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< GLAM‎ | Newsletter‎ | January 2019


Photographs by Vahan Kochar (continuation)

By Mher Bekaryan (User:Beko)

Photographs by Vahan Kochar

Famous photographer Vahan Qochar continues to provide photos to Wikimedia Armenia, which is being uploaded to Wikicommons. This time he uploaded about twenty photos of famous Armenians. Photos have been used in Wikipedia articles. Relevant pages of Wikipedias have been completed. Cooperation is ongoing.

  • Hagop Hekekyan, author: Andranik Kochar
    Hagop Hekekyan, author: Andranik Kochar
  • Babken Mavisakalyan, author: Andranik Kochar
    Babken Mavisakalyan, author: Andranik Kochar
  • Aram Alban, author: Andranik Kochar
    Aram Alban, author: Andranik Kochar
  • Aram Vruyr, author: Andranik Kochar
    Aram Vruyr, author: Andranik Kochar
  • Avetis Shahinyan, author: Andranik Kochar
    Avetis Shahinyan, author: Andranik Kochar


Public domain day edit-a-thon; Hack The Gender Gap edit-a-thon

Public domain day edit-a-thon

Logo Public Domain Day 2019
Logo Public Domain Day 2019

Each year on 1 January we celebrate Public Domain Day. On this day thousands of works of authors that died 70 years ago enter the public domain and can be used in Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia platforms.

To celebrate this day and to be sure public domain authors have an article in Wikipedia, we organised together with the Royal Library of Belgium an edit-a-thon to write about the authors. Based on Wikidata we created an overview of authors that entered the public domain. This formed the basis for articles that are still missing in de Dutch, French or English Wikipedia or can use some expansion.

After the participants arrived, they got a guided tour through the Librarium of the Royal Library. After the tour, we gave an introduction to Wikipedia, introduction to public domain (day), and after that we started editing in the newspaper reading room (Krantenleeszaal/Salle de lecture Journaux). At lunchtime, a fresh made lunch was provided to the participants.

During the edit-a-thon the participants have worked on at least 18 articles related to public domain authors.

  • Location of edit-a-thon: Krantenleeszaal/Salle de lecture Journaux
    Location of edit-a-thon: Krantenleeszaal/Salle de lecture Journaux
  • Guided tour through Librarium
    Guided tour through Librarium

Hack The Gender Gap edit-a-thon

In October 2018 we organised the Women in Tech edit-a-thon to write about women in the tech industry that are listed in the Forbes list for top 50 women in tech. A lot of them were missing in Wikipedia, will there are in the top of their profession. After the edit-a-thon it was concluded that writing only once about this theme, the impact is limited and we like to have more results. This resulted in the start of the Wiki Club Brussels that organises in the center of Brussels (in BeCentral) every two weeks on Tuesday evening a Wikipedia session for a (stable) group of participants. This works very well and we will continue during 2019.

The organisers of the Wiki Club Brussels received in January 2019 some budget to organise a larger edit-a-thon: the Hack The Gender Gap edit-a-thon. This edit-a-thon was organised on 29 January 2019 in BeCentral where over 70 people participated in it, motivated to come as this was an opportunity to help improve the world a little bit themselves. The edit-a-thon got media attention by some major news networks in both sides of the language border of Belgium.

After a speech by someone from the regional government of Belgium, an introduction was given to all the participants. After the introduction the participants were divided in four groups that started editing in four of the large rooms of BeCentral. Each group was guided by an experienced Wikipedian, supported by two or three helpers so that all questions of participants got answered.

All together it was a good event with great atmosphere, this tasted for more!

  • one of the groups editing
    one of the groups editing
  • One of the participants interviewed by the media
    One of the participants interviewed by the media


GLAM Wiki at the Digital Collections Conference and new partnership with Casa de Rui Barbosa

Due to our experiences with GLAM Wiki projects, Brazilian Wikimedians were invited to speak at the Collections on the net: trends and practices in the management of digital collections conference, at the Museu do Índio, in Rio de Janeiro, at the end of November. Invitation was especially sent to Wikimedians involved with projects supported by the NeuroMat. The event brought together professionals from the field of museology and information sciences in order to discuss and present new methodologies and technologies for the treatment of digital collections, seeking ways of appropriating the potential of networks in the socialization of collections of cultural institutions. The event focused specifically on documentation processes, cataloging, production of metadata standards and the semantic dimension in the context of digital culture.

The first day of the event was marked by the discussion about the technological maturity of museums linked to the Brazilian Institute of Museums (IBRAM), signaling trends and challenges in the adoption of information technologies. The second day was dedicated to the practices of production of indigenous collections, along with the inauguration of the digital collection of the Museu do Índio on the open source platform Tainacan. Participants of the event were able to attend a Tainacan workshop, a Wordpress-based tool for organizing online collections developed by the Federal University of Goiás Laboratory of Research, Development and Innovation in Interactive Media (MediaLab).

