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Greek Rituals; Wiki Loves Monuments 2017

Greek Rituals

Oenochoé 26120
The Musée Saint-Raymond, the archeological museum of the city of Toulouse, continues to work hand in hand with Wikimedians on their exhibitions. The current one, about ancient Greek rituals, is already on Wikidata, thanks to metadata from the museum and photography from both the institution and volunteer photographers.

WLM 2017

Saint-Vigor church, in Normandy, by Selbymay.

The results of the 2017 edition of the photo contest Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM) were announced in December, first the ones for France then the international results. An award ceremony was held in the Wikimedia France office.

See all winners country by country on Wiki Loves Monuments 2017 winners.


a good working key to GLAM collections

Awesome results

It was the fourth time I was sitting in the first row waiting to see the results of the German hackathon on open cultural data. Beside me the minister of culture of Berlin, representatives of one of the richest and most influential patron foundations in Germany and 200 guests, coders, GLAM staff, Wikipedians, journalists and art fans. It was the 2nd of December. It was the day of the Coding da Vinci award ceremony in the Jewish Museum in Berlin. 15 project teams presented their applications. A great variety of things. There was a handcrafted card game based on digitized train tickets, the data on the program of the Berlin Konzerthaus was enriched with Wikidata, its promise to be inclusive was analyzed and presented on a website. An audioplay based on notes taken while Alexander von Humboldt was lecturing on Kosmos was embedded in a multi-perspective digital presentation. The Berlin Wall was raised in an augmented reality app that takes you through Berlin showing you private foto material from East-Berlin. Even a Virtual Reality application was created in the six week sprint, giving you access to browse the enlarged skeletons of fragile snake heads. We saw games, chat bots and were confronted with the hundred year old headlines of a German newspaper appealing like today's #fakenews via Twitter. It was a hard choice for the jury and the audience to choose the winners. But here they are: Skelex, Berliner MauAR, Bertuchs Bilderspiel, Exploring the Hidden Kosmos, Haxorpoda Collective and Marbles of Remembrance. New to us was that the coder community had become more female, more international, more professional and more diverse. I think, this was due to our cooperation with the creative industry through one of our partners and our collaboration with the science hack community through our project manager Lucy Patterson. We had more high end media coverage thanks to a professional support here and we gained more international interest from countries like Sweden and France to cover Coding da Vinci as a format for their GLAM hackathon initiatives. Coding da Vinci shows: substantial is sustainability both in cooperations with partners, here Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek, Servicestelle Digitalisierung and Open Knowledge Foundation Germany, but also in the format itself. It takes time to create a community, to create confidence to create a name. Next Coding da Vinci will start within 4 months in Leipzig. You are welcome to join us.

One of the winning teams at the Coding da Vinci award ceremony

Chaos Computer Club Congress N° 34

For 34 years some engaged people interested in hacking, data privacy and coding in general have been gathering in the days between Xmas and new years eve. This year they were 16.000 at #34C3. People mostly from Germany, mostly male and mostly nerds in one way or the other were debating, learning, hacking or simply chatting for 3 days in a road at the fair in Leipzig. The town welcomed them with lots of extra services for their convenience. But mostly the attendees do all on their own on a volunteer basis, just like Wikimedians. The years before mostly colleagues from the Wikimedia Deutschland software department went to the congress. This year it was time to bring some #openGLAM to the halls. In a litte presentation on one of the many open mic stages, I showed the obstacles Free knowledge movement meets at museum's doors. The key is often cooperation to gain mutual benefit. Coding da Vinci is a frame where to achieve it. In the talk I gained my most valid take-away in a comment from the audience: loads of images are dull, if not accompanied with valuable metadata. Screening was yesterday. Re-use needs machine readable metadata. Reuse is what art is all about. We need to assure that as much metadata is attached to the files uploaded in Wikimedia Commons as possible. Pattypan is a handy tool here. And we need to make sure to use Wikidata more thoroughly to create a tight linked open data network of GLAM content.

#34C3 in Leipzig 16 thousand coders striving for openness


Collaboration with library in Yogyakarta

Digitization letters from the library's collection

A letter from De Administrateur, Chef van het Kabinet des Ministers van Koloniën

Wikimedia Indonesia is in collaboration again with Dewantara Kirti Griya Museum in Yogyakarta to digitize the collection of Ki Hadjar Dewantara's letters from the collection of Dewantara Kirti Griya Library Museum. For nearly five months, these activities have successfully digitized 981 sheets of 365 catalog numbers.

