GLAM/Newsletter/June 2020/Single
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Wikigap 2020 in Albania
Wikigap 2020 in Albania
Wikimedians of Albanian Language User Group has been collaborating with the Swedish Embassy in Tirana since 2018. Over the years, the focus has been on writing articles about women around the world.
This year the focus was on Swedish and Albanian Women, specifically sportiest and ambassadors. The event was held as every year on International Women's Day on March 8th. Participants in Edit-a-thon were about 12 Albanian women of different ages who contributed to the writing of articles for Swedish and Albanian women. During the event 9 new articles were written, 20 other articles were improved within 2 hours. They wrote about a person they liked or for whom there was no real article in the Albanian language. As a participant but also as a speaker was the ambasador of Sweden in Tirana, Mrs Elsa Hastand. The purpose of this edit-a-thon was to increase the awareness of the gender gap on Wikipedia. Also as a result of this event was anther event organized by one of the participants "Women in Tech" in April. Details here.
Taking training online
National Gallery of Australia volunteers re-train as Wikipedia editors
When the National Gallery of Australia closed to visitors in March, one disappointment was the interruption to the Know My Name program on which Australian editors had been working as part of Art+Feminism 2020. It also shut out the Gallery's team of volunteer guides.
With some creative thinking by the Know My Name Program Coordinator, and lots of preparation work by the Gallery's volunteer coordinator, learning team and library staff, Wikimedia Australia supported online Wikipedia training for gallery guides. A huge thanks to Wikimedian, Kerry Raymond for developing and expertly delivering the 100% online training for new editors, over three 2-hour sessions in June. Twenty new editors have so far worked on 26 articles related to Australian women artists, and contributed 86 references.
1Lib1Ref May 2020
1Lib1Ref also went online for the May-June session. State Library of Queensland staff met virtually and continued their great work for 1Lib1Ref, with a geographical focus on Brisbane suburbs.
This was the second year of 1Lib1Ref involvement by Yarra Plenty Regional Library, and a training day for library staff had been booked since last year. When a face-to-face workshop was not possible, we converted this to a two-hour online training session, followed by a number of drop-in support sessions where Pru Mitchell or Kerry Raymond were available in the library's online platform to answer questions or demonstrate new skills.
With library staff working from home, and no access to the local history collections, the project had to find alternatives to book citations. The Victorian Heritage Database became the primary resource, and was used to add detail about heritage places to articles related to the library's community. The Project was well-managed by Liz Pidgeon, Local and Family History Librarian, and she and the team added 327 citations. Liz reports that:
participants agreed that local place name articles were a good focal point to for a citations project. They enjoyed the collaborative nature of the training, and enjoyed the local history reading and learning aspect.
Ingrid Cumming, Western Australian Heritage Awards
Congratulations to Ingrid Cumming, recognised in the Western Australian Heritage Awards for her role in setting up and maintaining Noongarpedia, Australia's first Indigenous language Wikipedia. The commendation for an individual who has made a significant contribution to heritage and has demonstrated best practice standards acknowledged that:
Noongarpedia has enabled young people to embrace knowledge as a means of breaking down barriers, enabling ancient Noongar knowledge to become a heritage tool locally and globally.
Wikimedia in Brazil in times of pandemics
In the context of the COVID-19 pandemics, our user group had --like many other Wikimedia organizations-- to quickly adapt to a new, challenging reality. Team work time and expectations had to be adjusted. A thought-through Annual Plan had to be reviewed, with the postponement of some key events we had programmed (i.e., a WMF-supported training on LUA and a Seminar on Digital Technologies and Open Culture). We are thankful for the collaboration of the WMF grants and community support teams in making necessary changes in our activities. The new context was also an opportunity for experimentation and devising programs and activities we had not necessarily envisioned; in this report, I highlight some of these programs and activities.
A highlight in our work in the context of the COVID-19 pandemics is a series of edit-a-thons we have held in partnership with cultural institutions, especially Museu Paulista. The initiative with this particular museum, which was described on a previous edition, was listed as one of the few successes of museums amidst a widespread inability to adjust to digital audiences in Brazil, at an op-ed on the most important Brazilian newspaper.[1] Between March and mid July, WMB held eleven edit-a-thons, including six that were co-organized with Museu Paulista (digital posters below).
