GLAM/Newsletter/October 2016/Contents/Mexico report

This Month in GLAM – Volume VI, Issue X, October 2016

Mexico report

Women in Cinema, LGBT rights, WikiArte, Donation from the Cervantine Library and WikiConNA

Editatona: Women in Cinema

Our friends at the National Film Archives stand with us in our continuous Gender Gap Reduction Project. This time, our Editatona focused on notable women in Mexican cinema. However, this is not restricted to actresses, the complete list of created articles includes researchers, critics, directors, producers, editors, and writers. This way we're not only improving coverage of notable women, but also showing women are not restricted to a handful of professional roles, which goes contrary to general perception.

The Editatona was focused on Women in all professions related to Cinema
The National Film Archives helped us with their original research and publications
Two editors working side by side

WikiArte in Mexico City

In 2015, Wikimedia NYC, the Museum of Modern Art (WP:MoMA GLAM page) and the Fundación Cisneros/Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros started WikiArte, an editathon focused on improving coverage of Latin American artists on the English Wikipedia. This year, WikiArte was held simultaneously on New York City and Mexico City, with future events in Caracas and Buenos Aires.

In the Mexico node, we gathered at Museo Soumaya, ready to improve Wikipedia on two main topics:

Female Latin American artists, and
Latin American artists and works in the Soumaya's collection

The early birds who started editing even before the Museum was open
The Museum staff working hard on en.wiki
A WMMX volunteer, showing us a small gift we gave to our editors
Final photo at The Gates of Hell

First donation of files from the Cervantine Library

Negotiations to start uploading files from Tec de Monterrey's noted Cervantine Library had been going on for a couple of months when the call from the Wiki Conference North America came out looking to increase content related to indigenous languages. The Library had been digitizing elements of its collection onto its own website, but with relatively little success in making this content more visible. In October, the Library agreed to uploading of 32 documents from its collection of documents in indigenous languages of Mexico, mostly from the colonial period (Category in Commons here) These include documents in Nahuatl, Totonac, Kickapoo (Fox), Matzalinca and two now-extinct languages. In almost all cases, these documents are the first authentic (non Wiki) samples of documents in these languages and most have been integrated with Wikipedia articles in Spanish and English. Two have been integrated with the articles of their authors Bernardino de Sahagún and Alonso de Molina. The next steps in this collaboration is to work at least several of these documents onto Wikisource (not easy as most are in an old script) and the scanning of images from various documents in their historical collections, a process which is already underway.

Wiki Conference North America

El Pájaro Carpintero by Los Hijos de Malinche

Dr. Lourdes Epstein gave a plenary about Wiki projects during Semana i at Tec de Monterrey (see blog post here). In particular she focused on the project she was directly involved in, the making of freely-licensed recordings of Mexican traditional music, in collaboration with the National Sound Library (Fonateca), the professional band Los Hijos de Malinche of Veracruz, several student and teacher musicians and students from the school's digital music engineering department. This project was aimed for a week, resulting in four full pieces of music onto Wikimedia Commons as well as several demonstrations of traditional music played on instruments. It is the start of a larger project aimed at increasing availability of these irreplacable parts of Mexico's heritage, in sound recordings, scores and MIDI files.

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