sources. This was the largest New Zealand WikiCon to date, with 32 attendees, and only the second in the South Island.

Let the Wikifying Commence

Thanks to a Rapid Grant, Tamsin Braisher (DrThneed) and Mike Dickison (Giantflightlessbirds) have been busy Wikifying conferences: this includes improving Wikidata of speakers and attendees, creating or improving Wikipedia articles, and clearing photographs for Commons or taking them in a makeshift photo booth. The project goal is to document the best ways to go about this and produce a handbook for Wikipedians. Mike attended Printopia, a print-making fair in Auckland, and then both Tamsin and Mike attended the Otago Medical School's 150th Anniversary celebrations. We have one more event to Wikify, an international congress in three weeks’ time, and then we’ll get to work documenting our process.

Tamsin also started as the new Wikimedian in Residence at the University of Otago at the end of May. This is the first university-wide WiR position for New Zealand, and is a half-time role for six months.

Portraits from Printopia and the OMS 150th
Ina Arraoui
Sophia Jenny
Eduardo Sanchez Ojeda
Sunny Collings
Rebecca Grainger
Doug Sellman

Listful thinking

Tamsin (DrThneed) has recorded three screenshares for Listeria, Petscan and the Wiki List Tool, and an overview video talking about what these different list-making tools are good for and how they can be used in editing workflows. The overview video was originally a talk at the recent Wikidata and Sister Projects event but was re-recorded due to technical issues. Tamsin would love to hear from other editors if there are other good list-making tools or workflows that we can share.

Listful Thinking:How to use Wikidata to help with editing workflows, May 2025 (an overview video of Petscan, Listeria and the WikiList tool talking about the workflows they can help with)
How to use Petscan (Petscan can query Wikipedia and Wikidata at the same time, see the video description for some example uses)
How to use Listeria (Listeria creates dynamic lists on Wikipedia, based off Wikidata)
How to use the Wiki List tool (Wiki List Tool uses Google Sheets to combine info from Wikidata and Wikipedia)

Architectural Folklore Campaign Series

By Lutarchitecture

Forgotten Material Science in Architecture

The monthly webinar aimed at creating awareness and bridging knowledge gaps in the heritage sector in Nigeria has been very impactful; conversations around forgotten heritage in the country have been discussed by professionals and non-professionals. This campaign has not only educated your GLAM professionals but has challenged everyone who has been a part to document these interesting parts of Nigeria's rich heritage and see how we represent them on global scenes. We covered the eastern architectural folklore with an Mbari case study, which led to the culmination of the Mbari House article now on Wikipedia. There is only one surviving Mbari house out of over 150 that were in existence, as captured by Herbert M. Cole. We went ahead to talk about Northern Architectural Folklore, where the speaker explained its revival as a pathway to sustainable architecture, discussing motifs and symbols and its integration in modern structures and why these motifs and styles need to be preserved and practiced more often. The conversation moved on to Western architectural folklore. Here we talked about sacred signs and symbols from palaces to public spaces, and we had our speaker on Yoruba symbolism, and we learned of the Queen of Ife folklore, where she, well after torrential rainfall, ordered the whole of Ife to be potsherded to prevent future occurrences. We will be discussing the Southern Architectural Folklore to discuss the architecture and heritage of the great Benin kingdom.

Training GLAM Professionals to contribute on Wikimedia Commons during restorative Projects

The webinars for this campaign included Wiki professionals for every stage, one Wiki professional and one heritage/GLAM professional—a great fusion to achieve the mission of the HCI proposed Wikimedia Heritage user group. The idea behind the short 30-minute to 40-minute presentations and training was to teach the GLAM professional off-wiki how they can contribute to wiki projects and to create awareness for the need of a wikimedian in restorative heritage projects to help document history and heritage through article writing, audio recordings, photography, and video recordings to ensure continued preservation of these processes. For the Eastern Folklore, the Igbo Wikimedian Community User Group co-founder Tochi Precious was the trainer and speaker. We tried to merge language user groups and oral histories into the GLAM and Heritage line of the webinars and also to ensure coherence during the conversation. For the Northern Folklore, we had a Wikipedian administrator, Muib Sheifu, take the trainings on how to contribute to Wikipedia. For the Western Folklore, we had the Yoruba Wikimedian Community User Group co-founder train our participants how to contribute to the commons during heritage projects. It has been an interesting and eye-opening series for everyone.