Normally, WMB has run edit-a-thons with an idea that we should go as quickly as possible to the magic moment of enabling, empowering newcomers to edit for the first time; in a remote context, we moved to an interaction in which we were able to present more deeply, thoroughly what the community is and does, then having several Wikimedians work as individual tutors for newcomers. Slides, videos, chats are available on the event pages. Over 2,000 people watched the videos and over 1,100 joined the campaign with Museu Paulista.
In parallel, WMB ran a three-month-long online initiative to improve contents broadly related to Museu Paulista on Wikipedia in Portuguese. A new initiative is about to be launched with the Brazilian National Archives; over 500 people have signed in this competition that focuses specifically on the Brazilian capital, Brasília.
New partnerships
Another highlight was the reorganization of the Wikimedia and Education community in Brazil. WMB systematically researched and listed education programs that were organized in Brazil since 2011 and sent out a call to all professors and education leaders that had been involved or were involved in these programs. A first meeting was held on June 17, with around 40 participants.
The work with educators is particularly important as they have faced the challenge of adapting to new technologies without receiving sufficient support from local governments, and to set up Wikimedia education programs is relatively straightforward and can be a means of engaging students to renewed experiences. Open meetings in the Wikimedia and Education community will be held monthly.
We are also happy to have recently celebrated the largest partnership with Brazilian academic libraries in our history, with the formalization of a joint initiative with several libraries from the University of São Paulo. (We hope to submit a full report soon!) We are also working to ratify partnerships with Musica Brasilis (one of the largest collection of musical scores from Brazil, with which we might bring to Wikimedia Commons around 5,000 media files of Brazilian music) and the Brazilian Society of Scientific Research to improve content on Brazilian science policies.
Association des archivistes français
Wikiarchives
The live sessions Wikiarchives in partnership with Association des archivistes français continued and ended this month the 25. That was the occasion to learn about swiss initiatives and projects as well as les sans pagEs activities. For the moment no live is planned for july but the idea could be to organize regular web meetings (once a month) for september.
México free and diverse representation
Wiki Loves México 2020
From May 1 to 31 we had the second edition of Wiki Loves Mexico photographic contest, organized by Wikimedia Mexico and the Mexican Secretariat of Culture centered on the visual documentation of the great diversity of the festive, cultural and popular expressions of our country, recognized by UNESCO as one of the world's largest holders of intangible heritage and of which there are very few photographs on Wikimedia Commons. This contest aims to portray the complex cultural diversity and the different representations of Intangible Heritage in our country.
Although the COVID-19 pandemic represents new challenges in the dissemination and reception of photographs, fortunately this didn’t limit participation. This year we received over 2,500 photos, ready to be shared with free licenses and to illustrate hundreds of articles that still don’t have free images. One important support was that Secretariat of Culture included Wiki Loves Mexico contest as a cultural offering in “Contigo en la distancia” social distancing program which improved the reach of the contest’s national call.
As a side event we organized an online conversation on May 16 with Cecilia Barraza an expert in Intangible Heritage, Rodrigo García a professional photographer and Carmen Alcázar, president of Wikimedia México. All of them discussed and problematized topics as the multiple visual representations of Intangible Heritage and the importance to be shared it with the world in the light of the actual discussions around the complexity behind the multiple expressions in one country and how needs to be represented more over a simplistic vision of “traditions”. This perspectives will support us to enrich our concepts and the selection of the topics we will cover in this contest in the next years.
Carmen Alcázar, considers that Wiki Loves México “is a wonderful approach to the cultural diversity that exists in México. It’s understand the material and intangible heritage we have and showing it on the main reference site on the Internet”.
Wiki goes Caribbean meetup and media donation & Making references to Dutch newspapers in Wikipedia more sustainable
Wiki goes Caribbean meetup, themed 'fauna and flora'
On June 20, approximately 15 participants of the Wiki goes Caribbean project met again via Zoom. This specific bimonthly meetup, co-organized with Nationaal Archief, was themed 'fauna and flora'. Some attendees, hailing from the Netherlands and Curaçao, participated in a Wikipedia introduction while the rest of the group discussed various topics, including best practices for including common species names in Wikipedia lists, searching for images on Wikimedia Commons, and the international competitions Wiki Loves Monuments and Wiki Loves Earth.
New media donation by Biblioteca Nacional Aruba
On the occasion of the above-mentioned meetup, the Biblioteca Nacional Aruba contributed a new set of images to Wikimedia Commons: 77 illustrations from a 1662 book that are some of the earliest images known of people, animals and plants in the Antilles.