The third day was devoted to the experiences of opening collections on the Wikimedia platforms and their unfolding to the museums institutions. RIDC NeuroMat presented along with the director of the Museu Paulista, Solange Ferraz, and the director of the Museum of Veterinary Anatomy, Maurício Cândido. Both directors presented in detail how the GLAM Wiki partnership benefited as the management as the access to their collections. Maurício pointed out the educational value of the initiative based on the perception of the reach that the collection acquires when it is published on Wikimedia platforms - which does not reduce the interest for the in person visitation to the museum. Solange highlighted the importance of the GLAM Wiki partnership while the museum is closed for visitation and demonstrated how the project goes beyond the exposure of objects in the network, emphasizing the role of Wikidata in the process. Related to the talk of the session colleagues I presented on practices of convergence and collection's data structuring through Wikidata, demonstrating processes that we realized in the RIDC NeuroMat and emphasizing the importance of the realization of partnerships with institutions of culture in this process. To tie up the proposed ideas on the Wikimedia projects, Dalton Martins (user:Daltonmartins), responsible for the development of Tainacan, gave a basic Wikidata workshop in the afternoon to the audience of the event.

GLAM Wiki initiative takes part on a digital collections conference at Museu do Índio (on the left) and new partnership with Casa de Rui Barbosa (on the right), both on Rio de Janeiro.

Since the event, we've partnered with the Casa de Rui Barbosa, the first Brazilian house museum, inaugurated in 1930. The museum contains a collection dedicated to the memory of Ruy Barbosa (1849-1923), a prominent jurist, journalist, politician and diplomat who contributed to the elaboration of the first constitution of the Brazilian Republic of 1891 and co-founded the Brazilian Academy of Letters (ABL) in 1897.

At the end of December, we formalized the partnership with the institution and the OTRS validation was filled, with the provision of a license for the project (here). In January, we began to structure the workflow with the Casa de Rui Barbosa and documents of the Campanha Civilista collection will be loeaded, related to the time in which Ruy Barbosa was a candidate for the presidency against the military Hermes da Fonseca.


First report from GLAM in Wikimedia Colombia

Linking Open Data in Wikidata

This blog post explain what is linked open data with examples of a Colombian artist and the possibilities to use Wikidata in GLAM institutions.

It explores as well a gender gap in Wikipedia in Spanish and how librarians can contribute in an equal representation. It is written in Spanish to make it more accesible for our region.


Prachatice Museum

Cooperation with Prachatice museum

Via Wiki and Prachatice museum had agreed on terms for their oncoming cooperation which starts in February 2019 by training the museum personnel in Wikipedia editing as well as creating content for Wikimedia Commons, followed by an Edit-a-thon for which the Museum agreed to provide the facility, personnel and resources. Continued cooperation on common projects focused on improvements of Wikipedia content is expected as well as the participation of other cultural or educational institutions based in the area.



#1lib1ref; Museum of Brittany

#1lib1ref

Multiple #1lib1ref events were held in France, in particular in Bordeaux (Université Bordeaux-Montaigne) and Rennes (Bibliothèque de Rennes in Les Champs libres and CFCB in Université Rennes-II). This year, about 3220 edits have been made with the hashtag #1lib1ref on Wikipedia in French by 139 editors (big thanks to others french speaking countries, especially Canada). This is three times more contributions than last year for the same period and put the French as the first language in #1lib1ref!

Museum of Brittany

On Sunday 27th took place the usual monthly workshop in the museum of Brittany (musée de Bretagne). It was focused on the History of Rennes and more specifically about the exposition Rennes, les vies d'une ville. Some objects of this exposition has been imported on Wikidata to prepare a more general mass import. The next workshop in March will focus on doing this import and taking pictures.


Indonesian Wikisource meetup; more documents from Museum Tamansiswa

Wikisource meetup

On Januari 18, 2019, Wikimedia Indonesia organized a meetup for Indonesian Wikisource users in Jakarta. Of 15 participants (outside of Wikimedia Indonesia) registered to the event, only 20% attended. During the event, two users were new to Indonesian Wikisource, so they were introduced to Wikisource and how Wikisource is different from Wikipedia in relation to editing styles and its user interface.

By the assistance of the participants, the meetup harvested more than 20 proofread pages, and at least 10 index pages created. For more details, see full report at Dokumentasi Aktivitas § 18 Januari: Kopdar Wikisource bahasa Indonesia at Wikimedia Indonesia wiki.

