GLAM/Newsletter/October 2019/Single
WikiD at the Design Museum
WikiD nominated for Beazley Designs of the Year Award
The WikiD: Women, Wikipedia, Design project by Parlour and Architexx has been nominated for the 2019 Beazley Designs of the Year Award, and is on show at the Design Museum in Kensington, London until April 2020. WikiD is a project that contributes profiles of women architects to Wikipedia. Since 2015, the collaboration has added over 200 new articles, and made 12,000 revisions. In Australia, posts about women in the sector have increased ten-fold.
How do you represent a project like this in an exhibition? Parlour and Monash University commissioned a film from filmmaker Shing Hei Ho and typographer Catherine Griffiths, which provides a sense of the impact of this group of editors. Check out the film WikiD: Women, Wikipedia, Design Wikimedia Australia congratulates Justine Clark, Charity Edwards, Virginia Mannering, Alysia Bennett and all the WikiD team who continue to address the gender gap in architecture and design.
Art and Gender and Wikipedia at Queensland College of Art
New and expanded articles on Australian women artists, and 684 new citations were the result of work by second-year students at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University this semester. This course by Dr Louise R Mayhew, feminist art historian, examines art practices, from the 1960s until now, that address subjectivity and identity. Students were guided through training modules on the Programs and Events Dashboard, and the development of research, writing and citing skills for biographical articles. Their final upload party was supported by local Wikimedian, Dr Kerry Raymond.
Wikimedia Colombia in Argentinean event
GLAM from Wikimedia Colombia in Argentinean Conference
Celebrating the 10 years of the "Jornada TAB", an event about library and information science in Mar del Plata (Argentina), User:C3r098 as coordinator of GLAM in Wikipedia Colombia presented a panel titled "Las Bibliotecas frente a la búsqueda de equilibrio en las tensiones del sistema de propiedad intelectual" (The libraries looking for balance in the intellectual property system). The presentation is available in this link.
Wikipedia Week of Libraries in Broumov
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On October 1 - 3, the Wikipedia Week of Libraries event took place in Broumov. Besides the Municipal Library in Broumov, two other institutions were involved in the event: the Broumov Monastery Educational and Cultural Centre and the Broumov Grammar School.
Broumov Municipal Library
A discussion about Wikipedia in the presence of Ms Lelková, the director of the library, was held in the Municipal Library. Next day a workshop "We Write Wikipedia" was held. It lasted 3 hours, three new accounts were opened and the article "Municipal Library in Broumov" (Městská knihovna v Broumově) was established and the Culture section was added to the "Broumov" article.
Broumov Monastery Educational and Cultural Centre
On Tuesday we organized a two-hour workshop with two employees of the Educational and Cultural Center Broumov Monastery. Both of them have already written several articles on Czech Wikipedia. We have mainly focused on technical items and the difference between the PR's language and the encyclopedic style. See e.g. the article "Treasures of the Broumov Region" (Za poklady Broumovska).
Grammar School in Broumov
On Wednesday there were two discussions with students of Grammar School in Broumov on the topic "How to use Wikipedia?", The first discussion was focused on students of the first year of four-year study (students of 15-16), the latter for first year of eight-year study students (10-11 years old ones). Active students proved enough knowledge on the topic, proved they were aware of it, were alert and I suspect that some of them were editing. But no one admitted that.
A three-hour workshop on Thursday for six first-year students and their Czech language teacher - that was the teacher's joy! We divided the individual parts of the article into individual sandpits and put them together in the end. The joy of the joint result of the Grammar School Broumov was genuine. I think these students will show us! Note: photos of the school building were taken by their classmate Michael Schirlo for the occasion.
The Museum of Broumov Region
I had an hour's conversation with director of The Museum of Broumov Region (Muzeum Broumovska). I have outlined possibilities and different kinds of cooperation within GLAM. We agreed to write an article about the museum. And after that we would see the possibility of the further cooperation.
Finally, many thanks to lector-colleagues Ikcur and Svenkaj!
Nordic cooperation + Wikisource + library information
Nordic cooperation and GLAM sector
At the beginning of October Wikimedia Northern Europe Meeting 2019 took place in Estonia bringing together Wikimedians from Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Norway, Russia, and Sweden.
The event itself was as close to GLAM institutions as possible: the pre-meetup program consisted of a visit to the Estonian Museum of Natural History and the Tallinn City Museum's Museum of Photography, and the conference itself took place in University of Tartu Natural History Museum.
Bigger plans for the future include:
- A digital repatriation initiative that will help to bring back (in digital form) assets that have ended up in other countries.
- Forming a Museum Task Force for joint promotion of GLAM material.
Bringing museum exhibition texts into Wikisource
Together with the Estonian Museum of Natural History we are investigating the possibility of bringing textual materials composed for exhibitions into Wikisource. The first test case is with the exhibition "The Secrets of Ancient Seas", that talks about the 600 million years of the geological history of Estonia and surrounding regions.
There are also some images that were made for the exhibition and have now found their way into Wikimedia Commons.
We are also looking to get these texts translated into other languages. We'd be glad to get your help!
Locations of Estonian libraries now in Wikidata
In September we got the location information of all the libraries of Estonia (excluding school libraries) from the National Library of Estonia. Nicolás Tamargo got all of that into Wikidata this October.
This is where you may found libraries in Estonia.
We are also actively searching for other similar datasets related to other institutions (schools, museums, etc).