Most of the digitized collection is a correspondence originating from the Dutch Government to Ki Hadjar Dewantara. Some are official documents issued by the Dutch Government in relation to Ki Hadjar Dewantara and Tamansiswa.

The entire collection can be accessed freely on the internet through the Wikimedia Commons. These collections come with a short metadata so the readers know the essence of the text without having to read it in its entirety.

The next step is to translate the results of digitization that are in Dutch and English into the Indonesian language. Thus, the results of this digitization can be used by readers who are not proficient in these languages. In addition, the results of this digitization can be used by the Wikipedia community to enrich Wikipedia articles related to Ki Hadjar Dewantara and efforts during his lifetime.

The Content Digitization program is first initiated by Wikimedia Indonesia to digitize the Indonesian manuscript collection from local institutions. In 2017, Wikimedia Indonesia once again collaborated in digitizing document collections and correspondence from the Dewantara Kirti Griya Museum, which is in 2015 has collaborated to digitize Javanese texts from the collection of Dewantara Kirti Griya Museum.

This program is designed to digitize texts collection from Tamansiswa Dewantara Kirti Griya Museum, Yogyakarta, and then disseminate the results of digitalization through internet media in hopes that the text will be sustainable and the paper is not damaged because it is held by many hands. The results of this project are also expected to help the text be read by the public, as well as researchers and enthusiasts of Java language and literature so that the value of text culture can be preserved and socialized.


Activities in December

Founders of historical firms and ICAR

ICAR (the Central Institute for Archives), based in Rome, is contributing to many Wikipedia articles about the founders of historical Italian firms, focusing especially on their archives. The first 70 articles were expanded by the ICAR team of archive experts. The GLAM/ICAR project has also uploaded on Wikimedia Commons historical images taken from the SAN (Sistema archivistico nazionale), the National system of archives in Italy. Images from the SAN has been viewed about 650.000 times in the last month on 38 different wikis. GLAM/ICAR project is using Outreach Dashboard to monitor the work in progress.

BEIC and Wikimedia Italia are renewing GLAM collaboration

Wikimedia Italia and BEIC (en:Biblioteca europea di informazione e cultura, European Library of Information and Culture), based in Milan, will renew the collaboration for the fourth year in 2018. The GLAM-BEIC project started in 2014 and is the longest-running GLAM-wiki project in Italy.

December 18th

Napoli: workshop and Wikipedia LAB at Palazzo Reale by Alessandra Boccone and Remo Rivelli, with the support of Tania Maio and Francesca Russo, as part of the Reach Out project

December 16th

Cernobbio (CO): Edit-a-thon "La Cernobbio Liberty e Wikivoyage" held at Villa Bernasconi with Stefano Dal Bo, Marta Pigazzini and Dario Crespi.

December 5th

  • Firenze: Firenze - AD ALTA VOCE: Edit-a-thon at MuseoNovecento with Susanna Giaccai, Silvia Bruni, Manuela Musco and Luca Landucci.
  • Potenza, Museo Provinciale: the students of the Galilei Scientific High School of Potenza present the Wikipedia voice dedicated to Pietro Amato Perretta, tutor Luigi Catalani.


Winners of DARM Challenge 3 and Wiki Loves Food award ceremony

DARM Challenge 3

The challenge run one month: from 00:01 (CET UTC+01:00) November 15, 2017 until 23:59 (CET UTC+01:00) December 15, 2017. Wikipedian in Residence at DARM (National Archive of the Republic of Macedonia) in the collaboration with the State Archive uploaded more than 2500 files. The aim of this challenge was to use these files in articles in any language. The winners (first five contributors with most points) are:

The five winners will get prizes: set of books, 20 euros each, with total amount of 100 Euros.

Statistic results (some according to GLAMorgan tool):

  • 16 participants
  • from 12 different language wikis
  • more than 50 new articles created at the time of DARM Challenge 3
  • 40.83% of all images of category are used in articles

We noticed that there were editors who used the files in their home wiki articles, but they didn't sign themselves as participants. This is something we count as a success.