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"Zee-appelen Zee-sterren Zee-boomen en Zee-pluymen" -
Young woman with child -
"De zee-gedrochten" -
"D'aanmerkelijkste Vogelen der Voor-eylanden"
Making references to Dutch newspapers in Wikipedia more sustainable
Dutch Wikipedia contains some 20.000 citations (URLs) to Delpher, a digital historical newspaper archive in the Netherlands. Many of those URLs are sustainable, but until recently Dutch Wikipedia also contained thousands of non-future-proof links to Delpher. In this article Olaf Janssen (Wikimedia coordinator of the National library of the Netherlands) shows how he found these links and replaced them with persistent URLs, and what the benefits of this search-and-replace operation are.
More than 130 new articles about insects
The Museum of Natural History of North Macedonia
On 12 February 2020, GLAM Macedonia signed an agreement for collaboration with the Museum of Natural History of North Macedonia. WiR started their job. But in March, when the quarantine was declared, the Wikipedian in Residence continued to work from home, as he managed to get materials from the Museum to work on. Also, materials were shared with other active Wikipedians, who were willing to help in creating new articles about the insects.
GLAM activities haven't stop as many of the activities were held online. The collaboration with the Museum of Natural History of North Macedonia resulted with more than 130 created and improved articles about insects in North Macedonia. There are several documents get form the Museum which has to be added as references in the articles.
Unfortunately, WiR's are not allowed to have off line activities this time. Wiki Tours, workshops, edit-a-thons and editing together were dropped this time.
June Highlights - Let’s make new agreements
Wikipedian in residence - National museum of Toplice
A two-month-long Wikipedian in residence project has started at the National Museum of Toplice on 1st of June. In this month, Wikipedia was enlarged by 23 new articles, 16 supplemented, while Wikimedia Commons was enlarged by 266 photos from the collection of Numismatics and Ethnology.
The National Museum of Toplice was founded in 1946 in Prokuplje, Serbia. The museum includes an archeological collection, collections dedicated to the Toplice Uprising in 1917, and the People’s Liberation Struggle during World War II, an ethnological collection, as well as two galleries. The building in which the museum is located was erected in 1925 and is protected as a cultural monument.
Expansion of cooperation with The Belgrade City Library
Wikimedia Serbia has signed a Memorandum of Cooperation within the GLAM program with the Belgrade City Library, thus strengthening existing cooperation and starting on the preparation of new projects.
Wikimedia Serbia and the Belgrade City Library already have long-term cooperation within the Wiki senior project and the annual 1Lib1Ref campaign.
We are expanding the network of our associates
Wikimedia Serbia has signed a Memorandum of Cooperation and a Protocol of Cooperation with the Association of Citizens for Culture, Arts and International Cooperation Adligat, which includes the Museum of Serbian Literature, the Museum of Books and Travel, the Lazić Library and the House of Legacies.
This association owns more than a million books, various antiques collected around the world, a collection of miniature books, many different prayer books, and relics.
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Part of the Ethnology collection at National Museum of Toplice -
Part of the Ethnology collection at National Museum of Toplice -
Part of the Ethnology collection at National Museum of Toplice -
Part of the Numismatic collection at the National Museum of Toplice -
Part of the Numismatic collection at the National Museum of Toplice -
Part of the Numismatic collection at the National Museum of Toplice
Free music on Wikipedia
Free music on Wikipedia
Wikimedia Sverige has had several fruitful discussions with the Swedish Performing Arts Agency about how they can contribute material related to Sweden's music history to the Wikimedia projects. With their vast archival collections they have a lot to bring to our project Free Music on Wikipedia, whose aim is to share out-of-copyright music and related materials with the Wikimedia community.
Of particular interest is their collection of recordings made by Swedish folklorist Matts Arnberg in the 1950's and 1960's. Working for the Swedish Radio, Arnberg traveled all around Sweden and Swedish-speaking Finland and recorded examples of traditional folk music. The Swedish Performing Arts Agency now has all those recordings and we are excited to share that they decided to release this valuable collection as CC0. This means we will be uploading the first batch of several hundred audio files later this summer!
Diversity in GLAM Program
Virtual GLAMHack 2020
Due to the pandemic, the 6 th edition of the Swiss Open Cultural Data Hackathon on June 5 to 6, 2020, was carried out as an online event and attracted participants from all over the world. Organizing a virtual event presented a unique challenge: how to maintain the team spirit and collaboration necessary for a hackathon during a virtual event?
