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USA report

A busy conference season, a new Caribbean community and introducing a tool for adding artwork metadata

By Slowking4, Fuzheado & S.ann.adams

WikiConference North America 2019

The annual WikiConference North America 2019 conference was held in Boston/Cambridge, Mass. and was run in collaboration with the Credibility Coalition and with the generous support of the Craig Newmark Philanthropies, MIT and local cultural institutions. Because of the recent Wikimedia Foundation moratorium on funding conferences outside of a narrow band of pre-approved events, no Wikimedia Foundation or movement funds were used in the execution of this event.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology hosted the main conference from November 8 to 11. The majority of the programs were recorded and video streams can be found here.

Culture crawl

The conference kicked off with the annual culture crawl as a pre-conference event as a whole day of GLAM related engagements with institutions in the Boston/Cambridge area. The Museum of Fine Arts hosted the day with curatorial tours of the museum and hosted training for staff and community in their trustees room. There were meetups at Boston University, MassArt, State Library of Massachusetts, and a hackathon at the MIT MakerWorkshop.

A full writeup can be found at meta:WikiConference_North_America/2019#Culture_Crawl

Programming

There were a number of notable sessions, including a plenary panel discussion about the forthcoming book, Wikipedia @20 by MIT Press, with a number of Wikimedian contributors at the conference and serving on the panel. The reception for the evening was hosted at the MIT Museum.

  • Culture Crawl training
    Culture Crawl training
  • With the Museum of Fine Arts staff
    With the Museum of Fine Arts staff
  • Organizing team
    Organizing team
Reliability and Credibility Summit

November 11 was the Reliability and Credibility Summit, run in conjunction with the conference partner the Credibility Coalition, which focused on the reliability of information, and included breakout roundtable sessions related to downstream platforms users of Wikimedia content, reliability of news content, and reliability of Wikimedia content. The platforms roundtable was an historic event, with representatives from Google, Facebook and Microsoft present to discuss how Wikimedia content could benefit users in assessing information reliability.


GLAM programming

A number of sessions related to GLAM were held at the conference. On the Culture Crawl day, there was training on Wikidata, Structured Data on Commons and tools/strategy for GLAM institutions to contributed content.

  • Culture Crawl: Wikidata Tutorial: The basics - Rob Fernandez - slides
  • Culture Crawl: Introduction to Structured Data on Commons - Alex Stinson (WMF) - slides
  • Culture Crawl: GLAM Contribution strategies for Wikimedia content - Andrew Lih - slides
  • Open Access at the Cleveland Museum of Art - Kevin Payravi, Andrew Lih - slides
  • GLAMs embracing open access and Wikidata: Experiences from the Met Museum - Andrew Lih and Richard Knipel slides
  • Mbabel - One click article creation for events - Rob Fernandez and Richard Knipel - slides
  • Putting Institutional Partners at Ease: Becoming a Reliable Guide in an Unfamiliar Landscape - Ariel Cetrone - description
  • Engaging with Scientists: Sharing Knowledge and Encouraging Editing Through a Science Library - Jamie Flood - description
  • What’s good for GLAM is good for STEM? Editor recruitment and retention at NIOSH - John P. Sadowski - description
  • Introduction to WikiCite - Phoebe Ayers and Daniel Mietchen - description
  • 4 Million in 4 Weeks: A case study on bulk import of cultural heritage metadata on Wikidata - Dominic Byrd-McDevitt - description
  • Taking Wiki Loves Monuments in the US to the Next Level - Kevin Payravi and Laura Soito - description


Wiki Art Depiction Explorer: a new tool for adding artwork depiction information

WADE interface example
WADE interface example

The Wiki Art Depiction Explorer (WADE) is a user-friendly interface to add depiction information to the Wikidata items of artworks. It was soft launched in the summer of 2019, and is now open for community testing.

The project is a collaboration between Wikimedia District of Columbia and the Smithsonian Institution, with community members Andrew Lih, Robert Fernandez, and Effie Kapsalis working with developer Edward Betts to develop the system. Its development was made possible through support from the Knight Prototype Fund, an initiative of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Basic operation

WADE's most basic mode of operation presents the user with a web interface that includes the Wikidata item of an artwork and a large image of the artifact. WADE prompts the user to type in what is depicted in the given painting. We are focusing on paintings for simplicity, though any Wikidata item can be edited using WADE.

Entering terms. As the user types, matches are interactively displayed, and previously used depiction terms listed first. How often that term has been in previous depiction statements is also displayed. Wikidata terms that have never been used before in a depiction statement are listed in a secondary set.

Selecting the name of a matching term adds that to a working queue of terms and any number of depiction statements can be added in this way.

Clicking the "Add these to Wikidata" button commits these changes immediately to Wikidata under the user's account. Therefore, the user needs to have a Wikimedia account. (WADE uses OAuth to authorize the tool to edit on their behalf.)