Wiki Loves Food award ceremony

On the 16th of December, after a period of preparations, together with Slow Food Vodno, we held the award ceremony for the Wiki Loves Food photographic contest. The Wiki Loves Food photographic contest attracted significantly large attention in the public thus several media outlets reported from the competition. The competition itself went excellent resulting in 916 uploaded images from 67 registered competitors who covered 100 different traditional dishes from the Macedonian and regional cuisines. This topic, traditional cuisine, led us to the collaboration with the Slow Food organization whose members wholeheartedly helped us in the promotion and judging of the contest as well as the organization of the award ceremony which at the same time was celebration of their Terra Madre day. The event was attended by around 70 people among which the winners and the other authors of the 10 best photographs who got their images printed in large format as well as a gratitude certificate for participation in the contest.


Historical aerial photographs from the Ministry of Defense; Texts on Dutch philosophers released under free license; Wikipedia manual; Images from Erfgoedhuis Zuid-Holland

Historical aerial photographs from the Ministry of Defense

Last August the Dutch Ministry of Defense donated a collection of 1142 pre-WWII aerial photographs, in collaboration with Arne Wossink of Wikimedia Nederland. These images offer unique information on (destroyed) cityscapes, military objects, islands, castles, dams and dikes, and town and country planning in general.

[Text donation, national library] Texts on Dutch philosophers released under free license

Permission to release texts on Dutch philosophers under CC-BY. Also see this PDF (in Dutch)

--OlafJanssen (talk) 12:02, 2 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia manual

A recurring problem at editathons and other (online) events revolving around Wikipedia is that help pages on how to contribute to the online encyclopedia are spread all over the platform. In December, Wikimedia Nederland released a new manual that brings together tips, tricks, do's and dont's on how to become a contributor to the world's largest online free encyclopedia. The draft version can be read here.

Images from Erfgoedhuis Zuid-Holland

Dutch heritage organisation Erfgoedhuis Zuid-Holland made its first image donations to Wikimedia Commons in the last quarter of 2017. Just over 200 images on various aspects of the Roman Limes were made available, including photographs of Roman re-enactments, and of Roman artifacts. The latter come from the collection of the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, the Dutch national antiquities museum, which recently updated its copyright and re-use conditions to permit uploads of their content to Wikimedia Commons and other CC platforms. The collection be accessed here. The subset from the RMO can be accessed here.


Two Serbian museums welcomed their first Wikipedians in Residence

At the end of November, two Serbian museums opened their door for Wikipedians in Residence. The Museum of Yugoslavia welcomed a young Wikipedian Dušan Ružić, who wrote and improved around 50 articles on Serbian Wikipedia in one month, and also uploaded over 200 images of notable persons from the SFRY era on Wikimedia Commons, released by the museum. The project will be enriched by more photographs during January, in order to illustrate the articles in Serbian Wikipedia. These images are of great importance for Serbian Wikipedia, since they were chronically missing, both for the illustration of existing articles and for creating new ones within the Serbian part of the largest online encyclopedia. The project caused great public attention, which resulted in many people contacting the Museum and Wikimedia Serbia with suggestions about which persons to write. And the Wikipedia community welcomed this internship positively, thus some editors helped the Wikipedian in Residence in illustrating and editing articles, as well as with other suggestions.

At the same time, another such program was realized in the southern part of Serbia. At the National Museum in Leskovac, Stefan Mitić was the Wikipedian in Residence, fulfilling all the planned metrics - 40 written and improved articles, 168 freed files, and 127 photographs of museum collections. He also digitized two 19th-century books (Serbian Christian Home Education and Cha Mita’s School), and he also held a successful workshop for the Museum staff on editing Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons.

Both of these successfully implemented programs, as well as the support of the Ministry of Culture, stimulated other cultural institutions to realize their own implementation of this program, as well as other forms of GLAM cooperation. Thus, a two-day GLAM seminar with a practical workshop for representatives of all museums in Vojvodina will be held soon.



Wikipedia Club

Wikipedia Club

Façade of the library

Reina Sofía is the library of the University of Valladolid. For several years they have been involved with the Wikimedia movement through the organization of editathons and Wikipedia training courses for professors and students of the university. This academic year they started a new activity: the Wikipedia Club. On the first Monday of each month, from October to June, the library offers a free access session to learn how to edit and how to use Wikipedia as an educational resource, as well as answer doubts and share experiences among the attendees.


Inputs to the National Library Strategy; Statens maritima museer; Tekniska museet; Riksantikvarieämbetet

Inputs to the National Library Strategy

The recommendations from WMSE to the National Library Strategy.