The proposed Wikimedia Heritage User Group Nigeria is focused on Nigerian heritage preservation, conservation, and its integration into regional and global discourses. Focused on policy advocacy, knowledge equity, knowledge gap bridging, skills development, etc., the group handles archive curation and seeks to digitize and document archives from libraries, museums, and galleries that can help Wikipedia articles or improve them and contribute to underrepresentation of Nigerian GLAM globally.

What's up in GLAM in Poland

By Kamila Neuman

GLAM-Wiki in Poland: Presenting at the National Conference of Museum Registrars

In May 2025, Wikimedia Polska was invited to present at the annual conference of the Polish Association of Museum Registrars (Polskie Stowarzyszenie Inwentaryzatorów Muzealnych). The two-day event brought together professionals from museums across Poland who are responsible for documenting, describing, and managing collections — often working behind the scenes, but playing a key role in cultural heritage preservation.

Kamila Neuman, Open Culture Manager at Wikimedia Polska, gave a presentation titled “Opening Museum Collections through GLAM-Wiki Partnerships: Perspectives and Practices.” It was an opportunity to introduce the Wikimedia movement and explain how platforms like Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikidata can support museums in increasing the visibility and accessibility of their collections — using the data and resources they already have.

During the talk, she referred to striking statistics from the Swedish Museums Association, showing that 9 out of 10 museum audiences today are digital. While Polish museums report in-person visitor data, there is still a gap when it comes to measuring and understanding digital reach. Kamila highlighted the importance of collecting and comparing such data to support more strategic approaches to online engagement.

This experience also offered a valuable opportunity to learn more about the everyday work and challenges faced by museum registrars in Poland — including the complex task of acquiring rights to reproduce and share objects. “I left the conference feeling inspired and enriched,” she said. “There’s a real curiosity in this community about open access, and I believe there is great potential for collaboration.”

Wikimedia Polska continues to work with both large and small cultural institutions, helping them find simple, sustainable ways to share their collections with the world through Wikimedia projects.

WikiChełmoński Editing Campaign – Still Open Until June 29!

Wikimedia Polska, in partnership with the National Museum in Poznań and the National Museum in Krakow, invites the international Wikimedia and GLAM-Wiki communities to take part in the WikiChełmoński editing campaign – a collaborative initiative that brings together museum research and the free knowledge movement.

The campaign focuses on the life and work of Józef Chełmoński, one of Poland’s most renowned painters, whose work is rich in themes related to nature, rural life, and the environment. So far, 16 new or expanded articles have been created, but there’s still much to do!

We welcome contributions across Wikimedia projects, including: writing and expanding Wikipedia articles, translating content into other languages, editing and enriching related Wikidata items, adding alternative text descriptions to images.

To support participants and inspire new contributions, we’re also organizing a webinar in June dedicated to Chełmoński’s late work and his deep connection with the natural landscape.

As a special highlight: five articles created or improved during the campaign will be featured on-site at the National Museum in Krakow through QRpedia codes linked directly to Wikipedia – allowing visitors to explore curated knowledge about selected paintings as part of the exhibition opening in August.

This campaign is part of ongoing GLAM-Wiki partnerships aimed at expanding open access to cultural heritage around the world.

Join us in making art and heritage more accessible – one article at a time!

More info: WikiChełmoński campaign website.

Celebrating Museums and strengthening #1Lib1Ref connections

By Gorana Gomirac

Celebrating International Museum Day with a Wikipedia Edit-a-thon

In celebration of International Museum Day, Wikimedia Serbia organized a thematic edit-a-thon dedicated to museums and cultural heritage. This activity brought together 9 editors who collectively created and improved 48 articles on Serbian Wikipedia. The content focused on museums, curatorial collections, notable curators, and artists, significantly enriching the representation of cultural heritage topics on the Serbian Wikipedia. This edit-a-thon helped increase the visibility of underrepresented institutions and individuals and also helped as a way to raise awareness of the importance of cultural heritage preservation in the digital space.

Upcoming: Global #1Lib1Ref Campaign Let's Connect

As part of the Let's Connect program, a global Learning Clinic about the #1Lib1Ref campaign has been prepared and will be held on June 5. This session will introduce recent updates to the campaign, highlight useful tools, and offer practical tips for engaging librarians and knowledge professionals. This Learning clinic aims to foster global learning and exchange, especially for newcomers who wish to get involved or improve their local #1Lib1Ref initiatives.

Some news from Spain

By Olea

Very Small GLAM presented at 1st International Congress on Digital Archaeology and Heritage Management

The Congreso Internacional de Arqueología Digital y Gestión del Patrimonio conference has programmed the presentation Documenting intangible heritage: the case of the Digital Documentary Center for Cinema in Almería. Here it will be presented a pilot project of archive for cinema production history by LaOficina Producciones Culturales implemented in linked open data with Wikibase Suite developing the Very Small GLAM concept. The concept looks to lower entry barriers for heritage institutions and colectives.