  • Participants of Indonesian Wikisource meetup
    Participants of Indonesian Wikisource meetup
  • In the process of proofreading the text
    In the process of proofreading the text
  • Group photo
    Group photo

Digitization in Museum Tamansiswa

As part of GLAM 2018 Project, Wikimedia Indonesia has digitized and uploaded documents from 98 catalog number which are part of letters from Tamansiswa Dewantara Kirti Griya Museum library to Wikimedia Commons. In this phase, the documents started from prefix TDKGM 01.366 to TDKGM 01.460. The documents written in the Dutch, English, or Javanese language will be translated into Indonesian to engage more people to use them, even they are not speaking in those languages. The translation started this February and will last by April 2019.

  • Laporan Rapat Sub-Panitya IV ke-5 Panitya Negara Chusus Untuk Menindjau kembali Persetudjuan Indonesia-Nederland
    Laporan Rapat Sub-Panitya IV ke-5 Panitya Negara Chusus Untuk Menindjau kembali Persetudjuan Indonesia-Nederland
  • Ontwerp Culturele Overeenkomst tussen het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden en de Republiek der Verenigde Staten van Indonesië
    Ontwerp Culturele Overeenkomst tussen het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden en de Republiek der Verenigde Staten van Indonesië
  • Notulensi berjudul "Soal Bahasa Belanda adalah Soal Perdjoangan Nasional" oleh Ki Hadjar Dewantara
    Notulensi berjudul "Soal Bahasa Belanda adalah Soal Perdjoangan Nasional" oleh Ki Hadjar Dewantara


Celebrating Wikipedia and remembering the Holocaust

Holocaust Remembrance Day

Editors in action

On January 27th, in occasion of the Holocaust Remembrance Day, an Edit-a-thon was organized at the Shoah Memorial in Milan. 15 editors wrote 12 new articles related to Shoah on it-Wikipedia and completed the existing ones.


WLM 2018: exhibition in Como

On January 22nd a #WikilovesLakeComo exhibition inaugurated at the Como Chamber of Commerce. It features the best pictures collected in the Como area for WLM 2018 in Italy and it's organized in collaboration with Sentiero dei Sogni, a very active local partner .


Seminario sulle categorie

Cathegory workshop in Florence

On January 11th a little group of wikipedians met at the National Library of Florence with the librarians who are responsabile of the National Thesaurus to discuss some problems about categories in Wikipedia.
Since 2013, the National library of Florence created a link from its Thesaurus to Wikipedia and back, like it's shown in this example: external link of article Bioarchitettura and back link to Bioarchitettura in Thesaurus.
After this meeting the group, composed of wikipedians Susanna Giaccai, Stefano, Luca Martinelli and Camillo and the librarians Anna Lucarelli, Albero Cheti and Chiara Storti decided to create a mailing list to better discuss all the problems connected to the semantic organization of Wikipedia.


Scientific Outreach at CREA and IIT in Tuscany

flyers

Seminar of User:Alexmar983 at CREA (research unit of the Ministry of Agricolture)invited by Dr Maurizio Antonetti. The conference was skyped among three other research units in Liguria, Marche and Campania. tweet.

Invitation at the SLaMM Workshop of the ERC starting grant at Museo Piaggio (Pontedera). Thanks to Professor Gianni Ciofani Alessandro Marchetti and Camillo Pellizzari updated or created new wikidata items of researchers. commons category

Botanic illustration

The role of Pokemon in botanic illustration...

Lesson about botanic illustration with high school students of La Spezia at the Orto Botanico of the University of Pisa with Alessandro Marchetti, Andrea Assenti e Mascha Stroobant images post on facebook.


Archeology and ethnography in Oleggio (Piedmont)

Visit to the archeological and ethnographical museum in Oleggio

On the 19th of January members of InFormAzioni association and of Insubria local group have been hosted by the municipality of Oleggio for a guided visit of the local archeological and ethnographical museum; the museum has a very rich permanent exhibition of ethnographic objects and the reconstruction of rooms and workshops, it also hosts an interesting collection of archaeological artifacts from the en:Golasecca culture.

After the lunch, kindly offered by the municipality, the 14 partecipants had the opportunity to work in the local library to upload pictures (148), write articles (25 created or improved), write on wikivoyage (1 page created) and improve items on wikidata (15 items created or edited).

The event was organized thanks to the collaboration with the municipality of Oleggio.


Diversity in Glam projects

International Year of Indigenous Languages 2019 and Glam institutions

Sami Parliament Language Conference 4–5 February

2019 is the International Year of Indigenous Languages 2019. Wikimedia Norge has been recognized as a Civil Society Partner for UNESCO and it gives us a great opportunity to tell the world about our work with Sami languages and the Wikimedia projects. To mark the start of Wikimedia Norge’s contributions to The Year of Indigenous Languages 2019, The Language Centre at The Sami House in Oslo and Wikimedia Norge invited several of Norway’s major cultural institutions to a 2-hour seminar at The Sami House to discuss the possibilities of digitalisation and dissemination of Sami cultural heritage and the use of the Wikimedia-projects for this. The participants will meet again in April.