On the 1st of December WMSE submitted our recommendations for how libraries in Sweden can work with the Wikimedia movement to the team working on the National Library Strategy. The National Library Strategy will outline goals and strategies for all libraries in Sweden. The report is expected in late 2018. We have met with Erik Fichtelius, the national coordinator, a few times during the year to discuss the strategy and what place Wikimedia could have. In 2018 we hope to work with the Royal Library of Sweden to make some of these recommendations a reality.

Statens maritima museer

An early Christmas present from Statens maritima museer, an association of museums protecting Sweden's maritime cultural heritage, has come to Wikimedia Commons – ‎over 1,600 works of art depicting ships and other aspects of the country's marine history. This is the second batch upload that's been made possible by the cooperation between SMM and Wikimedia Sverige; in total, the institution has provided ca. 2,200 high-resolution files that can help us learn about the vital role seafaring has played in our culture.

Tekniska museet

The Swedish National Museum of Science and Technology (Tekniska museet), whose mission is preserving heritage related to technological and industrial history, is one of Sweden's most liked museums. Now some of its collections are being prepared for upload to Wikimedia Commons. We're talking about the photo archive of Sigurd Curman, one of the most prominent figures on the Swedish heritage conservation scene in the first half of the 20th century. Apart from enjoying his celebrity status as a church renovator, Curman traveled all around Europe and took photos of its urban environments. We have been working on processing the metadata of some 500 of those photographs, which will soon enrich Wikimedia Commons with their unique early 20th-century views of cities such as Nürnberg, Trento and Vichy.

Riksantikvarieämbetet

Sample of voice sample.

Riksantikvarieämbetet (the National Heritage Board) released their podcast under a CC BY license and started uploading a number of podcast episodes to Commons. Some of the includes guests with notable persons and these have been added to the articles about them as voice samples. They were also added to Wikidata which required some modeling since not much have been done in that area before.

Riksantikvarieämbetet and the National museum attended the Europeana Open GLAM Hackathon network meeting. The plan is to do a sequel to Hack for heritage in 2015 and if it is possible to coordinate efforts across Europe thanks to EU's Year of Cultural Heritage it would be good.

To make it easier for museums to publish 3D files across several platforms (and by that encourage them to publish at all) that support free licensing, Riksantikvarieämbetet, together with Wikimedia Sverige, is starting a fork of video2commons for 3D files.

After the latest upload of around 173,000 images (reported in October) there has been a lot of activity associated with them. More than 130,000 edits in two months and many new editors.


Upload Book


Upload of the book L’amphithéâtre de Thibari

On 14 December we uploaded the book L’amphithéâtre de Thibari


Upload of the book Thibari (Extrait de la Revue Tunisienne)

On 22 December we uploaded the book Thibari (Extrait de la Revue Tunisienne)


Upload of the book Thibari

On 28 December we uploaded the PDF form of the book Thibari


  • Thibari
    Thibari
  • Thibari (Extrait de la Revue Tunisienne)
    Thibari (Extrait de la Revue Tunisienne)
  • L’amphithéâtre de Thibari
    L’amphithéâtre de Thibari


Promoting and Community events in Libraries

Wiki Loves Monuments

On December, 9th, Wikimedia Ukraine held Wiki Loves Monuments awards ceremony in Zabolotnoho State Scientific Architecture and Construction Library (Kyiv). Diplomas, prizes, and souvenirs were handed to contests winners able to come and not only for photographers of top 10 photos but in nominations that are traditionally awarded by WMUA: top 10 users by the number of pictured monuments, best photos of each administrative region, top users by the number of monuments pictured in each region. The list included about 30 names.

The place was chosen not by chance: the participants of the contest had an opportunity to see the 25 volumes bibliographic index about towns of Ukraine illustrated by image submitted to the contest in previous years. There was a discussion about the future of the project in Ukraine after the event, the organising committee, participants, and jury members have discussed a few ways to change the rules of the local contest.

The ceremony was held alongside the exhibition of winning photos.

Last Stop of Travelling Photo Exhibition in 2017

After presenting the exhibition of award-winning photos on joint Wiki Loves Monuments and Wiki Loves Earth awards ceremony in Kyiv in December 2016, Wikimedia Ukraine declared it available for touring. GLAM institutions and volunteers were welcomed to invite or organize display in other cities of Ukraine. On December, 1st, 34 images (from 21 authors) were opened for display in Hluhiv Central City Library - 10th location where photos were showcased in 2017. On the opening day visitors could learn more about the contests from wikimedian`s presentation and photographer whose photo was among exhibited. Exhibition will last till January 15th, 2018.