Collaborative histories
Indigenous matters at WikidataCon
Kimberli Mäkäräinen and Susanna Ånäs presented Wikimedia Finland's initiatives and experiences with the Saami languages and culture at WikidataCon. Our work was ignited by facilitating the use of the Skolt and Inari Saami languages in Wikidata for recording concepts and lexemes, even though these language communities of 300–400 speakers each would likely be too small to maintain their own Wikipedia. Yet working with Wikidata opens up new opportunities for these languages when content is tagged with multilingual tags in GLAMs, broadcasting companies, Wikimedia Commons, etc.
Language issues were also in the spotlight of the Indigenous knowledge meet-up led by Stacy Allison-Cassin. The group felt that Traditional Knowledge and copyright in the Wikimedia projects also requires coordination. For this, a dedicated user group could be formed, or work could be coordinated with existing groups for languages and diversity.
Authority data in Finnish GLAMs
Mikko Lappalainen of the Finnish National Library and Susanna Ånäs from Wikimedia Finland prepared a presentation together about recording places and place names within Finnish memory institutions for WikidataCon. Wikidata offers an attractive way of modelling changing places, and lexicographical data makes it possible to record their names in all their variations, including in under-resourced languages.
After WikidataCon, the National Library arranged a workshop to further explore the opportunities of Wikidata and Wikibase in mobilizing authority data. The workshop was a combination of hands-on data modelling in a fresh Wikibase and exchanging thoughts about library data with Barbara Fischer from the German National Library and Jens Ohlig from Wikimedia Deutschland.
Helsinki Rephotography's October
In October, we continued to refine our Helsinki photography walks. Sandra organized 6 guided walks with local history groups in Helsinki.
Our method was to have first a presentation indoors about the topic of the walk, which included a short tutorial about taking rephotos. After the presentaton, we walked a pre-planned route with a guide who showed historical photos of the area and told participants about the history of the area. At selected key points, we took re-photographs of the area. Some of the participants used the Ajapaik app, while others used their cameras and mobile phones without having any special rephotography software on them.
Two of the walks were about the history of the Alppila and Töölö districts, one was about the art in the Helsinki university buildings, one about the life of Finnish photographer Signe Brander, and two were about defunct neighbourhood movie theaters in Kallio. The movie theater walks included visits inside three of the old movie theaters. Two of the theaters had been repurposed, but one was still a movie theater. We repeated some of the walks several times because we assumed that the weather in October would be quite bad. This proved to be a good idea, as it was raining and sleeting during three of the six walks. Being accustomed to this type of fall weather, we still had at least 10 participants on these days. When the weather was better, more than 30 rephotographers participated in our walks.
Our partners for the walks were Kallion kulttuuriverkosto, Helsinki City Museum, Guided Art Historical Tours at the University of Helsinki campuses, Hanna Partnership House, and Töölö Library. The walks were also covered by the media. For example, the local newspapers in Helsinki interviewed us and articles were published in the Töölöläinen and Meri-Helsinki newspapers. Sandra was also interviewed on Yle Radio Suomi.
Collaborative Game Histories
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On October 18–19, 2019, Wikimedia Finland participated in the Collaborative Game Histories seminar at the Finnish Museum of Games in Tampere. Haltiamieli participated in both the seminar and the workshop day.
On the workshop day, Haltiamieli and Zache had a Wikimedia table at the event together with two other community groups: Pelikonepeijoonit and Kasettilamerit, who have also worked with the Museum of Games before. Pelikonepeijoonit was a key group for creating the museum with their skills and collection of game hardware. At the event, they did an extensive presentation about their work with the museum and the collection itself.
Wikimedia Finland presented our long-time collaboration with documenting Finnish game culture in the Finnish Wikipedia. Our work with the museum started before the Finnish Museum of Games was even founded, since we worked with its predecessor, the media museum Rupriikki. Our work continued with the the Finnish Game Museum Wikiproject, writing about the games included in the first exhibition of the game museum. Our latest project was the Wikidata-focused Edit: History project by Olimar.
One very interesting topic at the event was the Art of Coding project, which aims to inscribe the demoscene on the UNESCO List of Intangible Cultural Heritage. This is a joint effort with underground hackers, mainstream demoscene, and researchers and has support from the Finnish Heritage Agency.
The event was co-organized by the Finnish Museum of Games, the Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies, and the University of Turku.
GLAM working group at WMFr; Partnership with AAF
GLAM working group at WMFr
We have launched on October 28th the first meeting in order to prepare the 2nd edition of the French GLAM national meeting which will take place on April 2020.
Partnership with AAF
We have launched a partnership with AAF (French archivists association) to include a Wikipedia, Wikimedia commons, Wikidata training day in their 2020 training catalogue. The AAF proposes every year a training courses calendar to increase skills and expertise of their members that can relate to digitization. Being officially in a professional catalogue is a manner for us to reach a bigger audience among GLAM actors.
Numismatic items from Sumatran Numismatic Museum
Announcing the digitization results at the Sumatran Numismatic Museum
On the last week of October, a socialization event to announcing the digitization results was held at Sumatran Numismatic Museum (Museum Uang Sumatera) in conjunction with National Museum Festival in Medan City, North Sumatra, Indonesia. Members of numismatic association from Malaysia, Persatuan Pertemuan Numismatik Indonesia Malaysia or PPNIM, attended the event and talked about the close relationship between Indonesian and Malaysian numismatic items. In that event, GLAM Indonesia's representative presented a 10-minute slideshow, showing the urgency of museum digitization and the expected outcomes.
A QR code was created to direct users to Sumatran Numismatic Museum on Wikimedia Commons.