The Sami parliament marked the start of the International Year of Indigenous Languages by hosting a 2 day language conference in the city of Tromsø in Northern Norway and Wikimedia Norge took part in this conference with two participants.


Women in Red: Collaboration with The National Library

In 2018-2019 Wikimedia Norge partners with The National Library of Norway to make more content by Norwegian female authors available on the Wikimedia projects. This is the first time the chapter has a topic-specific part-time position at The National Library, and we are thrilled that a major knowledge organization sees the value of sharing knowledge on the Wikimedia platforms. The is co-funded between Wikimedia Norge and The National Library. The project page can be found here.

The focus of the project has been uploading public domain work by Norwegian female authors to Wikimedia Commons and WikiSource, as well as adding content about these authors and their work to Wikidata and Wikipedia. So far we have focused on authors where their work has become public domain the last decade - women whose contributions to culture and society is mostly forgotten about today. As a part of this project Wikimedia Norge is also working on new potential ways to collaborate in the future, and one of the next steps will be hosting a Wikidata workshop together with the library. Inspired by the IIIF conference in December 2018, how to work with IIIF manifests on Wikimedia project is also something we are looking into.

The work of Norway's first female professor, biologist Kristine Bonnevie, is among the resources from The National Library of Norway that is now public domain.



GLAM Winter in Serbia

Edit-a-thon at Republic Institute for the protection of cultural heritage of Serbia

During the Wikipedian in Residence program at the Republic Institute for the protection of cultural heritage of Serbia, there was an edit-a-thon on writing articles about cultural monuments of Serbia. Volunteers of Wikimedia Serbia and Institute employees had written 26 new articles from the literature available at the Institute. Participants also illustrated the articles with images released during the Wikipedian in Residence program.


New museum in the WIR program

Theatre Museum of Vojvodina is a new cultural institution which joined GLAM program in Serbia. Wikipedian in residence is hired in this institution from the half of December 2018 until the end of January 2019. An expected outcomes are 20 new articles on Serbian Wikipedia, 2 digitized books and 500 released images.


Wikipedian in Residence at the Republic Institute for the Protection of Cultural Heritage of Serbia

Wikipedian in Residence at the Republic Institute for the protection of cultural heritage of Serbia, the first government institution that took part in GLAM program in Serbia, has ended with extraordinary results. More than 500 free licenced images of cultural monuments are uploaded, as well as 4 digitized books and 40 new articles in Serbian Wikipedia.


Promotion of the WIR project

Final event of Wikipedian in residence program - promotion of the project was held in december at the Serbian-Korean Information Access Centre. It was a closing event with an idea to sum all WIR results in 2018. President of Wikimedia Serbia, Filip Maljkovic presented the results:

Maljković pointed out the importance of this programs for improving the visibility of cultural heritage, but also for improving Wikipedia - the world’s largest encyclopedia, emphasizing the two-way cooperation and the need for such long term and stable partnerships. In addition, he thanked the institutions for opening their door for Wikipedia editors, as well as their archives to the entire world, as well as the Ministry of Culture that recognized this venture and gave it full support.

Estela Radonjić-Živkov, senior adviser at the Republic Institute for the Protection of Cultural Heritage of Serbia, said that this project has helped a lot not only in releasing materials, but also in the releasing institutions themselves - to make the documentation free and public. Radonjić pointed out that this cooperation has a common goal - protection of the cultural heritage of Serbia, and one of the conditions of protection is the availability of culture.
— In the world of new technologies, the easiest and fastest way to do this is through digital media, and one of the main sources for most people is Wikipedia - Radonjić concluded.

Maja Pujin, archivist of Historical Archive of Pančevo, thanked Wikimedia Serbia for given trust and participation in the residence program. She explained that for this residence is used literature about history of Pančevo that has been published by the Archive 10 years ago. Thus, now Serbian Wikipedia is covered with lacking articles about the notable citizens of Pančevo, the histories of various societies, the city itself… Many scenes and buildings from these images citizens of Pančevo don't remember, like the former synagogue, and now, thanks to the program, it is visible for a broad audience, Pujin emphasized.

Pavle Orbović, curator of City Museum of Vrbas, thanked Wikimedia and Ministry of Culture, but also the Museum of Vojvodina for cooperation and support. He explained that the Museum in Vrbas is small institution that has been operating since 2015. and that the help from the Wikipedian in residence is great in terms of presenting this town on the internet, or on Wikipedia.
— Reading written articles, people of Vrbas started to contact us, and we are especially pleased that in this way local history got attention - Orbović said. All partners expressed the will to contribute and cooperate more on this project in coming years, which will bring more free content on the world’s largest encyclopedia.

