GLAM/Newsletter/February 2015/Single
Photo Hunt in museum in Uganda
Photo Hunt at the Uganda Museum
On 1st march a photo hunt was held in collaboration with the Uganda museum to document the different galleries in the museum. This was done with the help of volunteers (wikipedians in Uganda). The list of museums in Uganda was also updated.
Future Plans
We plan to work with the affiliate museums around Uganda for which we will create articles and train their staff
Free Book for Wikipedians
Snippet: Editors of Armenian Wikipedia created more than 350 articles about Armenian doctors: Armenian Genocide victims during February [1].
Armenian GLAM team collaborated with Armenian Medical Museum, and the head of Museum Haroutyun Minassian provided us with huge deal of materials about doctors, which was scanned and now Armenian community works on those texts making them into Wiki articles.
Dr Minasyan provided his book: "Armenian doctors repressed and massacred in Ottoman Empire", images from archive of Armenian Medical Museum. The book was scanned and uploaded in commons and wikisource. After making schedules in cooperation page, the editors created over 280 articles on Eastern Armenian and 70 on Western Armenian.
The process is ongoing and creation of new articles, upload of the images and work with other provided materials is expected.
About book
Armenian doctors repressed and massacred in Ottoman Empire, Republic of Turkey and nearby territories. A brief biographical dictionary/ H.Minasyan. – Yerevan, Lusabats, 2014, 523 pages
There are alphabetically represented the brief biographies of Armenian doctors and health workers repressed and massacred in Ottoman Empire, Republic of Turkey and nearby territories on the basis of ethnicity mainly in 19-20 centuries.
Conferences & workshops
Europeana Photography Final Conference, KUL, Leuven, 29-31 January
Ste.caneva has attended the final conference of Europeana Photography [2] to establish contacts between Wikimedia Belgium and the Photo Consortium [3], the association that will make use of the results of the Europeana Photography projects to support GLAMs interested in digitising and opening up their archives on the internet. The contacts established during this event have had a follow-up: the intivation of Wikimedia Belgium to give a presentation during the stakeholders' workshop organized by the project Civic Epistemologies at KUL, Leuven, on 20 February (see below).
Civic Epistemologies Workshop on the Roadmap, KUL, Leuven, 20 February
Ste.caneva & Romaine have attended the Workshop of the Civic Epistemologies network [4] in Leuven. During the Stakeholders' Session, they have introduced Wikimedia Belgium and the Wikimedia projects that can help GLAMs and educational institutions to enhance a closer interaction between researchers, Cultural Heritage institutions, and citizens. Photos and slides from the event are available on the project's website [5]
Europeana Fashion, International Conference, MoMu, Antwerp, 25 February
Ste.caneva has given a presentation for Wikimedia Belgium concerning the role of CC licenses during the Workshop 'Handling Intellectual Property in Fashion Images' [6]. The workshop was organized by Gabrielle De Pooter (MoMu Antwerpen) and was chaired by Roxanne Peters, Intellectual Property Manager at Victoria and Albert Museum London and the author of the Europeana Fashion Guidelines for IPR [7]. The other participants were Jill Cousins, Executive Director at Europeana Foundation, and Alexis Hallemans, Partner at law firm CMS DeBacker Belgium, an expert in IPR law. The presentation of Wikimedia Belgium has focused on the Wiki vision regarding the use of CC lincenses when GLAMs open up their digital archives: more precisely, on the efficiency of a SA clause and on the reasons why this license is, in most cases, preferrable to NC and ND. Pictures of the event are available on Flickr [8].
Open Belgium 2015
The Open Knowledge Foundation Belgium organised on 23 February 2015 the yearly conference Open Belgium 2015 in Namur. Romaine gave there a presentation about Wikimedia and copyright.