Slides used in the event: File:Presentation slides for Museum Uang Sumatera collection socialization.pdf. Watch the news coverage in this YouTube video.
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Master of Ceremonies -
Wikimedia Indonesia's presentation -
Attending guest from PPNIM -
QR code for Sumatran Numismatic Museum on Wikimedia Commons
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Proposal of Islamic old books digitization
Hardiansyah, a GLAM Indonesia's representative, was invited for a talk at the Sumatran Thawalib Parabek Boarding School in Agam Regency, West Sumatra, Indonesia. The boarding school was interested to digitize some of Sheikh Ibrahim Musa's books, who was teaching in the boarding school. Because of copyright status, the books cannot be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons unless there is a OTRS mail stating that the books is being relicensed in CC license.
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Hardiansyah during the talk
More news on GLAM Indonesia activities can be read on @GLAM_Indonesia Twitter account.
Wikipedia Penang Meetup 2 @ Tuanku Fauziah Museum and Gallery, University of Science Malaysia
On 9 October 2019, the Wikimedia Community User Group Malaysia held a Wikipedia meetup for the 5th time with GLAM institution and the first with museum and gallery under the Wikipedia Penang Meetup 2 official name at Tuanku Fauziah Museum and Gallery in University of Science Malaysia, located in the state of Penang.
User Tofeiku had a meeting with the museum director and officer to introduce Wikipedia to them. Overview of GLAM movement in other countries were also presented to them for discussion for them to have idea on what kind of offline activities can be made from this and what benefits the museum can gain. The museum agreed to present and share information and pictures to the user group and the museum gave the user group a spot for the year end event held by the museum, most probably in December 2019.
Other topics of the discussion were the latest development of Malay-language Wikipedia (ms.wikipedia) and the plan to create a Wikipedia article about the museum and gallery itself.
This fall Wikimedia Netherlands hosts four workshops for information specialists, data-analists and digital collection managers from GLAM-institution who are interested in Linked Open Data and want to learn more about sharing their collections with the Wikimedia projects. The classes prepare the participants for the Wikimedia Tech Storm which takes place on 22 and 23 November in Amsterdam, and for collaboration with Wikimedia-projects in general. The attendees can either participate in this tech storm too start working on sharing their collections, or donate their data for the other participants of the tech storm.
The topics of the masterclasses are the following:
- Copyright on Wikimedia
- General introduction to Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata
- Sharing media on Wikimedia Commons with Pattypan
- Sharing data on Wikidata with Openrefine
The classes are attended by a group of approximately 15 GLAM professionals, and their first reactions are positive. After evaluation of the classes, WMNL will see if the track can be repeated next year.
Course materials can be found on Wikimedia Commons. For more information or questions about the program, please contact Michelle (vanlanschot
wikimedia.nl).
Introducing: Michelle van Lanschot
From the 1st of October onwards Michelle van Lanschot started working as project manager for Wikimedia Netherlands. She has been a Wikimedia-volunteer since 2015, and has been working as an information specialist in the GLAM-sector and also as a Wikipedia in Residence working with small regional heritage institutions. She will take on several GLAM-related projects together with Denise Jansen, and also the education programme and the Netherlands and the Worl project. You can reach her by e-mail (vanlanschotwikimedia.nl).
6000 images from Africa 1970-2019
by Hansmuller, Wikipedian in Residence at the Afrika-Studiecentrum Leiden
Various seasoned Africanists and expert photographers have donated about 6000 historical and recent photographs and slides of their work in for instance Burkina Faso, Cameroun, Kenya, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, Somaliland, Tunisia, Zambia and Zimbabwe ... to the Afrika-Studiecentrum (African Studies Centre, Leiden) which has scanned the images and now donates them to Wikimedia Commons. Three recent random samples from Collections of the African Studies Centre (Leiden):
Rietveld Collection Nigeria 1970-1973
Aart Rietveld is an historian who, among other activitities, taught at Toro Teachers College, Nigeria.
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Teachers in training await the inspection of their huts, Toro Teachers College, Nigeria. -
Polygamy. The driver of Toro Teachers College marries his third wife. Toro, Nigeria. -
Dodo dancers dressed as evil spirits of ancestors with their drummer have to wait for their turn at the Jos Ceremony, Jos, Nigeria. -
The ceremonial ruler of Bauchi in his procession at the islamic Eid al-Fitr festivities, Bauchi, Nigeria. -
Pan African Games Lagos January 7-18, 1973. A female javelin thrower in the stadium. Lagos, Nigeria -
Kainji Dam in the River Niger. White horned zebus in front of the openings of the dam, Nigeria.
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F. van der Kraaij Collection Liberia 1975-1976
Fred van der Kraaij is an economist who taught at the University of Monrovia, Liberia, and is a well-known expert on Liberia.
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Fruit vendors, Monrovia, Liberia, 1975 -
Open pit mining for iron ore, Yekepa, Liberia, 1976 -
Conveyor belt carrying iron ore, Yekepa, Liberia, 1976 -
Train with iron ore, Yekepa, Liberia, 1976 -
Dam for the generation of electricity, Firestone factory, Harbel, Liberia, 1976 -
A rubber tapper at the Firestone rubber plantation, Harbel, Liberia, 1976
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Firestone latex factory, Harbel, Liberia, 1976 -
Rubber factory, Harbel, Liberia, 1976 -
Illuminated houses of the workers at the Firestone rubber factory, Harbel, Liberia, 1976 -
Storage of latex sheets, Harbel, Liberia, 1976 -
A woman winnowing paddy and a man with a mortar, Agrimeco, Montserrado county, Liberia, 1976
Van de Bruinhorst Collection, Somaliland, 2019
Gerard van de Bruinhorst, an arabist and Africanist at the Afrika-Studiecentrum Leiden, documented his visit to the Hargeysa 12th International Book Fair, 20-25 July 2019, in Somaliland.