The GLAMHack was organized by the OpenGLAM Working Group of the Opendata.ch association in collaboration with other partners and was hosted by the Swiss Institute for Information Science at the University of Applied Sciences in Chur, in collaboration with the Institute for Multimedia Production. To create a sense of unity, the event was live-streamed so participants could follow along and feel part of the event. The team of organizers led the event on-camera from a stage from Chur, giving instructions and encouragement to participants.
The data used in this year’s projects covered a variety of areas, reaching from press articles and topographic information, paintings and provenience descriptions of artworks to datasets containing information about theatre performances, Swiss heritage institutions or art exhibitions.
While organizing a virtual event had its challenges, it also created opportunities, with participants from 18 countries joining and sharing. This international touch, along with virtual break rooms, cocktail hours and other ways to interact online, led to a successful event despite the circumstances. With 15 projects and a rich side program open to anyone, the event garnered incredibly positive feedback.
Eventpage / Challenges / Projects summarized / Aftermovie
GLAM and Wikidata
Wikimedia CH has started a collaboration with the Montreux Jazz Archives for a Wikidata integration project. Beforehand, we completed a similar project together with the Swiss National Sound Archives. The Wikidata project aims to carry out an integration between the Montreux Jazz Festival (MJF) authority file and Wikidata. The respective meta data, which is free of rights, will be extracted from the database of the MJF with the following two objectives:
- Enrich the Wikidata knowledge base with quality information
- Enrich the authority file of the MJF, enabling a flow of information from Wikidata to the MJF
To perform the alignment with Wikidata it is necessary that the MJF exposes its data through Web pages reachable with standard URLs, which was not the case so far. This project step was considered mandatory from our side and has been successfully completed by the Montreux Jazz Archives Team, in order for us to proceed with the next project activity.
The project encompasses the process of interlinking, which is the actual stage of the Wikidata project. The following types of entities will be interlinked with Wikidata:
- Musicians (approx. 17'000 items)
- Songs (approx. 47'000 items)
- Concerts (approx. 4'500 items)
For songs and concerts a Wikidata BOT will be developed. For musicians a manual interlinking is required. Wikidata lacks information on entities like 'songs' and 'concerts', therefore, the risk of disambiguation is low. The entity alignment can be performed using automatic procedures based on entity labels and exploiting the Wikidata ontology with safety reasonableness. The interlinking of the musicians (17'000 entities) instead, will be performed manually. Wikidata has many entities instances of classes like 'person' or 'musical ensemble', and the risk of creating wrong alignments, using only the names of the musicians, is too high to allow the use of automatic procedures.
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The Montreux Jazz Archives requested to be notified, if changes to their meta data occur. Therefore, for any Wikidata change on Montreux Jazz related items, a service will be configured. The objective is to check daily, if Wikidata items related to the Montreux Jazz Archives database has been changed. The same service will send a notification via email to the Montreux Jazz Archives’ staff. In order to implement this activity, a database will be developed to store the diff track record and a service to periodically query Wikidata and send the respective emails.
GLAM and Education
Cultural Innovation Open Lab
Wikimedia CH has been invited to participate in the first Cultural Innovation Open Lab, hosted by the University of Lausanne and the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). The aim of this new interdisciplinary project is to create cultural experiences for a post-pandemic society. The thematic working groups develop innovative cultural concepts and solutions such as digital tools and practices to help museums, music festivals, and theaters continue to operate, in an age of social distancing.
The Open Lab participants met virtually throughout the month of June to work on different topics ranging from how museums can leverage the digitalization of their content, to new formats that allow concerts and the performative arts to continue during a pandemic. The initiative is not only an avenue for us to learn and provide guidance, but also a great opportunity for outreach and to meet important partners among key contacts at GLAM institutions throughout Switzerland. Link to further information.
WikiArchives
International & Cross-boarder GLAM Awareness Campaigns
This year's International Archives Week took place from June 8 to June 14, 2020 and focused on "Empowering Knowledge Societies". Together with Wikimedia Austria, Germany and the Swiss Association of Archivists we launched an awareness campaign with the aim to motivate GLAM professionals and our volunteer community to support in improving and completing the presence of Archives on Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata in Switzerland, Austria and Germany. Interested in more information? Visit our project page.
Due to the pandemic, ICOM International explored new partnerships and communicated its collaboration with Wikimedia via newsletter. Moreover, Wikimedia CH has been asked to write a report on our activities and results for International Museum Day 2020. The report has been published on June 11, 2020 on the ICOM International news page. Enjoy reading our report or visit the project page for more information.