Fire & Ice & Goats

Cooper Hewitt

The Cooper–Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum completed a large digitization project in November and posted about 92% of the museum's collection online. Fæ wrote a bot to mass upload the new images and about 70,000 photographs were uploaded to Commons in December.

Women's Empowerment Edit-a-thon

Wikimedia DC and the Embassy of Sweden held a meetup, Women's Empowerment Edit-a-thon, at House of Sweden.

Black Lunch Table

Black Lunch Table held a meetup at The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation 8th Floor, Black Lunch Table/8th Floor 2017

Seattle Annual Meeting

Cascadia Wikimedians held their annual meeting, Seattle December annual meeting at the Capitol Hill Library.

Jacob Lawrence Gallery in Seattle will be holding quarterly Art + Feminism editing events. Last November there was an event on Northwest coast indigenous womxn artists, covered in The Stranger and KUOW, Seattle's NPR affiliate station. On Feb. 24, the Art + Feminism editing event focus will be on queer womxn artists of color, in part to coincide with the Jacob Lawrence Gallery's current artist in residence, C. Davida Ingram. Her exhibition will be up during that time. The events are convened by Laura Stowell.

OCLC Wikipedia + Libraries: Better Together project update

The OCLC project team has been gearing up to host Citations Needed a free 60-minute live webinar on Jan 10 for library staff interested in participating in #1lib1ref. There are about 350 library staff registered to participate.


Happy Q34812!

By Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing)

GLAM news

Further reading and viewing

Tech developments

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.

You are invited to comment on all open property proposals.


#1lib1ref, Structured Commons Research, and Blog Highlights

Help us identify program leaders!

Every year, the Wikimedia Foundation runs a survey, called the Community Engagement Insights survey, which asks community members to give feedback on the Wikimedia Foundation’s work. The survey focuses on different audience groups, one of them being community organizers and program leaders who organize activities, outreach, and other programs in the areas of GLAM, Education, Diversity, Gender, STEM, and others.

We want to get in touch with program leaders who aren’t already connected to the Wikimedia Foundation or haven’t attended major Wikimedia movement events (like Wikimedia Conference or Wikimania). By filling out this survey, program leaders become part of our global feedback network and will have a chance to offer feedback on Wikimedia Foundation’s work to support our communities.

If you would like to be part of these feedback opportunities, please fill out this short survey: https://wikimedia.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_3mmeBPdVXfCOhlr

If your local community has a mailing list or social media channel or you know an organizer who like didn’t see this message, please share it and encourage participation in the survey.

#1lib1ref is coming

It’s #1lib1ref season! Remember to remind and engage your local librarians to participate in the campaign which lasts from January 15- February 3! Remember #1lib1ref can be done in any language and its simple: encourage librarians in your local context to contribute. Learn more about the campaign at: http://1lib1ref.org.

If you need help supporting the campaign, contact astinson@wikimedia.org.


Initial findings for Structured Data on Commons Research

Wikimedia Commons upload tools used by GLAMs
Reasons why specific Commons upload tools are used by GLAMs

As part of the Structured Data on Commons project, WMF teams are working on various research projects, of which a few have been finalized in the last months of 2017. Here are the highlights:

GLAM uploads to Commons

Draft findings from the GLAM research as part of Structured Data on Commons has been published on Meta. The research highlights the challenges that GLAM professionals and Wikimedians supporting them face when doing uploads to Commons. The project confirms a lot of assumptions, and anecdotal evidence that the WMF GLAM team had been collecting as part of the Structured Data on Commons process, but also provides some targeted feedback and a body of evidence for strengths and weaknesses in the workflow that we were anticipating.

Highlighted issues in the research are:

Read the full report: Supporting Commons contribution by GLAM institutions. You can also watch a 36-minute YouTube video in which Jonathan Morgan presents the research results. We plan to organize more public presentations of this research!
Baseline metrics for Wikimedia Commons

The Structured Data on Commons project has also investigated the different ways in which Commons can be evaluated in the future. The goal of the research is to identify additional baseline metrics for Structured data on Commons team to evaluate and think about the impact of their work.

Read the full report: Baseline Metrics for Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons
Prioritization of tools for GLAM, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikidata

Additionally, Sandra led an AllOurIdeas poll to find out which tools are relied on heavily by the broader Commons and Wikidata communities, in order to help decide which ones are critical for integrating into product development decisions as part of the grant or future Commons development.

See the results on AllOurIdeas

From the WMF Blog


January's GLAM events

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