Edit-a-thons about archaeology in Gavà and biochemistry in Barcelona
Archaeology Edit-a-thon in Gavà
On October 2014, Amical co-organised its very first archaeology edit-a-thon in Barcelona. As a result of this event, a group of enthusiastic people, formed by university teachers, researchers, archaeology amateurs and sector professionals from several institutions, decided to draft a project to promote and improve archaelogy refered content on wiki. This project has 3 branches: 1 based on education, where students of the Autonomous University of Barcelona have started to improve content related to Catalan Archaeology. The second one is based on professionals and amateurs improving related wikipedia articles on their spare time and the 3r done is organising outreach events like the edit-a-thon which took place in the Gavà municipality (15 miles away from Barcelona). The calll for volunteers and organisation was managed both by University and Research Center and Gavà Museum and the Local public library kindly hosted the event for free. We particulary love these kind of projects where many cultural and educational institutions collaborate at their own rythm to improve Wikipedia. Appart from the improved articles, Sabadell History Museum asked to be the next place to host next Archaeology Edit-a-thon. All the project was led by an Amical volunteer, User:Vàngelis Villar
Biochemistry Edit-a-thon in Barcelona
The Institut d'Estudis Catalans, also known by the acronym IEC, is an academic institution which seeks to undertake research and study into "all elements of Catalan culture". The IEC is known principally for its work in standardizing the Catalan language, but it also have a powerfull science section. On Friday February 27, 2015, first joint edit-a-thon took place at the IEC Headquarters.
From morning until afternoon, a dozen people attened: both Wikipedia regular editors and Biochemistry students, researchers and entrepreneurs interested in the subject. For some participants, this was the first contact with Wikipedia as partners and served to demystify it. Before the edit-a-thon, the project page was filled in with a glossary of related discipline topics divided into different categories (e.g.: Resources or institutions) and we measured the relevance (Article visit) of the term in other language Wikipedias.
Hacking Heritage
Wiki Loves Maps
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We hosted Wiki Loves Maps seminar and a hackathon in Helsinki 5–8 February. The event brought together Wikipedians, GLAM professionals, city officials, hackers, historians and GIS enthusiasts from Finland and the neighbouring countries to talk together and learn from each other about using old maps and geodata in applications. The keynote speakers were Mauricio Giraldo from the New York Public Library and Peter Neubauer from Mapillary, and there were altogether 18 speakers from 6 countries. The sessions dealt with collaboration between GLAMs and Wikimedia chapters, geohacks, cultural hackathons #Hack4DK, #Hack4NO and #Hack4FI and platforms and projects for citizen historians or DIY historians in the Nordic landscape.
The 3-day hackathon was part of the first Finnish cultural hackathon #Hack4FI. There is a blog post about the event, and the documentation stream can be watched in the event pages.
The theme for the events, Historical Aleksanterinkatu, was created in collaboration with the City of Helsinki. The oldest street in Helsinki is the scene for many aspects of Finnish history.
This was the last of the events in the Wikimaps Nordic project, while development still continues with the Wikimaps Warper user interface.
Hacking continues in the Gallen-Kallela Museum
Finnish GLAMs are arranging events in the context of the #Hack4FI hackathon's production period, which ends in late March. The Gallen-Kallela Museum in Espoo hosted a small hackathon of their own. Wikimedia Finland Board member and GLAM activist Heikki Kastemaa introduced Wikimedia practices to the participants. The Museum celebrates the 150 th anniversary of the artist and has opened a collection of over 400 photographs from the artist's collection to Flickr. Wikimedia Finland is in the process of uploading the images to Wikimedia Commons with the help of the Flickr2GWToolset tool, that can help sort out data to different properties in Wikimedia Commons from the fuzzy description fields in Flickr.
From prehistoric era to pirates: an usual month at WMFR
Article about Wiki Loves Monuments published
An 4-pages article written by Trizek and Symac has been published in the January 2015 volume of the serials Espaces, a professional publication about tourism (summary online). The winning picture of the 2013 competition was used on the front cover.
Workshop about prehistoric era in Rennes
After a guided tour of the prehistoric era section of the museum of Brittany, several people (members of the Archaeological Association Men ha Houarn (in Breton "stone and iron"), which popularizes prehistory ; a person working in the castle of Sainte-Suzanne in Mayenne and a person working at the headquarters of INRAP in Paris) came to the workshop.
This led to a follow-up call with the community manager of INRAP, the French national institute for preventive archaeological research, which mission is to ensure the detection and study of the archaeological heritage affected by any planned works on the French territory, and future local initiatives with the volunteers of Men ha houarn in Rennes.