Date: June 25, Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, University of Cádiz, Cádiz, Spain.

DARIAH-EU Working Group DHwiki at 1st International Congress on Digital Archaeology and Heritage Management

The DHwiki Work Group will be present also at the same conference in Cádiz. DHwiki is a space for discussion and dissemination of use case experiences and best practices around Wikibase and Wikidata in a digital humanities (DH) context, and for contributions to further developing the Wikibase software and related tools.

The working group is funded by DARIAH ERIC, the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities. DARIAH was established as a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) in August 2014.

Date: June 25-27, Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, University of Cádiz, Cádiz, Spain.

International Museum Day 2025; CoCreation PTT-Archive; Scoring Girls

By Medea7 WMCH

International Museum Day 2025

It is the first time in the history of Wikimedia that the International Council of Museums ICOM approached us for a cooperation for the International Museum Day. ICOM international is located in Paris and they approached us expressing how thankful they are for the work that has been done in the last years. We explained that we need the poster as an open file on commons. They uploaded their posters to commons in different languages. In order to take the museums work further we expressed that we as wikimedians need free entry to all museums in the world. They have been very open to this and it does make sense to follow it up on all different levels with all the different contacts we have as Wiki movement. This year our projectpage has been done in 9 languages. Our panel was addressing the theme of 2025: The Future of Museums in Rapidly Changing Communities. We had four speakers showing their perspectives. Their inputs will soon be visible on the project page as well. The panel was moderated by Christine Düwel. The speakers were Gabriela Saenger Silva, Rose Musyoki, Stephanie Jünenmann and Ralf Schmitt. We looked at two museums in Brazil, the museum scene in Nairobi and decolonizing projects from BAI with international particiapants. The Museum Paraense Emílio Goeldi was founded by a Swiss naturalist and is now a center for Indigenous culture. Also new videos were produced reflecting the 2025 sustainable deveopment goals that have been selected by ICOM. As communities we are working together and have to strengthen each other in these difficult times. The video by Siggi Weide reflects the future stage museums can provide for communities. Although the International Museum Day has passed it is still possible to contribute and to use the page for showing projects of the year 2025.

CoCreation PTT-Archive

The PTT-Archive in Bern approached us to do a project on contextualisation with artistic methods in order to make the content in the archive available for a wider audience - and, of course, for digitalization purposes. The PTT-Archive is the national archive of Switzerland providing historical documents that reflect the rapidly changing history of telecommunication. The theme suggested by the archive has been telephone books. We were Wikipedians and artists that first got a tour through the history of telephone books. When telecommunication started there were only short numbercodes as only a few people hat a telephone and used it in their surrounding. On one telephone device a whole family or a whole community or working group was addressed. Interesting has been that there was a whole profession called telephoniste or switchboard operator that was done by women in Switzerland and by men in Italy that also falled in love with another. Telepfone books have been used to find people as at earlier times not all people have been registered in the city offices. Looking at the last names it came out that places with lost of restaurants and shops had more often names as Baker than places without food where the last name Hungry was quiet common. The job as telephoniste had similar working rules as working today remotely on ones own device. One should stand up in between, move, have breaks and take care of the own body. The project will continue and results will be published on the projectpage.

Scoring Girls

In Switzerland the preparation for the Women's EURO 2025 has started. The football games will take place in July. As football is a team event forcing collaboration the topic seems central for GLAM community building. The scoring girls is a community growing project addressing pupils in the age from 8 to 18. The edit-a-thon took place at Kasko in Basel and will be continued in July. People interested in participating also remotely can sign in on the project page.

The 18th language

By MartinPoulter

Khalili Foundation

Volunteers have created five new articles this month, including our first in South Azerbaijani! The first translation into that language is a short summary about the Khalili Collection of Aramaic Documents. This means the project has now created articles in 18 different languages. The Khalili Collection of Islamic Art article is right now being translated into French, and the Khalili Collection of Hajj and the Arts of Pilgrimage likewise, bringing us to five new articles in French from this project. The article about the Gulshan-i 'Ishq has been translated into Arabic. In addition, there is a new biography in Russian of Sir David Khalili. This does not translate text that I've written, but illustrates the Khalili Collections with 37 images that I uploaded as part of this project.