Read more in Serbian language.


1lib1ref 2019

Librarians and Wikipedians from Serbia once again took part in the campaign #1lib1ref. The main participants are librarians from Belgrade City Library and University Library “Svetozar Marković”, where two workshops were held. Ivana Guslarević from Wikimedia Serbia presented this global project to attendees, and Aleksandra Popović, from University Library held a practical workshop of editing Wikipedia. During the first week of the campaign, Serbian Wikipedia joined the top 5 Wikipedias with the highest number of added references, and an editor from Serbia - Ванилица (Vanilica) is one of the highest contributors. Wikimedia Serbia will award the participants who add the highest number of references with book vouchers and goodie bags.



Hackathon with the National Library of Sweden

Hackathon with the National Library of Sweden

Discussing the fine points of metadata.

Wikimedia Sverige continues its cooperation with the National Library of Sweden to bring more library data to Wikidata. In order to learn from each other's experiences, we invited a group of library employees to an all-day hackathon. The participants brought their expert knowledge of metadata and cataloging system, as well as an eagerness to learn more about Linked Open Data and Wikidata. We weren't surprised with their enthusiasm – Wikidata has been on the radar of librarians and information scientists for a while, as shown by initiatives like WikiCite, and the National Library of Sweden is working actively to increase the Linkedness and Openness of their data.

During the hackathon, we worked together on several ideas aimed at bringing Wikimedia and the library's union catalog Libris closer together, such as by including authors' Q numbers in the catalog. The participants also got to try their hand at editing Wikidata and writing more and more complex SPARQL queries. You can read more about the event in Swedish on Wikimedia Sverige's wiki, or on our blog.


Wales, Oxford and Scotland

News from the National Library of Wales

At the National Library of Wales we are currently working on a Welsh Government funded project to improve Welsh language content across Wikimedia projects with a focus on the people of Wales. As part of the project we are improving Welsh labels on Wikidata, creating Welsh Wicipedia articles and sharing thousands of Welsh portraits from our collections. 4 editathons have been held in schools, lead by Aaron Morris, Wikipedian in Residences with Menter iaith Môn, and we are planning a Welsh language history hackathon on March 2nd in Cardiff. The project was designed using Europeana's new impact playbook, and we will be using this to develop a greater understanding of the impact all of the above activities have on individuals, communities and institutions. Our initial findings will be published when the project ends in March. Jason.nlw (talk) 13:02, 4 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Oxford and Wikidata

The data import from the King Catalogue of Astrolabes has gone ahead. This added 362 new astrolabes, in various collections around the world, more than doubling the existing data. Now there are 592 astrolabes or parts of astrolabes; 4218 statements in total. These can be browsed in Astrolabe Explorer.

Also in January, incremental improvements to the data about art works in the Ashmolean Museum: the total number of statements has increased from 24,939 to 26,450 (7.8 per item). Also some software improvements to Collection Explorer which visualises these data. Here is a PAWS notebook which shows some queries that are possible with the data set.

"Making Wikidata Visible" is a new blog post about querying Wikidata to show how connections between collections are represented in Wikidata's knowledge graph.

Martin gave a talk to the GLAM Collections Committee, putting a Wikimedia perspective on open data to an audience of about ten head cataloguers from the university's GLAM division. This was followed up with links sent in email.

Update from the Scottish Library and Information Council Residency

January has been an exciting month in the library world in Scotland and I wanted to give you a few updates. The SLIC residency is coming to an end in March and I will share a full report on the project then. Meanwhile, I would like to share a few updates on some of the exciting projects that have taken place recently.

1Lib1Ref 2019 in Scotland

2019 has been our biggest year for #1Lib1Ref in Scotland to date. Delphine, as Wikimedian in Residence at the Scottish Library and Information Council, took on the role of 1Lib1Ref ambassador for Scotland and coordinated the campaign. The aim was to activate librarians across the entire library sector in Scotland this year. In order to do so, Delphine advertised the campaign using SLIC's key contacts list across Scotland as well as boosting the campaign on social media with the help of campaign amplifiers such as CILIPS, the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland, the Scottish Health Information Network (SHINE) and the SLIC social media team.

We framed the 1Lib1Ref campaign as a professional development opportunity and underpinned it with training opportunities for librarians in the form of free 1 hour webinars delivered by the SLIC Wikimedian in Residence. There were 5 webinars in total and those were attended by a wide range of professionals across the library sector including school librarians, public librarians, law librarians, FE and HE institution librarians and health librarians. Two of the webinars were specifically tailored to health librarians in response to a demand for Wikipedia specific training after the SLIC Wikimedian in residence deliver the key note speech at last year's SHINE conference. In support of the webinars, we also built a dedicated 1Lib1Ref 2019 in Scotland event page with additional resources for librarians to access while taking part in the campaign. The webinars were also recorded and widely shared for any librarians unable to attend the dates of the live events.