Pre-existing terms. If there are pre-existing depiction statements for the Wikidata item, they are displayed above the text entry field. There are also additional fields of information related to the artist, collection, and GLAM institution that holds the item.

Navigation. After depiction information has been added to the Wikidata item, a number of options are provided to navigate to similar works by artist, by collection, or by main subject. This provides incentives to keep working on more depictions.

Code and reporting

First-ever Wiki meetup in Puerto Rico with WikiCaribbean

Wikimeetup in Puerto Rico at Microsoft in San Juan, with Herbert Lewy, General Manager, Microsoft Caribbean providing welcoming remarks

On November 27, Andrew Lih worked with the new WikiCaribbean user group to give a talk in San Juan, Puerto Rico for the local community at the offices of Microsoft.

The talk was titled "The five most exciting things in Wikipedia, Wikimedia and Wikidata: How they can help boost content about Puerto Rico" and covered a brief introduction to Wikidata, visualizing knowledge graphs, Structured Data on Commons and how artificial intelligence and machine learning have been used in the movement. Afterwards, there was discussion with academics from the University of Puerto Rico and from the local destination marketing organization, Discover Puerto Rico, on how to enrich Wikimedia content about Puerto Rico.

Among the resources created:

Link to the Slides

Museum Computer Network, Wikimedia content and The Met

Effie Kapsalis at MCN 2019 in San Diego, California, Ignite talk about Smithsonian American Women's History Initiative

Effie Kapsalis (Smithsonian) and Andrew Lih gave two of the opening Ignite talks at the Museum Computer Network conference in San Diego called "Imagine the Future of Global Structured Data." He showed how Wikidata knowledge graphs work and how The Met is using them to visualize collections in a different way. Ignite talks are strictly five minute talks where the 20 slides automatically advance every 15 seconds.

Later in the conference, he presented with The Met on the use of artificial intelligence on their collections, and how it has been used to enrich content in Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata. The talk "Tags, Art, and AI. Oh My" was done with Jennie Choi, general manager of collections information at The Met, and Elena Villaespesa, professor at the Pratt Institute and consultant at The Met.

Link to slides

Advanced Wikidata and Wikibase training with Smithsonian Libraries

Jackie Shieh, Smithsonian, Descriptive Data Management Librarian during November 20, 2019 training on Wikidata and Wikibase

On November 20, Andrew Lih held a special training with Smithsonian Libraries on the advanced use of Wikidata and establishing content in Wikibase, the software extension to MediaWiki that allows for databases like Wikidata. Some of the topics covered included tools and gadgets for advanced users of Wikidata (Recoin, copy references, etc) and the new shape expressions (ShEx) EntitySchema features of Wikidata. Some other APIs and methods for accessing Wikidata from Python were discussed.

Link to slides

Celebrating Influential Polish and Polish-American Women

Embassy of the Republic of Poland and Wikimedia DC held a meetup, Celebrating Influential Polish and Polish-American Women Wikipedia Edit-a-thon

The National Gallery of Art and Wikimedia DC held a meetup, Drawing from the Collection: A National Gallery of Art Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon Celebrating Works on Paper

MetAsianMonth 2019

Metropolitan Museum of Art and Wikimedia NYC held a meetup. MetAsianMonth 2019

The Chicago Art Book Fair

The Chicago Art Book Fair and Black Lunch Table held a meetup, Black Lunch Table/CABF

Native American Artists

Minneapolis Institute of Art held a meetup, Native American Artists Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon/Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia)

Housing and Homesteading

Interference Archive and Wikimedia NYC held a meetup, Housing and Homesteading Wikipedia Editathon

Editing as Activism

Wikimedia Cascadia and University of Washington Library, held a meetup at UW Libraries Research Commons, Editing as Activism: Edit-A-Thon to Correct Systemic Bias in Wikipedia They reported a dashboard of outcomes here

Local 649: New Orleans Jazz History in Wikidata

The Semantic Lab at Pratt held a Wikidata workshop at Tulane University's Howard-Tilton Memorial Library using the Local 496 Membership Directory, American Federation of Musicians as the source document for editing Wikidata. This workshop was made possible thanks to a grant from the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation and resulted in the creation of data that will be integrated into the Linked Jazz project.

Cite NLM

Kansas City Public Library held a meetup, Kansas City/CiteNLM Mental Health November 2019

OpenUCLA #citeNLM

Open UCLA held a meetup, Wikipedia edit-a-thon focused on Mental Health

1000 Women in Religion 2019

American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature Women's Caucus held a meetup, 1000 Women in Religion 2019, and San Diego/SBL S25-402

Unsung Heroes of the Bureau of American Ethnology

The Smithsonian Institution and Wikimedia DC held a meetup, Unsung Heroes of the Bureau of American Ethnology Wikipedia Edit-a-thon



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