My current work related to the Khalili Collections is using the four volumes of "Brasses, Bronze and Silver of the Islamic Lands" by Michael Spink alongside other textbooks. Spink has a set of essays describing the characteristics of metalwork from different eras and places. By summarising each essay and combining them into an article, I am developing a dedicated article about Islamic metalwork, about which Wikipedia currently has one paragraph within a larger article.

There were four new images uploaded this month, plus a cropped version of a previously-uploaded Japanese textile image. I created Wikidata representations of the three depicted objects: Case bottle, Flask, and Rosewater Sprinkler.

The image of a lacquer instrument case in the Khalili Collection of Islamic Art has been nominated for Featured Picture status on Wikimedia Commons. The community will decide by the 12th of June whether to promote it.

Prof. Ben Outhwaite at the Cambridge University Library has got in touch to help with adding some data about the Cairo Genizah manuscripts to Wikidata.

Most work this month has gone into the Memory of the World project, for which there is a separate report.

The stats server reports 4,415,782 image views in May.

Spring GLAM news from Ukraine – first major survey for GLAM institutions & yet another successful #1Lib1Ref

By AntonProtsiuk

Throughout the spring of 2025, Wikimedia Ukraine has conducted two important GLAM initiatives – a pilot “Open GLAM in Ukraine” project, which included a major survey for institutions, and one more round of the #1Lib1Ref campaign.

1. “Open GLAM in Ukraine” promises to kick off a large-scale Wikimedia GLAM collaboration

In late 2024 a consortium of partners that includes Wikimedia Ukraine, Wikimedia Sweden and the National Archives of Sweden received a grant from the Swedish Institute to support a pilot project that would help bring Ukraine's cultural heritage from GLAM institutions to the Wikimedia platforms.

The main goal of the pilot project is to conduct research and analysis of the state of GLAM institutions needs and interests. The most important activity was a large-scale survey of institutions. We've managed to get over 550 institutions to respond – much more than we'd hoped for! – and received a lot of interesting results.

You can review highlights from the survey in the presentation, which was delivered during a working meeting of project partners in Stockholm on March 31-April 1. For more context about the meeting and the project, read also our article on Diff.

Based on the pilot, in May we applied for a larger project that would support large-scale training for GLAM professionals (both leaders and staff members), which would result in fruitful cooperation with Wikimedia. Fingers crossed we get the funding!

2. #1Lib1Ref's latest round brings almost 1,000 new sources to Ukrainian Wikipedia

#1Lib1Ref is an international campaign that invites people to add missing references to Wikipedia articles. We held the latest round on Ukrainian Wikipedia from February 19th to March 10th (later than the traditional international round because we feel this schedule is more convenient for Ukrainian librarians).

Within this round, 73 people improved 655 articles with 959 references – one of our best results yet. We organized two online webinars and a major hybrid event in partnership with one of Ukraine’s biggest libraries – Yaroslav Mudryi National Library of Ukraine.

The campaign is open to everyone but has a special focus on engaging librarians. The survey of active participants shows that over 40% work in a library, showing the potential for further developing GLAM cooperation.

May meetings

By Slowking4

DCCAH AANHPI Heritage Month

DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage and Wikimedia DC held an edit-a-thon, DCCAH AANHPI Heritage Month Wikipedia Edit-a-thon.

World Press Freedom Day

Center for News, Technology and Innovation (CNTI) and Wikimedia DC held a meetup, World Press Freedom Day Wikipedia Edit-a-thon.

Wikicurious Rhizome World

Wikicurious and Rhizome held a workshop, Wikicurious Rhizome World.

Editing Health Innovation

Health Wildcatters and Wikimedia NYC, held a workshop, Wikicurious: Editing Health Innovation on Wikipedia.

Meetup/Chicago

Chicago Wikimedians held a meetup, Chicago/24 May 2025.

Santa Monica Airport 2025

Museum of Flying and Los Angeles Wikimedians held a a meetup, Los Angeles/Santa Monica Airport 2025.

Meetup/San Diego

Chula Vista Public Library and San Diego Wikimedians held a a meetup, San Diego/10 May 2025.

Bay Area Meetup

San Francisco Wikimedians held a meetup at Double Union, Wikipedia:Meetup/San Francisco.

BHL-Wiki Working Group May monthly highlights

By Ambrosia10

Agenda & notes of the May 2025 meeting

The agenda for the meeting can be found at this link. The agenda document gives notes taken during the meeting, action items, as well as the dates of future online meetings and the zoom link to join.

The BHL wiki working group meetings will now be paused. See the section on charting the future of the BHL-Wiki working group below for more information.

JJ Dearborn leaving

JJ Dearborn is leaving BHL and her last day will be the 1st of June 2025. Siobhan Leachman, Chair of the BHL-Wiki working group, on behalf of the group and herself expressed gratitude for all that JJ has contributed and thanked JJ for all her efforts.