First training at the Musée national de la Marine
After a wave of enthusiastic replies about a potential partnership with the Musée early February, a training was organized a week after for 6 staff members of the musée, all women, who chose their alias among famous women pirates names. A partnership contract is in progress, to implement future actions.
Open GLAM is one thing - open funds quite another
Coding da Vinci is approaching
Within reach now is the second edition of Coding da Vinci the German hackathon on culture and art data. Registration is open. In February we released our film on last years edition. Also 2015 we are four partners to arrange the hackathon. Which is one of the reasons why we are able to succeed with the hackathon. We hardly speak about costs in this newsletter, but the hackathon with 150 data wranglers, 16 participating GLAMs and two big events in Berlin with all together no less than 350 guests (figures from 2014) will have an estimated cost of 80.000€. This means both paying a project team, grants and prizes to the coding people and costs relating to the event itself such as facilities, catering and so forth. The main funding comes from the partners own budget.
As we learned last year the data needs more work before you can actually start to use it, we planned to have paid IT staff to "rinse" it before it is released. In order to finance this work package WMDE tried its luck in crowd funding for data rinsing. As You all may know a crowd funding campaign is a project by it self. We had to produce a film, coordinate the campaign with all of the four partners and than try to get people to get involved. The campaign is still running for a week but it will be very hard to overcome the threshold of 10.000 € we aim for. And in crowd funding, as You may know, it is either you'll make it or you don't. Most likely, the money we have collected so far will not be at our disposal. Still I like to share our experience with you. We underestimated the intricacy of the project. The benefits to the crowd funders are apparently to abstract to be motivating and this despite we had the opportunity to address a large audience. I still consider crowd funding to be a clever tool to choose for funding projects within the Wikimedia world. As proven by wiki cheese by WMFR, but there you see, cheese is tasty. Rinsing cultural data is certainly a respectable task but I have to admit not as belly pleasing. Support the campaign is possible until Tuesday 17th of March.
But it is the spirit that counts, so we are looking forward to host again a wide range of developers in April in Berlin willing to compete with their ideas and skills in new applications using the API both from Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata and others combining them with open GLAM data for new open source products. Feel free to join us.
10th Europeana Fashion Edit-a-thon organised by Athens' Peloponnesian Folklore Foundation
The Peloponnesian Folklore Foundation, along with PostScriptum, the company which implements the ESPA program “The PFF in the digital era”, organized the tenth Europeana Fashion Edit-a-thon. The event was organized in tandem with wikipedians, the company PostScriptum, who works with the foundation on the programme “The Peloponnesian Folklore Foundation in the digital era” and the Euroepana Fashion project. The theme of the edit-a-thon, with rich materials from Greece's costume tradition, inspired fashion designers, folklore experts, costume designers, fashion historians and museologists to engage and enrich Wikipedia with entries relevant to the subject. The event took place on Saturday, February 7th at Harokopion University, which was an excellent host. Its students responded with great interest and compiled exceptional articles on the world’s free encyclopedia.
Report by Vasia Pierrou on the Europeana Fashion blog: http://blog.europeanafashion.eu/2015/02/13/report-on-the-fashion-edit-a-thon-in-athens/
OCLC conference in Florence; Wiki Loves Monuments exhibition; continued BEIC activities
OCLC International Conference in Florence
Wikimedia Italia has attended the EMEA Regional Council 2015 organized by the Libraries Consortium OCLC in Florence. The conference, named this year The Art of Invention: Culture, Technology and User Engagement in the Digital Age, is dedicated to innovative experiences in libraries in Europe, Middle East and Africa, and is one of the main events for European professional librarians. Personalities from all over the world were present in Florence this year, like David Weinberger. Andrea Zanni, president of Wikimedia Italia, has won the competition of the Lightning Talk session with a presentation about librarians as wikipedians.
Wiki Loves Monuments winner photos exhibition
Some of the best pictures from the last edition of Wiki Loves Monuments were exposed al the Triennale Museum in Milan. The exhibition was open to the public and Wikimedia Italia has held a press conference at the opening, with TIM and FIAF, the Italian Federation of Photographic Associations, presenting the project in its international context and announcing the coming 2015 edition of the contest.
BEIC uploads: more automation; almost 2 million requests
As stated in the monthly update (in Italian), activities related to the European Library of Information and Culture continued as planned.