We recorded the metrics for the program using the outreach dashboard as an individual programme nestled under the global #1Lib1Ref 2019 campaign. You can find the results here. In total, 46 editors enrolled as part of the campaign, 10 new articles were created, 249 articles were edited, with a sum total of 586 edits.

Wikidata project with the Glasgow School of Art product design students

In 2018, the SLIC Wikimedian in residence delivered an Introduction to Wikidata workshop in partnership with the Glasgow School of Art library as part of their Information Literacy week. As an offshoot of this workshop, we were invited to contribute to a two week project with 2nd year Product Design students on the theme of designing with data.

The project had run twice in previous years with clients such as the NHS sharing some of their data for students to use as the basis of their design. A lot of the focus in previous years had been on quantitative data and personal data. This year, rather than having a traditional client such as the NHS, tutors invited SLIC Wikimedian in Residence Delphine Dallison and Scotland Programme Coordinator for Wikimedia UK Sara Thomas to act as "clients" and introduce Wikidata as a potential source of open data for the students projects.

The project was structured over two weeks and students were divided into 7 groups of three to four students with set themes for the data they would explore (Finance, Food, Mobility, Transport/Infrastructure, Heritage, Entertainment, Wellbeing/Health). The students had the option of sourcing their data for their project from Wikidata, but could also supplement it with other open data sources as well as source/record their own personal data. The tutors introduced the project on the Monday of week 1 and we gave an introduction to the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia UK and Wikidata, followed by a practical workshop on how Wikidata is structured and how to run queries with Wikidata. The students then had a week to research data available within their set theme and narrow down an area of focus before presenting back to us at the half-way point on the Friday of week 1.

During week 1's show and tell, all the groups had attempted to query and draw potential data from Wikidata with more of less success based on the type of data currently available in Wikidata. The group researching the theme of finance in particular struggled to access useful data using Wikidata, but were able to access open data published elsewhere instead. Two groups were particularly inspired by data from Wikidata. The first, looking at food and biodiversity of species of fruit and vegetables available in UK supermarkets, was able to cross reference data from Wikidata and Wikipedia on the number of species of fruit and veg that exist worldwide with information they gathered themselves on the fruit and veg species available from supermarket chains. The second group, looking at heritage, was able to use data derived from the Wiki Loves Monuments campaign and cross reference it with published figures from Visit Scotland before narrowing their focus on how to encourage more international tourism to explore the urban heritage in Scotland. Having narrowed their focus and presented to us, students also gave indication on areas they were planning on investigating for their design project in week two and we were able to give them feedback on their ideas.

We met the students again on the Friday at the end of week 2, when the students presented their final design solutions. The results were diverse from subscription services, installations, city wide competitions to educational games. We were impressed with the depth to which some of the students had taken their design solutions in such a short period of time, with many functional prototypes illustrating their ideas. This project, being very open and experimental, had no set outcomes other than giving design students a better understanding of open public data and its potential in the design industry as opposed to private data mining which seems to be people's foremost conception of how data is represented in the media. Students exceeded our expectations, especially given the short timeframe of the project. During the training, they picked up quickly on the structure of Wikidata and were all more of less able to build their own Wikidata queries by the end of the session. In groups where they struggled to use Wikidata as their data source, they still worked hard to source other forms of open published data and demonstrated good awareness of the ethical issues surrounding the use of private data. In many of their design solutions, students explored the idea of contributing back open public data for the greater good of the community.

Some of our take-aways from the project were that product design courses are new area where Wikidata can be used as an open educational resource. The Wikimedia community could greatly benefit from getting more people with a design background involved in developing some of the tools and outputs from Wikidata, as a more user friendly interface would encourage greater community integration. There are still many issues with what public data is made easily available and published under open licenses and bringing greater awareness of this within the design community could help encourage more solutions to be sought out to resolve this issue.

Train the Trainer programme roll-out for librarians across Scotland

As the SLIC Wikimedia residency is drawing to an end, we have been focusing on its long term sustainable impact. To this end, over the past 6 months, we have been developing a series of training resources for public librarians in Scotland under a Train the Trainer programme. This training resources are now complete and available on the GLAM/SLIC project page. The final aim is to create a network of trained librarians who have experience of editing Wikipedia and have the tools and resources to run their own Wikipedia editathons and events in future. So far, the local authorities of Inverclyde, North Lanarkshire, Fife, Highland and Islands and Angus have undergone the training and we have dates planned for 3 more local authorities by the end of the residency.