Charting the Future of BHL-WIKI in a reduced capacity environment

In light of the funding situation BHL currently finds itself in as well as the limited capacity of the BHL secretariat to provide administrative and project management support for the working group meetings, it was decided by the attendees of the May 2025 meeting to pause the monthly meetings of the BHL-Wiki working group. However members of the group undertook to continue to work on BHL content and data in the Wikiverse. It was also decided to keep the telegram active to ensure communication lines are kept open between BHL and Wiki affiliated members.

Wikidata QID updates to BHL catalogue

Mike Lichtenberg, the BHL Lead Developer, is currently working on ensuring that Wikidata Qids are periodically refreshed in the BHL Catalogue. He sought guidance from the working group on what type of report was required to be generated regarding this work. The group recommended that the Wikidata Qid report be generated after the refresh of the catalogue, that the report be downloadable to ensure group members can ingest it into OpenRefine to assist in resolving any Wikidata issues. It was resolved that this report be sent to the BHL Metacat group as Siobhan is a member. She will then either undertake this reconciliation work herself or alternatively pass the report on to other Wikidata editors that can assist.

Best Practice document for using BHL identifiers

The best practice document for using BHL identifiers in Wiki is now complete.

Upcoming conferences

Two upcoming conferences were discussed. The GLAMWiki 2025 conference was mentioned with the scholarship application website (7 June due date) and the program application website being shared.
The Living Data 2025 conference was also discussed with Tiago Lubiana making the group aware of his session at the conference Wikimedia and Biodiversity Data: A mutualistic Relationship in the Open Knowledge Ecosystem and inviting submissions from the group.

Type specimens and a property for "collector"

A discussion was held on the need for a property for “collector” both to complete a data model for type specimens and also to assist with ensuring the structured data on commons model for specimen images in Wikimedia Commons is complete.

Preparing the data upload

By MartinPoulter & Hannah Drummen

This is the eighth monthly report of the ongoing work to improve the representation of the UNESCO Memory of the World international register on Wikimedia projects. This is supported and fully funded by the Khalili Foundation, with the involvement of UNESCO and Wikimedia UK.

Data import

Hannah Drummen at UNESCO has completed the comprehensive data mining and structuring effort for all 496 items on the International Register (through the 2023 cycle). With refined categories developed in collaboration with data expert Martin, a complete, tab-separated dataset is now ready for bulk upload to Wikidata, significantly increasing the visibility and accessibility of MoW-listed documentary heritage.

Martin is preparing this for import into Wikidata which we expect to do early in June. Part of our goal is to define best practice for this data upload and future updates: Martin has written a proposal (currently in Google Docs) and is getting feedback from Wikidata contributors and people involved with UNESCO. To additionally support clarity for Wikipedia contributors, Hannah published an explanatory overview of the national, regional, and international MoW Registers on the project's homepage, addressing frequent confusion across Wikipedia articles.

Hannah corrected over 50 small errors on the Memory of the World (MoW) International Register website, including high-profile entries such as The Florid Recollection and Ignacio Ellacuría’s Documentary Fond. Additionally, she completed translations for 14 MoW items from English into French, ensuring bilingual accuracy and enabling reliable data transfer to Wikidata.

Efforts to enhance visual content included outreach to institutions that nominated items in the 2017 and 2023 cycles, resulting in new freely shareable materials such as the Westerbork Film and eight newly illustrated entries on the MoW website—with more expected to follow.

Wikipedia improvements

Since this project is focused on cultures poorly covered by Wikipedia, including African and Latin American, we had not until this month looked at the English Wikipedia articles about the best-known MoW inscriptions. Martin found that Magna Carta, Phoenician alphabet, Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, Treaty of Waitangi, Treaty of Tordesillas and UNRWA, did not mention the MoW status. These articles get hundreds of views per day, hundreds of thousands of views per year, so it was worth making a small change to each. They each now mention the MoW international register and link to the relevant articles as well as to the relevant entry in the online register.

As a result of these extra incoming links, there is a measurable (23%) increase in traffic to the article about the Memory of the World Programme: 149 per day in early April to 184 per day for the past 20 days.

For dozens of other articles, Martin updated the links and clarified the difference between the International Register and other registers.

We have been looking at the 2017 UNESCO challenge, which engaged volunteers in creating articles about World Heritage Sites, as a model we can use for encouraging more new articles and translations about MoW inscriptions. Martin has also been talking to Wikimedia UK about ways to engage the volunteer community.