A Zotero installation file was produced to quickly install BEIC-specific improvements to Zotero (mainly for Primo) in Firefox, which now fully automate the bibliographic formats conversion we need. Work with Zotero devs is continuing but wasn't merged yet; users who don't interact with Primo are advised to use the official release.
Thanks to our tools and to three in-person sessions, work continued at a stable pace. Files on Commons are now around 200 and were loaded almost 2 million times in February according to BaGLAMa. Visitors who continued to the "full book" in the BEIC site are a small portion but continued to rise; we determined that most of them still come from the Italian Wikipedia and that there is up to 30 % underreporting due to the Wikimedia referrer policy and the non-usage of HTTPS by BEIC.
Report of activities: February
Content donation from Museum Catharijneconvent
Museum Catharijneconvent donated over 2500 high resolution (TIF) pictures to Wikimedia Commons from their permanent collection. The museum holds a large collection of paintings, sculptures and objects from christian history and culture. The donation got really great press coverage with several national newspapers picking up on it with large articles. It has been a very positive experience for the museum. The donation was combined with a workshop for museum staff on Wikimedia/Wikipedia. In March an editathon will take place. The collection can be found here: Media Contributed by Museum Catharijneconvent.
Changes in staff at WMNL
From 1 March 2015, Sandra Fauconnier (also known as User:Spinster) joins Wikimedia Nederland as part time project leader. She takes over the tasks of Sebastiaan ter Burg, who leaves the organisation. We thank Sebastiaan for his continued work, passion and dedication to our projects and wish him all the best on his future endeavours!
GLAM-WIKI conference in full preparation!
We are gearing up to GLAM-WIKI 2015, which takes place from 10 to 12 April in The Hague. In March, the full programme is to be announced, with a mix of workshops and presentations from all over the world, for beginners and experiences volunteers alike. Tickets are available!
Developing GLAM collaborations in Poland
Documenting regional culture: A Year of Folk Customs with Wikipedia
In November 2014 Wikimedia Poland began to work together with the National Museum of Ethnography in Warsaw. According to the Museum staff, there are very few quality ethnography or anthropology-related images or texts on Polish Wikipedia or anywhere on the Polish-language web. The museum has an extensive archive, but clearing copyright is going to be a lengthy process - so instead a joint field project was proposed: A Year of folk customs with Wikipedia.
The project is built around a calendar of several training workshops with museum staff and volunteers and 7 field trips to selected rural areas. Teams, each consisting of wikipedians, museum experts and volunteers, will visit each location and - after basic field work training - document seasonal folk events, festivals and customs which are about to become extinct, producing photos, video, audio interviews with local community members.
In between the trips, the teams will work on related content in Wikipedia articles on the visited places, the documented customs and improve articles around ethnography on Polish Wikipedia. The Museum staff and volunteers received funding from the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage to cover travel costs and any print publications based on the material, all of which is going to be available on BY-SA licenses on Commons and Wikipedia.
On February 28th the project kicked off with a day-long workshop intended as an exchange of skills between ethnographers and wikipedians. The first field trips are to take place in late March and during the Easter holidays. Apart from uploading media to Commons we will aim to create some content in both Polish and English. The project is to conclude in November 2015.
Celebrating the Public Domain
In January Wikimedia Poland and the Coalition for Open Education of which WMPL is a member, celebrated the annual Public Domain Day at the Warsaw Uprising Museum.
Talks included a presentation of GLAM-Wiki initiatives and projects which rely on content in the Public Domain. The National Archives of Historical Records and the State Archive in Poznań (institutions which contribute PD material to Commons) participated in the event. All talks (in Polish) are available on the Wikiradio project.
Introducing GLAM-Wiki and workshops at individual GLAMs
In order to widen the circle of GLAM institutions interested in collaborating with Wikimedia, we organise regional meetings with representatioves of local museums, galleries, archives and libraries where we present the basics of Wikipedia, the idea behind GLAM-Wiki collaboration and some technical know-how related to uploading files, using templates and editing articles. We organised the first meeting in Łódź - 30 GLAM employees attended the meeting and several institutions contacted us afterwards in order to begin individual collaborations. We are organising another meeting in Poznan on March 17th.