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A food stall run by women, Hargeisa, Somaliland, 2019 -
Nasiim Mohomed Ali Aar, writer of the novel Between Love, Past and Destiny, Hargeisa, Somaliland, 2019 -
The lights of Hargeysa at night, showing the red Central Market, Hargeisa, Somaliland, 2019 -
A panel discussion at the Hargeysa 12th International Book Fair, Somaliland, 2019 -
Hargeisa War Cemetery, 2019, Somaliland, 2019 -
Animal story and the mathematical geometric series of 0.5, Hargeysa Cultural Centre, Somaliland, 2019 -
A nest of weaver birds hanging from a tree, Hargeisa, Somaliland, 2019 -
Rock paintings of Laas Geel with a visiting group from the 12th Hargeisa Book Fair, Somaliland, 2019
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A red and white rock painting of a human figure in the caves of Laas Geel, Somaliland, 2019 -
A group of men sitting in front of the University Bookshop, women in burqa pass, video, Hargeisa, Somaliland, 2019
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Cattle livestock market, Hargeisa, Somaliland, 2019
Radio Cinema at the National Library in Oslo
On October 10th WMNO hosted an event at the National Library in Oslo about archive material from and about indigenous groups. The audience listened to an episode from the radio documentary series "In Elsa Laulas footprints through Sápmi". The episode is about a picture of a Sápmi family, taken by scientists researching on what they called the Sápmi race, during the assimilation process in Norway. After the podcast or «radio cinema», we invited a panel with representatives from archives and GLAM institutions to discuss problems and opportunities with sharing archive material freely online.
In October 2019 the monthly editing contest on Northern Sámi Wikipedia, Nynorsk Wikipedia and Bokmål Wikipedia was about Sámi topics. During the contest 113 new articles were written in total.
In November, three members of our staff will go to Finnmark, the northernmost region in Norway. We have arranged to meet with the Sámi Parliament and Sámi GLAM-institutions, and will try to start new collaborations with important institutions in the Sámi community. We are looking forward to the trip, and are hoping this will strengthen our work on bringing more Sápmi knowledge to Wikipedia!
Nordic Museum publications on Wikidata and Commons; Wikipedia training in Härnösand; Open cultural heritage data in focus in Visby
Nordic Museum publications on Wikidata and Commons
The Nordic Museum in Stockholm has been working on making data about their publications open and easily available. Their over a 100 years old history of working with Swedish cultural heritage is documented in the journal Fataburen, to which many known ethnologists, historians and art historians have contributed.
Now the metadata of those contributions, previously hidden deep in an internal publication database, is available on Wikidata – 1733 Fataburen articles. Having this data in a structured form on Wikidata made it easier to take the next step and identify articles that could be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons – i.e. those that are in public domain both in Sweden (at least 70 years have passed from the death of the author) and in the USA (published before 1924). The Nordic Museum had already digitized all the articles, so we uploaded 200 of them to Commons.
And some of them have already been proofread on Wikisource – bringing valuable knowledge about the history of cultural heritage work closer to the readers.
Wikipedia training in Härnösand
October 22 the Västernorrland County museum invited their network of museums and local heritage friends to a training day where Aron Ambrosiani and Axel Pettersson talked about the Wikimedia projects combined with training and editing of both Wikipedia, Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons. 15 users participated and created some new articles and improved both Wikipedia and Wikidata.
Open cultural heritage data in focus in Visby
The 2019 edition of Hack for Heritage, a hackathon focusing on cultural heritage, took place on October 4–6 in Visby, Gotland. The organizer of the event, the Swedish National Heritage Board, has a long tradition of working with open data and materials. 70 participants from around the country worked on three themes: 1) School, learning and pedagogy, 2) Destinations, tourism and experiences, and 3) Health, wellbeing and cultural heritage.
One of Wikimedia Sverige's workers was there to provide help and information on how to work with data from Wikidata, Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. Since a growing number Swedish GLAMs have uploaded parts of their resources to the Wikimedia projects, there was a lot of interest in exploring them. The questions ranged from how to correctly credit Creative Commons material to how to query Wikidata to find nearby museums.
Khalili; Museums + Tech; Oxford WIR placement ends
Oxford retrospective
Martin Poulter's Wikimedian In Residence placement at the University of Oxford ended on the 31 October. This placement began in April 2015 and went through three phases. In the first year, the WIR was focused on the Bodleian Libraries, sharing 8,000 images on Commons. There was also a series of public events, mainly about women in science. The second year was funded to work with Digital Humanities projects across the university, using Wikimedia platforms to improve the reach of research outputs. This involved sharing data on Wikidata and advising on using Wikipedia.
The last two years of the placement involved working across the University's GLAM division: as well as over 100 libraries, the university has four museums as well as botanic gardens and herbaria. The university is looking in the long term at linked open data to join up the many many catalogues and databases, and Martin's work was a pilot project looking at the suitability of Wikidata for this purpose. This involved delivering 20 workshops and presentations, writing 17,000 words of documentation, and sharing collection data about thousands of artworks, primarily from Asian and Middle East. The final report of this Wikidata project has been uploaded to Commons.