Snowdays/Shutdowns but Lots of Open Access

It's been a busy and historic month of open access work in the United States, spearheaded by the community from DC, New York City and Boston. Most of this was revealed in January and early February, with The Metropolitan Museum of Art celebrating the second anniversary of their open access initiative and the Cleveland Museum of Art also following the Met's lead by having their first-ever open access reveal. Read on for more details.

MIT/Met/Microsoft Hackathon and reveal

It could only be publicly revealed in January 2019, but on December 12-13, 2018, a special hackathon was held in Cambridge, Mass. with The Met, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Microsoft Research where Sam Klein (User:SJ) and Andrew Lih (User:Fuzheado) represented the Wikimedia community.

The event centered around brainstorming and prototyping ideas around The Met's new metadata tags project that was yet to be publicly shown. In 2018, The Met began and completed an ambitious subject keyword tagging project for their complete collection of artworks. Chief digital officer Loic Tallon described it as adding:

"quality-controlled subject keywords to the more than 300,000 digitized artworks in the collection... The 1,063 subject keywords range from 'trees' to 'castles,' from 'floods' and 'portraits,' and from 'ritual objects' to 'cats.'"

  • Jennie Choi of The Met Museum
    Jennie Choi of The Met Museum
  • Sam Klein of MIT
    Sam Klein of MIT
  • Team of Tag! That's It
    Team of Tag! That's It


The Met wanted to know what they could do with these keywords, and with Wikimedian in Residence Richard Knipel (User:Pharos) in house, they turned to the Wikimedia community as one of their main partners. Andrew Lih was brought on to assist in the strategy and development of using artificial intelligence and machine learning with the dataset and Wikidata. At the hackathon, Andrew worked with Jennie Choi, The Met's General Manager of Collection Information and Nina Diamond, Managing Editor and Producer along with Microsoft Researchers Patrick Buehler, J.S. Tan and Sam Kazemi Nafchi to train a machine learning model on Microsoft Azure that could predict labels for artworks. Using the Met's roughly 1,000 word art vocabulary, and representative images to help train the model a proof of concept app was developed at the hackathon. The results were impressive enough that Andrew finished the creation of a Wikdata Distributed Game - Depicts to connect the subject keyword recommendations to Wikidata.

In the weeks after the hackathon, Andrew worked with The Met to create a crosswalk database of their art thesaurus terms to Wikidata items. The game was further refined, and on January 31, the first candidates generated from the AI system were fed to the Wikidata Game and Wikimedia community members added AI-generated statements to Wikidata. It is believed to be the first use of deep learning in computer vision for the Wikidata community (and possibly beyond).

On February 4, there was an event at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC that demonstrated the result – the evening showcased the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning based on the Met's open access work, and included the unveiling of the new Wikidata Game.

The evening event for curators, trustees, journalists and technologists was held in the great entrance hall of The Met Museum, and had more than 100 people play the Wikidata Game on three large screen kiosks. More than 700 judgments were recorded from button presses by participants ranging from the museum's trustees to 12 year old attendees. The project will help inform further game development and supplement the existing "Wiki Art Depiction Explorer," a Knight Foundation-funded project that Andrew has with Effie Kapsalis of The Smithsonian Institution and Robert Fernandez of Wikimedia DC. More work is to come in going beyond just the Wikidata Game interface for yes/no judgments.

The initiative and the "Tag! That's It" project that resulted in the game development was covered in a number of publications:

Official posts

  • Setup for The Met/MIT/Microsoft hack
    Setup for The Met/MIT/Microsoft hack
  • Station setup near Egyptian wing of The Met Museum
    Station setup near Egyptian wing of The Met Museum
  • Team description
    Team description
  • Andrew Lih, Megan Wacha, Richard Knipel, Jane Alexander, Loic Tallon
    Andrew Lih, Megan Wacha, Richard Knipel, Jane Alexander, Loic Tallon
  • Matthew Tarr, American Museum of Natural History; Andrew Lih; Jane Alexander, Cleveland Museum of Art
    Matthew Tarr, American Museum of Natural History; Andrew Lih; Jane Alexander, Cleveland Museum of Art
  • Playing Wikidata Game
    Playing Wikidata Game
  • Wikidata Game on Microsoft Surface kiosks
    Wikidata Game on Microsoft Surface kiosks
  • Kiosks
    Kiosks
  • Andrew Lih and Richard Knipel
    Andrew Lih and Richard Knipel


Open Access at the Cleveland Museum of Art

Inspired by The Met Museum's open access initiatives, on January 23, The Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) released their digital content of more than 30,000 artworks and 60,000 object records under a CC0 license and uploaded images to Commons.[1]; [2] Andrew Lih was asked by the CMA to assist in a novel approach – simultaneous mass donation of Wikidata and metadata information with upload of images. To create 4,000+ Wikidata items and link them to existing and new images, he created several new Python based tools for linking museum APIs to Wikidata item creation and will eventually be releasing them to the community under a free license.