Another case is GLAMs already committed to sharing content. For those we organise individual workshops on Commons upload, best editing practices, open licensing and legal issues related to contracts signed with creators. (The State Archive in Poznań is one example of an institution where all images are uploaded to Commons by members of staff. Another collaboration, with the Senate of Poland, relies on the Senate Chancellery sending weekly images with OTRS permissions to a volunteer Wikimedian).
The Muzeum Sztuki, a museum of 20th century art, is in the process of verifying rights ownership to artworks and is planning to release high quality scans of leading Polish and international modern artists on Wikimedia Commons later this year.
Zachęta National Gallery of Art
The Zachęta National Gallery of Art has agreed to permanently collaborate with Wikimedia Poland. The Gallery has developed an open policy, signing agreements with artists which enable them to release images of artworks or exhibition documentation on CC BY or BY-SA licenses. A selection of Zachęta's open artworks is being uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, alongside audio recordings of lectures and talks. A wikimeeting was held to create new open images of the Gallery itself. 15 Wikipedians and 3 guests attended the event; over 250 photographs of Zachęta have so far been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, the article about the Gallery was expanded; the team helped Zachęta's staff to create an account on Commons and upload available open images of artworks. All files can be found at category Zachęta National Gallery of Art.
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7k images from the Józef Burszta Digital Archives ready for Commons upload
We are about to upload images and video from the Józef Burszta Digital Archive - held by the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at Adam Mickiewicz University - onto Wikimedia Commons. The University presented WMPL with sample copyright agreements with authors, OTRS permissions and an extensive list of all files with permissions. A bot has been created to handle the upload and categorisation of files.
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As this is the first Polish TMIG, hello to all! Please visit our wikiproject to get a wider idea of what we have been working on so far; we also have an account on Fb; I will do my best to kick off Twitter - in English. Let's keep talking!
Workshops at Reina Sofía Library in Valladolid
Workshops at Reina Sofía Library in Valladolid
On February 23 and 25 there were two new Wikipedia training sessions at Reina Sofia Library of Valladolid University. Wikimedia Spain has collaborated with Reina Sofía Library several times, organizing workshops, talks and edit-a-thons. This two sessions are part of our GLAM and Educational program to provide skills to students and staff of Valladolid University to edit Wikipedia.
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Strange noise, public art and old maps
Work With Sounds
The Work With Sounds project continues to make strange industrial sounds and noises available on Commons. Thanks to Fæ's GLAM dashbord we can now see in the report that the files that are uploaded are not beeing used in articles or put in enough categories. Please help with promoting the project in your communities, and if you have ideas for how to make more use of the files feel free to ping Torsten Nilsson (project manager for WWS) or me.
Working life museums
Two more workshops for volunteers from Working life museums were held in February ending the tour for this time. A total of 39 participants now have knowledge of how to edit articles and upload images, and also a basic idea of free licenses, reuse of material and what Wikidata is. As Working life museums is one of the categories in Wiki Loves Monuments, and Swedish Wikipedia have lists of all Working life museums in Sweden they can easily find a way to contribute with both images and knowledge.
Offentligkonst.se
In February we got some good news with respect to our ongoing lawsuit aimed at clarifying that Freedom of Panorama in Sweden still applies when the images are published online. The district court agreed that this was one of the rare cases which warranted sending the case directly to the supreme court. This should get the situation clarified more rapidly and skips the normal procedure of having to appeal first to the appeals court then to the supreme court. It is now up to the supreme court to decide whether to take the case or send it back to the district court.
At the same time we have also ramped up our efforts of contacting the Swedish municipalities and requesting their data on public art. At the end of the month we had reach out to more than a third of the roughly 300 municipalities and 44 of these have been included in the database and used to produce lists on Swedish Wikipedia. You can browse all of the collected data on Offentligkonst.se
Wiki Loves Maps
We also participated in the WikiLovesMaps event in Helsinki (organised by Wikimedia Finland). This consisted of a seminar on the Wikimaps project as well as a hackathon (held under the umbrella of OKF's #Hack4FI hackathon).
The seminar was a great chance for Nordic GLAMs to meet up, together with Wikimedia chapters, and discuss what is being done and what could be done with respect to historical maps and other geospatial information. It was also an opportunity to learn from the NYPL and their extensive work of making their collections more accessible online. You can find the stream of the seminar at here.