Museums and Tech
This one-day conference, held at the British Library, brought people from across the UK's museums sector to discuss the theme of openness. Jason Evans of the National Library of Wales and Martin Poulter of the University of Oxford presented about using Wikidata to join up and visualise different data sets, but were not the only ones speaking positively about Wikimedia platforms. The opening keynote from Loic Tallon, formerly of The Met, and the final talk by legal expert Andrea Wallace of Exeter University both cited Wikipedia as giving diverse audiences a chance to describe and provide context for cultural heritage. Slides from the event will be added to the programme on the event's web site.
Khalili Collections
A CSV of images from the Khalili Collections is in preparation, to enable a bulk import to Commons. This month, Wikimedia UK made a five minute video about the partnership with the Khalili Collections.
Spooky Autumn meetups
Ada Lovelace Day
Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and Wikimedia DC held a meetup, Ada Lovelace Day Edit-a-thon at Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (AWHI) There was a livestream, [1], [2]
Women Trowelblazers
Smithsonian’s National Anthropological Archives, Human Studies Film Archives and Wikimedia DC held a meetup, Documenting Women Trowelblazers: A National Anthropological Archives Wikipedia Edit-A-Thon
Disability Pride Month
Old Dominion University Department of Women's Studies, ODU Libraries, and Wikimedia DC. held a meetup, Disability Pride Month Wikipedia Edit-a-thon
New School Centennial 1
New School, and Black Lunch Table held a meetup, Black Lunch Table New School Centennial 1
Stanford Indigenous Languages
Stanford University. held a meetup, Stanford Indigenous Languages Edit-a-thon
North Carolina Newspapers
University of North Carolina held a meetup, North Carolina Newspapers.
#WikiForHumanRights
This is a cross post of the blog post on Discuss space, also available in Spanish.
In August, the Wikimedia Foundation announced a partnership with UN Human Rights to improve coverage of human rights related topics on Wikimedia projects. We are excited to announce our first activity for the partnership: A campaign called #WikiForHumanRights that will run from November 15-January 30! We’re inviting affiliates, individual volunteers, and anyone that might be interested to join us in the campaign to improve and add knowledge about human rights on Wikipedia across languages.
What is the campaign?
To pilot the collaboration with UN Human Rights, Wikimedia Argentina hosted an editathon in Buenos Aires with UN officials in July, building off their fantastic work with the WikiDerechosHumanos project. Now, we’re looking to expand that pilot into a global campaign. The campaign is focused on two key topics – expanding and adding articles about the UN Declaration of Human Rights and “youth standing up for human rights”.
From November 15 to January 30, we’re asking volunteers, affiliates, and anyone else who might be interested to organize both on and off-wiki activities focused on improving and adding articles about these topics.
The Youth topic speaks to how human rights are relevant to current events. With 1.2 billion youth aged 15-24 years globally, accounting for one out of every six people worldwide, there are more adolescents and young people alive today than at any time in human history, and many of them are in the poorest countries or in contexts highly exposed. In the last few years, youth have frequently been major drivers of political, economic and social change.
Let’s make sure that these youth advocates are visible around the world on Wikipedia! Help us cover the major internationally visible youth involved human rights, like Greta Thunberg and the School Strike for the Climate, to less well known youth making a difference in different parts of the world.
How can you get involved?
- Help us build the list!
- We need your help identifying more topics related to youth involved in human rights for the list. We would like to represent many different languages and regions of the world. To propose topics for the list, see instructions at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiForHumanRights/List#Adding_a_topic_to_the_Youth_Lists
- Organize an online or offline event: The core of every campaign in the Wikimedia movement is local Wikimedia organizers helping us spread the world and coordinate local events! We need your help now letting us know if you can:
- Host an online campaign on your language Wikipedia! To learn more about hosting a local topical campaign see the kit here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiForHumanRights/Organize#Campaign
- Hold an in person editathon with local human rights organizations or other partners! To learn more, check out the kit here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiForHumanRights/Organize#Editathon
- Promote the campaign starting Dec. 10: Help us amplify your efforts around the campaign and publicize it to wide audiences. We’ll be sharing a communications toolkit (including graphics) soon with suggestions on reaching out to folks about the campaign.
- Reach out to local media and supporters: Journalists and the public can help add momentum to the campaign through storytelling and spreading the word.
- Promote the campaign on social media: We’ll be using #WikiForHumanRights to promote the campaign on social media, once it launches on Dec. 10.
If you want to help in other ways or have questions, let us know on the open thread in Discuss Space or by emailing Alex Stinson <astinsonwikimedia.org> and Luisina Ferrante <educacionwikimedia.org.ar>
If your community or affiliate is already running an activity (like an editing campaign, editathon, partnership or other activity) during the campaign and would like to include it in the campaign: please do! Contact us if you want to workshop your project in light of the theme!
Stay tuned for other communications materials to help amplify the campaign on International Human Rights Day this 10th of December.
Looking forward to having you involved!
Have questions?
If you have questions, we are going to be hosting an office hour tomorrow (Tuesday). If you are interested in having another, or if you have general comments or questions, you can post them on the thread started in Discuss Space.
Getting started, Tool highlights, Blog posts and presentations about SDC
How to get started with Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons?
If you are getting started with Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons, the recent workshop slides from WikidataCon should give you a quick overview of what's new and how you can edit structured data:
Structured Data on Commons tools
Since several months, it is possible to edit multilingual captions and statements on Wikimedia Commons via UploadWizard and via file pages on Wikimedia Commons. But recently, community members have also started developing various tools with which you can easily add structured data to Commons files. A few highlights below:
The ISA Tool
The ISA Tool is a multilingual, mobile-friendly tool, that makes it easy for anyone - especially beginners! - to add structured data to images on Wikimedia Commons. You can create 'tagging' campaigns and small competitions in ISA, but you can also use it for your personal workflows. Anyone can do this - no need to be an administrator or a skilled user! ISA is developed by Wiki In Africa and Eugene Egbe in collaboration with Histropedia and the Structured Data on Commons team.