The collaboration with the CMA's Chief Digital Information Officer Jane Alexander and Director of Technology Ethan Holda was furthered by Wikimedia presence at the Museum Computer Network conference in Denver (November 13-16, 2018), where Andrew gave the first-ever Wikidata tutorial for museum professionals at the influential annual gathering. News of the CMA open access donation made it to the front page of the main Cleveland newspaper.

A report on some of the project's outputs can be found in a live Wikidata Query notebook. Using a Python notebook approach for GLAM statistics has been very helpful for The Met and CMA projects, and has inspired other uses by GLAM Wiki community members (see Martin Poulter's notebook). There seems to be much interest in furthering this model as a education and insights tool. Please contact User:Fuzheado for more info on this.

The fruits of open access are already being seen – the CMA artworks have been fed into the AI system developed with The Met (described above) and depicts statements are already being added into Wikidata for their works via the Wikidata Game interface.

The CMA project was not just a US project and had international collaboration – thanks to Sandra Fauconnier of Structured Data on Commons and Maarten Dammers of Sum of All Paintings for assistance on this project.

#1Lib1Ref

1Lib1Ref grew again this year. It was taken up by the Association of College and Research Libraries, #1Lib1Ref: An Easy Gateway to Wikipedia Editing A dashboard tracked results campaigns/1lib1ref. Feedback is requested here [3]

Wikipedia Day 2019 New York City

Wikimedia NYC held a meetup at the Ace Hotel in Manhattan, Wikipedia Day 2019. - video by Internet Society is available Wikipedia Day 2019 NYC, and media is at Wikipedia Day 18 NYC

Wikipedia Day 2019 Stanford

Wikimedia and Stanford University, held a meetup, Wikipedia Day 2019.

An Expansion of the Commons: Copyright, Creative Commons and the Public Domain

Wikimedia DC, Creative Commons USA, and the American University Washington College of Law, Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, held a panel discussion, Wikipedia Event on Public Domain.

Marching in Washington, D.C.

Wikimedia DC continues to cover the ongoing protests in Washington, D.C.



Enhancing the Narrative of DC Public Schools A Wikipedia Editing Workshop

A meetup at Charles Sumner School Museum and Archives to improve and create Wikipedia articles about the history of public education in the District of Columbia.


New year, new newsletter format

By Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing)

Huge congratulations to our sister project Wikipedia, which reached 18 years of age on 15 January!

Highlights

Other news

For all other Wikidata news, new properties, etc, see:


Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons

Multilingual captions are live on Wikimedia Commons!

File captions on Wikimedia Commons, a first feature of Structured Data on Commons

In January 2019, multilingual captions went live on Wikimedia Commons. They are the first feature of Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons.

Captions can be added and edited on file pages and during upload of files via the UploadWizard. It is not yet possible to add captions via batch upload tools like Pattypan.

To learn more about captions and how to use them, see the on-wiki documentation. Please add specific suggestions on how to use captions for files uploaded via GLAM-Wiki projects!

Updates about GLAM pilot projects for Structured Data on Commons

While the Structured Data on Commons development team is squashing the last bugs before releasing more features on Wikimedia Commons in the upcoming months, preparations continue for GLAM pilot projects. The current list of confirmed pilots is available on Wikimedia Commons, and more upcoming pilots are being prepared and discussed.

Example of a digitized map uploaded to Wikimedia Commons in 'unstructured data', but prepared for easy conversion to structured data later

Among others, Wikimedia España will contribute with a pilot project on historical maps and aerial photographs from the Instituto Geográfico Nacional. Recently WMES has uploaded a first batch of almost 10,000 digitized maps from the Mapa Topográfico Nacional to Wikimedia Commons.

This current upload is still in unstructured data, but was done in a format that should be easily convertible to structured data later:

  • The files are described with the {{Map}} information template on Wikimedia Commons
  • Information about the maps on Wikimedia Commons points to Wikidata items for the location shown on the map, the map type, place of publication
  • The file pages contain Wikidata-powered {{Institution}} and {{Creator}} templates.

Wikidata properties related to copyright

In preparation for Structured Data on Commons, new Wikidata properties are discussed and created. Structured Data on Commons will include machine-readable copyright information, and for this purpose several copyright-related Wikidata properties now exist, including a few recent ones:

Description of copyright is documented on Wikidata at Help:Copyrights, and this system will likely inspire the way in which copyright of files will be described in structured data on Wikimedia Commons.


February's GLAM events

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