The #hack4FI hackathon involved various new ways of using GLAM material in innovative ways. You can find the projects here together with the WikiLovesMaps projects.
First Swiss Open Cultural Data Hackathon
On the last weekend of February, some 100 software developers, artists, designers, researchers, Wikipedians, and members of the heritage sector gathered at the Swiss National Library to re-use more than 30 open data sets. The data and content provided by over 20 different institutions was re-used in a wide range of fields: for research purposes in the Digital Humanities and related areas, for the transmission of free knowledge in the context of Wikipedia/Wikimedia, for a variety of web-apps, and for artistic remixes. The hackathon was also an excellent means for heritage institutions to enter into dialogue with software developers, researchers, or Wikipedians, and to put cultural data and digitized collections to wider use. And, last but not least, the hackathon was about sharing know-how, insights, software code, and techniques in an open-minded and playful environment among participants of varying backgrounds.
The event was organized by the Swiss OpenGLAM Working Group, with the participation and support of the Swiss National Library, the Swiss Open Government Data Project, opendata.ch, Wikimedia CH, infoclio.ch, the ETH Library, Dock 18, and Migros Kulturprozent. A list of projects that were worked on during the two days is available at the event wiki. Here some examples:
The image collections made available by the Swiss National Library and the Swiss Federal Archives on Wikimedia Commons aroused considerable interest. Thus, both the Gugelmann Collection and Durheim's Police Photos of Stateless Persons were used in several projects: One application clusters the images from the Gugelmann collection in 3D space along dimensions that can be selected by the viewer (demo video). Another visualization made use of the geographical metadata in order to locate the images on a Swiss map, showing the user which locations have been depicted by the so called "Schweizer Kleinmeister" (Swiss 18th century masters) (image). A third project used the metadata of the police photographs to visualize family relationships between the depicted persons and to dig up other interesting facts (image). More playful uses included an interactive picture frame and various applications allowing to impersonate stateless persons from the police photo collection.
There were various direct contributions to Wikipedia/Wikimedia projects: First of all, the hackathon has triggered various image uploads to Wikimedia Commons, some of which were prepared during the hackathon itself (e.g. by improving metadata). Inspired by a publication by the City of Zurich the contents of which were largely made available under a free license, several Wikipedians worked on an article about "the first battle of Zürich" which took place in 1799 during the Napoleonic wars. On Wikisource, Kościuszko's Inventory was set up, relating to the Polish national hero Tadeusz Kościuszko who spent the last two years of his life in Solothurn. Another group started to systematically transfer Swiss monuments data to Wikidata, while another cooperation resulted in a tool that generates family trees based on Wikidata entries (see for example the familiy tree of Prince Charles; Wikidata users can enable the tool for their user account).
Continued Catalan Collaboration; Steam Sounds; Glasgow GLAMs; Edinburgh Editathons
Royal Society of Chemistry
Andy Mabbett's residency at the Royal Society of Chemistry is ongoing.
Andy was quoted in in Atmetric.com's announcement that they now index citations of research papers in Wikipedia. He spoke to young members of the society, at the University of Bristol - the meeting was also open to the public.
The Catalan chemists Andy collaborated with last year have as a result set up a project with the Institute of Chemical Research in Catalonia. Andy has written a blog post with details.
See the project diary and the blog (aimed at non-Wikipedians) for other news.
Thinktank
Andy Mabbett is also Wikimedian in Residence at Thinktank Museum in Birmingham. During February, he trained sixteen curators, other staff, and volunteers, to edit Wikipedia. Several new articles were created.
Andy attended the museum early one morning, before opening, and with the kind help of the resident engineer, recorded several of the collection's working steam engines:
- File:Amos gas engine - Thinktank - Andy Mabbett - 2015-02-12 -01.flac
- File:Robey steam engine generator set (model) - Thinktank - Andy Mabbett - 2015-02-12 -01.flac
- File:Belliss steam launch engine - Thinktank - Andy Mabbett - 2015-02-12 -01.flac
- File:Savery steam launch engine - Thinktank - Andy Mabbett - 2015-02-12 -01.flac
- File:Savery steam launch engine - Thinktank - Andy Mabbett - 2015-02-12 -02.flac
- File:Murray engine - Thinktank - Andy Mabbett - 2015-02-12 -01.flac
The Murray Engine is said to be the third-oldest working engine in the world.