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At various past conferences, people have organized mini-challenges with ISA. -
The ISA Tool received a WikidataCon 2019 award in the Multimedia category!
You can give ISA a try by adding structured data in the campaign of Quality images supported by a Wikimedia chapter: https://tools.wmflabs.org/isa/campaigns/33
AC/DC
AC/DC ("Add to Commons, Descriptive Claims") is a batch editing tool by Lucas Werkmeister. It allows for complex data modeling of sets of files, either defined by a category or by a Pagepile. This is the only batch tool right now that supports Qualifiers. Installation is simple through the Preferences Gadget menu, and it supports large and small batches of files well. For more, see commons:Help:Gadget-ACDC
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An example of the AC/DC tool in action
SDC
SDC is a user script developed by Magnus Manske that is similar to HotCat, allowing users to both:
- evaluate the existing structured data statements on a file page from a category or search results page and
- add a limited set of statements (currently P180 (Depicts) and P195 (Collection)). The tool only adds structured data to files on one page of a category; if a Commons category is exceptionally large and you want to add structured data to many or all files, this is not the tool for you.
PetScan integration with QuickStatements
It is now also possible to use PetScan to add structured data to files on Wikimedia Commons, through integration with QuickStatements. The process works as follows:
- Do a search on PetScan that produces a list of files as result (example: files in Category:Volkswagen T1) . For creating PetScan results for Commons files, note that:
- The Wiki needs to be set to “wikimedia” for the project, and “commons” for the language
- The namespace for files needs to be selected in the second tab.
- You will then see a small box at the top right of the file list in which you can enter statements to add to those files (example: P180:Q1819861)
- When clicking 'Start QS', you will be taken to QuickStatements in which you can then run your batch edit.
A link to PetScan from each category is coming to the commons:Template:Wikidata Infobox soon, so creation of the queries should be quite straightforward from that point.
Help welcome with data modeling!
The Wikimedia Commons community is at this moment thinking about the best ways to describe files on Wikimedia Commons with structured data. This is very new territory: there are no established ways yet to, for instance, describe the creators or locations of files.
Please help with this process by participating in the data modeling discussions at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Structured_data/Modeling and its various subpages. Examples and thoughts about GLAM files are especially welcome here.
Blog posts about Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons
The following blog posts by Keegan Peterzell outline the development process behind SDC:
- Structured Data on Commons – A Blog Series
- Structured Data on Commons, Part Two – Federated Wikibase and Multi-Content Revisions
- Structured Data on Commons, Part Three – Multilingual File Captions
- Structured Data on Commons, Part Four – Depicts statements
- Structured Data on Commons, Part Five – Other statements
Also check this blog post by Lucas Werkmeister:
Structured Data on Commons at WikidataCon 2019
Andrew Lih presented about Wikidata Commons contribution strategies for GLAM organizations and SandraF did a hands-on workshop about Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons.
Structured Data is coming to WikiConference North America
There is also a Workshop at WikiConference North America on Friday, November 8.
Books & Bytes–Issue 35, July–August 2019
In this issue we highlight Wikimania, global developments and, as always, a roundup of news and community items related to libraries and digital knowledge.
Wikimania
Wikimania 2019, which ran from 14 to 18 August, included a Libraries Space to showcase intersections between libraries and Wikimedia projects. Goals of the space included sharing best practices, capacity and partnership building, and providing opportunities for collaborative working.
Before the main Wikimania event, the Swedish Library Association hosted an edit-a-thon, including lightning talks and discussions. The space opened on day 1 of the conference proper (16 August) with a workshop that aimed to introduce librarians to Wikidata and advocate adding data about libraries worldwide to the site.
Day 3 (18 August) opened with a series of lightning talks. Topics included strategic inclusion of library data on Wikidata, inventaire.io, library outreach for user groups, and Wikidata and bibliographic infrastructure. This was followed by a round of five-minute "idea pitches". After a break, the space continued with a set of brainstorming and discussion groups, a Wikimedia and Libraries User Group lunch, and two Wikidata-focused workshops.
We're building something great, but..
Many of you probably already know of the Library Card platform, our centralised platform for applying (and soon for accessing and searching!) for access to high quality sources. The platform is constantly evolving to meet the growing needs and interests of Wikimedia contributors, to be user-friendly and to serve users of varying language backgrounds. We're giving the final touches to – scheduled to roll out soon, followed by the integration of EBSCO Discovery Service, bringing the platform two steps closer to a one-stop solution for all of your research needs.
But to be a truly one-stop solution, we need your help. Over 250 editions – that's the number of languages in which Wikimedia projects are made available; we intend to serve every single editor regardless of their language background. That is what we mean by 'truly'. The Library Card platform currently has translations of 90% or more of its content available in nine languages (French, Traditional Chinese, Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Portuguese, Ukrainian, Simplified Chinese, Turkish and Hindi), thanks to the volunteer translators at translatewiki.net.
- If you are someone who knows how to write in a language other than English, is interested in translation, and has some time to spare, please visit translatewiki.net. If the language you are trying to translate is fully translated, you can review the contributions of other translators.
- If you are someone who knows how to code, you can help us too by starting at Phabricator.