For a more complete list of activities, see the Thinktank project diary.
Free Books for Wikipedians
Two of our partners the PCF and w:Penguin Books have supplied us with free reference books for Wikipedians to use to improve Wikipedia. Here are some examples of improvements that this has enabled our editors to do:
- The PCF's lavishly illustrated Oil Paintings in Public Ownership, London: West has enabled us to add details of painting by notable artists in the collections of Boston Manor (with an image of one of the oils added from Commons), Fulham Palace and 7 Hammersmith Terrace.
- Two Girls Dressing a Kitten by Candlelight has been written by Philafrenzy
We still have several Pelican Ebooks available from Penguin for Wikepedians (sorry but for commercial reasons this offer is not open to US residents).
Scotland
Glasgow
Sara Thomas' residency secondment to Glasgow Museums has made a promising start. A Wiki Working Group - who will hopefully continue when the four month secondment finishes - are set to meet at the end of February. Sara will also provide training for Connect @ Edinburgh Napier University 'Writing Women Back into History' Editathon on 6 March.
Sara also attended the Glasgow Wikimeet #5, organised by Wikimedian in Residence at the National Library of Scotland, User:ACrockford
Edinburgh
The University of Edinburgh successfully hosted a week-long series of editathons as part of its 2015 Innovative Learning Week in mid-February; the editathons were a collaboration between the University's Learning, Teaching, and Web Services Division and Academic Support Librarians, the Moray House School of Education, EDINA, and the National Library of Scotland, with training provided by the Wikimedian in Residence at the National Library of Scotland, Ally Crockford.
The events, which focused on the theme of 'Women, Science, and Scottish History' and used the Edinburgh Seven as a catalyst, drew an average of 15 participants each day, often with editors trained earlier in the week returning later to continue work on their articles. This series-style event not only offered the opportunity to create a sustained learning environment in which to support new editors and give them the confidence to continue working, but also allowed for training to focus on particular editing 'goals' each day: people, places, making connections, and illustrating Wikipedia. The result of this approach was that while the number of created and improved articles wasn't significantly higher than single editathons, the quality of the new articles and the improvements was significant for new editors. It is hoped that it will also mean a higher number of participants will continue to edit.
The events attracted a massive amount of attention throughout the University, dominating the extensive Innovative Learning Week programme. The scheme encourages staff and students at the University of Edinburgh to take a week away from classes to explore alternative learning methods. The impact of the editathons has been charted in a Storify of tweets using the hashtag #ILWeditathon. The University of Edinburgh are following this success with open Wikipedia Hours of Power, held over lunch to encourage participants of the editathon and those who were unable to attend to continue editing and share their developing skills. These will begin early March 2015.
Technology
Wikimedia UK has endorsed Europeana's bid for funding for the next phase of the GLAMwiki toolset.
Wikimedia UK was one of the consortium of chapters that funded the first phase of the toolset development and Jonathan Cardy was a member of the task group.
Wales
The Egyptian Centre at the University of Swansea
Over 5,000 images from the Egyptian Centre at the University of Swansea have been identified and will be uploaded on an open licence to Wikimedia Commons. The images are photographs of artefacts donated by Sir Henry Wellcome (of Wellcome Trust fame) to the centre a few years ago. HAM II was instrumental in acquiring these images, following the successful gender-gap edit-a-thon at the university at the end of January.
WiR at the National Library of Wales
Jason Evans, the new Wikipedian in Residence at the Library has organised a few editathons:
- Welsh Photographers Editathon. 10 April 2015, which will focus on the Magnum Welsh photographer Philip Jones Griffiths. As a taster, two of his most famous photographes were uploaded to Commons on an open licence. This edit-a-thon ties in with the launch of a major exhibition at NLW on the life and work of Phillip Jones Griffiths. The event will be held at the NLW with support from the Visual Images Curator.
- World War I Gallipoli Edit-a-thon. 23 April 2015. This event will be held at NLW and will focus on improving content relating to the role of Welsh soldiers in the First World War, with support from the Wales at War team at the Library and academics/students.