If you have any questions, reach out to us at wikipedialibrary.
wikimedia.org
Wikimedia and Libraries User Group
The user group was gearing up for Wikimania in June and have been working on resources and activities for the group post-Wikimania. The steering committee met twice, once in July and then in August. The July meeting's agenda was oriented towards shaping the group's presence in Wikimania, and to that end designing a poster for the organizational gallery and bringing the Libraries space to fruition.
The post-Wikimania meetup of the steering committee was geared towards engaging the user group members in different activities and making the user group a true rendezvous for librarians and Wikipedians. The group's participation in the upcoming WikidataCon 2019 and WikiConference North America was also briefly discussed.
One point that was discussed in both the meetings and currently in the works is the training resources. Various materials pertaining to #1Lib1Ref, Wikidata, Commons, etc. are being collated for the benefit of the user group. Once completed, the document would be uploaded to Meta for further input and sharing. An activity that would involve user group members, particularly librarians, entering their library into Wikidata is also being designed and will soon be publicised for participation.
A Wikibrarian's story
One's arrival into the world of Wikimedia projects is almost always a noteworthy event. Here we share one such account of a librarian who was introduced to Wikipedia in an unusual way and began their adventure trying to better understand Wikipedia and now helps others understand it too!
Laurie Bridges is an Instruction and Outreach Librarian at Oregon State University in the US. She was introduced to Wikipedia by her son: at age 9, he was assigned a class project to research and present about a species of frog, and was told to only use Wikipedia for his research. When he related this to her, she thought, "If 9-year-olds are being introduced to research using Wikipedia, I better learn more about Wikipedia". So she got involved because she wanted to better understand the resource her son, and the students at her university, use. She explains:
Students and faculty are familiar with [Wikipedia] because many use it daily, although they do not cite it in their papers. As a librarian I teach about information literacy and help students and faculty with their research. Wikipedia is a familiar website that I can use to teach information literacy and afterwards students and faculty leave equipped with a better understanding of how the information source works. Students are used to teachers and professors saying, "Don't use Wikipedia." However, this dismissive statement doesn't teach the students how, why, or when they can use Wikipedia or other online resources. We are living in a time of misinformation and I want students to understand the information they are using and become critical consumers of that information. Using Wikipedia to teach students about information literacy is fun! In addition, it's fulfilling because I can see students' excitement as they learn more about Wikipedia, a website they use on a daily basis. I've found teaching with Wikipedia to be so rewarding that I want to spread the word.
Finally, if librarians don't teach students about Wikipedia and what it is (or isn't), who is going to teach them? I'd like to see more activity and interest from librarians related to Wikipedia. This is why whenever I get a chance, I will introduce other librarians to ... the Wikimedia Movement. Last year I received a scholarship to attend Wikimedia + Education in San Sebastián, Spain. I was only one of two librarians in attendance (in addition to Basque librarians who were volunteering at the event). It was a great learning opportunity and I connected with so many enthusiastic educators. I'd love to see enough interest from librarians to host a Wikimedia + Libraries conference! That would be a great conference!
Bytes in brief
- (English) Wikipedia + Libraries: health and medical information
- (English) What I want my son to learn from libraries
- (French) Des archives et des bibliothèques comme contrepoison aux fausses nouvelles
- (English) An International Knowledge Base for all Heritage Institutions
We Are Seven
Happy Birthday Wikidata!
Wikidata was seven years old on 29 October, and so WikidataCon 2019 was held in Berlin. You can read all about it, see high-quality videos of many of the sessions, and enjoy the many "birthday presents", all via the program.
News
- Wikidata won an Open Publishing Award (description).
- Panandâ, a mobile app powered by Wikidata (and Wikimedia Commons), was selected as one of the five finalists in the App for Social Good category in the Android Masters 2019 competition organized by Google Developer Group Philippines. The final event will be held on November 16.
Press, articles, blog posts
- Generating "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" Questions Sets Automatically from Wikidata, Markus Wohlan, et al.
- Wikidata: A large-scale collaborative ontological medical database, Houcemeddine Turki et al.
- My message to video game databases: We(kidata) come in peace, by Jean-Frédéric (the subject is broader than just video games)
- Lei (Nico) Zheng, et al. (2019) The Roles Bots Play in Wikipedia. Proceedings of the ACM: Human-Computer Interaction, Volume 3, Issue CSCW, Article 215 (November 2019), 20 pages. DOI: 10.1145/3359317 (also blog post).
- Lina M. Rojas-Barahona, et al. (2019) Spoken Conversational Search for General Knowledge. Proceedings of the 20th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue. ACL Anthology ID: W19-5914 + arXiv:1909.11980
- Querying Wikidata RDF with SQL using RDF2X
- Ozymandias in Canberra - how the Atlas of Living Australia could be enhanced using Wikidata
- Knowledge Graph Consolidation by Unifying Synonymous Relationships - Jan-Christoph Kalo, et al.
- Analysis of Urban Information of Colombia on Wikidata, 2nd CATAÏ Workshop, Bogota, Colombia, 23-24 October 2019 (Preprint)
- Wikidata as a FAIR knowledge graph for the life sciences (preprint in Biorxiv)
- Una lezione di biblioteconomia, o Del nome corto dell’autore
- PhD thesis: Candela Romero, Gustavo (2019). Publicación y enriquecimiento semántico de datos abiertos en bibliotecas digitales (in Spanish).
Technical matters
- ShowTalkLabels: with this script enabled, when a talk page is shown on your watchlist or similar pages, the label of the related entity is shown.