The Library has also identified 20,000 images to be released in the next few months. By supporting and participating in the development of such a high profile resource, this enterprise will contribute towards the NLW's aim of providing ‘Information for All’ and in turn will draw people back to the services and collections of the Library.
Conferences & Exhibitions
Navino Evans has had a presentation accepted, in mid July he will be presenting Wikidata: the potential of structured data to enable applications such as Histropedia at ISKO UK 2015 conference
Other news
After discussions at the GLAM organisers meeting, Jonathan filed a request on Phabricator for an "Event Organisers Userright"
Wikipedia in Philadelphia (and Ocean City, MD!)
Wiki Loves Small Museums
Ahead of a gathering storm, volunteers from Philadelphia, New York, Washington, and Delaware gathered at the Small Museum Association (SMA) Conference in Ocean City, MD, on Sunday, February 15, 2015, for a Wiki Loves Small Museums Workshop. After a presentation by Wikipedian Abram Fox, volunteers answered questions, helped conference attendees to upload photos from their museums to Wikimedia Commons, linked the new photos to existing pages, and released new articles. Thanks go to all the volunteers who attended, and to Wikimedia DC for their generous support, which made it possible for some of the volunteers to be there. The conference organizers have asked if we would like to come back again next year!
ArtAndFeminism Events
ArtAndFeminism started early in Philadelphia, with an edit-a-thon at the University of the Arts on Saturday, February 28, 2015. Steve Trader, from the local radio station, WHYY, did short before and after reports about the event. "It went very well," said Sara MacDonald, a UArts librarian and organizer of the event. "It was very chatty during the training, lots of questions about Wikipedia, but once people started working it was a quiet intense atmosphere." At least fourteen people attended, releasing four new articles, starting eight more in sandboxes, editing another dozen, and releasing public domain photographs.
Continue editing #ArtAndFeminism at the next GLAM Café on March 10, 2015, at Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania! Bring your sandboxes: experienced Wikipedians will be there to answer questions and help with editing.
Represent African American Artists
In coordination with its new exhibition, Represent: 200 Years of African American Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art is organizing Represent African American Artists, to be held on March 25, 2015, 5:30pm-8:30pm. Those attending will be able to visit the exhibit with museum staff, as well as working to better represent African American artists online. An introductory talk will be given by Mary Mark Ockerbloom, Wikipedian in Residence at the Chemical Heritage Foundation.
Europeana's Wikimedia Task Force reports
In light of the Europeana 2020 strategic plan, what shape should Europeana’s relationship to Wikipedia and the wider Wikimedia community take in the years to come? To find an answer to this question, a Europeana Network Task Force was formed with a mix of people drawn from the Europeana network of GLAMs as well as active members of the Wikimedia community. Together, the group has produced a report outlining ten ways in which Europeana and Wikimedia can build on their successful cooperation.
An important aspect of the report was the recommendation that Europeana further integrate its systems and technology with Wikipedia and other Wikimedia platforms. Wikidata is a key part of this, as a fast-growing project with enormous potential for linking collections, carrying out authority control, and synergy with Europeana’s systems.
For more information, see the blogpost announcement.
Read the full report (CC-By-SA).
Tracking recent uploads; Wikidata for research meetups; Ant-decapitating flies, Lego and a new frog
Recent uploads
Uploads to the Wikimedia Commons category Open access (publishing) or its subcategories are now being tracked via this page using OgreBot. There have since been a few false positives, which hint at incorrect categorization and thus facilitate work in this area.
Wikidata for research meetups
WikiProject Wikidata for research has seen its first in-person meetups this month: some participants met at EuropeanaTech 2015 in Paris, others for a dedicated workshop in Berlin or as part of the Open Cultural Hackathon in Bern. The main purpose of these events was to explore opportunities for follow-up projects to the Horizon 2020 proposal that was submitted in January. These could be of a disciplinary nature or specific to a country or region.
Open Access Media Importer: Ant-decapitating flies, Lego and a new frog
The following represents a selection of the files that have been uploaded by the Open Access Media Importer this month, bringing the total to over 18,900. If you can think of wiki pages where these files (or other files from the same source articles) could be useful, please put them in there or let us know.
March's GLAM events
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