- OpenRefine 3.3 beta was released
Other news
For all other Wikidata news, new properties, etc, see:
- d:Wikidata:Status updates/2019_10_07
- d:Wikidata:Status updates/2019_10_14
- d:Wikidata:Status updates/2019_10_21
- d:Wikidata:Status updates/2019_10_28
October 16th meeting minutes
Steering committee meeting
The Steering committee met and discussed Wikimania 2020, a potential WikiCite ANZ meeting (14 Feb in Melbourne), Librarians Love Wikipedia, how the group might use Wikimedia Space and more.
You can check out the meeting notes for more details.
Community Wishlist Survey 2020 and Wiki Advanced Training 2019
Community Wishlist 2020
Each year the Community Tech team at the Wikimedia Foundation runs the Community Wishlist Survey, an opportunity for Wikimedia contributors to propose new or different technical requests relevant to their work on the Wikis. Because the Community Tech team is still working on Wikipedia-focused requests from previous years, they decided to focus this year’s wishlist on sister projects other than Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata.
This year, Wikisource is proving to be very prominent in the requests, with 27 of the 73 proposals (as of November 6) focused on Wikisource. We wanted to highlight a few of the proposals that reflect the kinds of needs being identified in SGill’s research around Wikisource. To see the full list, check out: the Wikisource part of the wishlist
Highlights
- OCR improvements focused on making it easier to support more and different languages
- Improving the usability of WikiSource content in ways that GLAMs or digital aggregators can use it
- Improving the interface for contributing to WikiSource:
Wiki Advanced Training 2019
CIS-A2K organized Wiki Advanced Training 2019 which was focused on Wikisource for this iteration. The event had 21 participants from 9 Wikisource communities across India. SGill did a workshop with the participants to surface 5 major pain points for the Indic Wikisource community.
Based on conversations with the participants and a survey followed by that (filled by 12 out of 21 participants), the following are the top priorities around Wikisource for Indic communities:
- Tools/scripts across various Wikisources - There are many scripts/tools that exist on some Wikisources and not on others. There isn’t enough documentation available to easily localize and integrate them in other Wikisources. This might also be easily implemented with Wikisource Extension.
- Easy (Automated/Semi-automated) Transclusion of Proofread/Validated Indexes - Currently, the Wikisource community manually creates Main namespace pages and multiple subpages.
- VisualEditor for Wikisource/Improving the Proofreading Interface - Wikisource uses a lot of templates and VisualEditor for Wikisource needs to be designed accordingly. (check interface related proposals described in the highlights above)
- Bulk OCR (Not dependent on platform) - Currently, the only Bulk OCR tool available for Indic Wikisources is OCR4Wikisource which is GNU/Linux based and requires the use of a command line.
- Tool to integrate book viewing with pagelist creation and identity page scan errors - the workflow for creating pagelist could be improved by an integrated bookviewer for PDF/DJVU files improving the page identification experience and allowing for adding/removing errored pages from a scanned file. (similar to the proposal Index creation wizard 2020 proposal )
Similar proposals have already been submitted as proposals in the Community Wishlist Survey 2020. This list aims to help the global Wikisource community in adding new proposals, possibly improving related proposals and hopefully prioritizing these once voting begins on 20th November 2019.
1Lib1Ref, Wikimedia Sweden Research and other updates
1Lib1Ref
The Wikipedia Library team published a retrospective on the 2019 1Lib1Ref campaign this month. You can read the summary version on Wikimedia Space and the full report on Medium. Key takeaways included continued expansion of the reach and impact of the event, the need to continue supporting a community organising team, and the value of proactive outreach to underrepresented communities.
1Lib1Ref will be taking place on the same dates in 2020. You can join in between January 15th and February 5th as well as May 15th to June 5th. Organise an event with your local library and librarians, support new contributors, or just add a citation! Read more about how you can participate.
Wikimedia Sweden Research Update
The GLAM team is preparing various pieces of research that will help to inspire the work by Wikimedia Sverige to build better technical and social infrastructure for Wikimedia content partnerships. This research will help to understand which interventions and technologies are most needed around the world.
- GLAM Mapping: research on past GLAM-Wiki projects documented in This Month in GLAM, in various affiliate reports and other on-wiki venues
- Research on international datasets and indicators that help us better understand the potential of Wikimedia content partnerships around the world (starting in 2020)
- Two regional deep dives in which the insights of the datasets and indicators research will be applied to the specific situation in Latin America and the ESEAP (East, South East Asia and the Pacific) region.
This research will soon be documented on the Meta page: WMSE-WMF joint initiative concerning GLAM communities of practice.
Other goings on
- We have been busy on Structured Data on Commons. Check out the report.
- The Wikimedia Foundation is working with UN Human rights to promote coverage of Human Rights topics on Wikimedia Projects: check out the special report to learn more.
- The team is busy screening and interviewing candidates for Senior Program Manager, GLAM and Culture position. We are excited about the diversity of experiences that candidates could bring to the Wikimedia ecosystem.
- Open GLAM -- a team of partners from the Wikimedia Foundation, Creative Commons, Euopeana and others are working together on revitalizing OpenGLAM work -- if you haven’t caught it, check out the community page on Meta: Open GLAM
- Community Wishlist Survey 2020 is open and unlike previous years is focused on the smaller Sister projects (not Wikidata, Commons or Wikipedia). The GLAM-Wiki community has often show up heavily in the wishlist voting and idea sharing: please join the conversation. We also created a special Wikisource report about the wishlist: Read it here.
November's GLAM events
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1 Edit-a-thon Prachatice 2,
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