Highlight Activities from our GLAM Partners
ETH Library Project
This month the ETH Library in Zurich completed their Wikipedia project. 5'791 Wikipedia articles have been enriched and 44 ETH Library staff members have been involved in this project so far. This project started as Wikipedia Action Day 2212 in December last year. The aim was to improve the quality of existing Wikipedia articles concerning 2'212 Swiss municipalities. Moreover, the event endeavored to enrich the articles with photographs by the Swiss aerial pioneer Walter Mittelholzer and his successor Werner Friedli. The ETH Library offers access to its images, and pictures can be downloaded for free if the authors' rights allow it. Nevertheless, the library recognized that uploading their historical images onto Wikimedia Commons and integrating them into Wikipedia articles made them visible and accessible to a wider public. The ETH Library has contributed more than 50'000 images to Wikimedia Commons and continuously supports us, in implementing events and new formats to enhance the quality of our projects. Wikimedia CH wants to express its thanks to the ETH Library team and the active Wikipedians engaging in this project as well as for the great achievement! Link to the blog report of ETH Library.
Cantonal Administration of Appenzell Ausserrhoden (AR)
It is the first time in the history of Wikimedia CH, that a Cantonal Administration launches a Wikimedia project largely by themselves. A joint team of the Cantonal Library and the State Archives started this project with the aim to complete information about the canton of Appenzell, personalities, families and more using their archival holdings and integrating the information of the Historical Lexicon of Switzerland (HLS). The project includes completing Wikipedia articles, releasing valuable images under a CC BY-SA license on Wikimedia Commons and launching a transcription project on WikiSource.
The first milestone is to integrate all German-language articles about Appenzell Ausserrhoden from the Historical Lexicon of Switzerland into Wikipedia. For biographies and family related articles an HLS model for Wikikipedia articles has been created.
In its work, the Cantonal Administration of AR has been supported by the voluntary community and Wikimedia CH, as it became aware of how important it is to prepare the corresponding image material. For this reason, knowledge is being developed in parallel on how to use Wikimedia Commons to upload predominantly copyright-free images and how to create a WikiSource project.
As an example, one of the most beautiful manuscripts from the Cantonal Library, 'Memorial der Tugendt (Johann von Schwarzenberg)' was just uploaded with Pattypan. This manuscript has been available at e-codices for 10 years under a non-commercial license. In collaboration with e-codices, the Cantonal Library has now changed the license accordingly and made it available on Wikimedia Commons so that the handwriting can be transcribed to WikiSource in a next step. Link to the project page / Link to the Memorial der Tugendt
New Release of GLAM Statistical Tool
In the last two years, we have extensively worked to improve the GLAM Statistical Tool. We are happy to announce the release of the new version at the beginning of June 2020. The GLAM statistical tool has evolved to become a real working instrument, with its significantly improved usability. The added functionalities include new search features for media files, a statistical drill-down by image category, category-related statistics, and analysis of unused media on a statistical level, as well as a practical instrument for planning future work. The GLAM Statistical Tool now also offers an algorithm that suggests unused media files to be added to selected Wikipedia articles, with direct links to the suggested articles. Explore the GLAM Statistical Tool.
Research Case of the White Paper Cooperation Writing Between Taiwan Gallery and Wikidata Taiwan
In 2020, Wikidata Taiwan and Shin Leh Yuan Art space[1] co-started a research case, “The imagination of constructed art archive: take historical data of Shin Leh Yuan Art Space as a case study”, was the first ever “self-initiated” research case by Taiwan community and it aims to create a well-knitted Wikidata white paper for certain principle. This research case is the biggest achievement of our community in the first-half of 2020, below we will briefly introduce the content of this research case.
- [1] Shin Leh Yuan Art Space, one of the most representative and also the longest exist alternative art space located in Taiwan (founded in 1995). Because the member artists’ dedication on the discussion between different principle and its potential of rallying different art organization, we can, in this collaboration, not only play as the technician but also as a actual participant entering the discussion.
Background
Creating a proper white paper for Wikidata is the top priority for Wikidata Taiwan community. Due to Wikidata’s international nature, some translation issue often emerge while people are contributing to the platform and cause some uncertainty in the process. In 2019, the community, we, realized that though the Wikidata server as a great attraction to many institutions in Taiwan, the lack of a proper standardized operation procedure to follow often leads to difference to the international community norm, consequently undermined our reliability. Therefore, a well-tailored white paper which servers as a authorization that can be referred will greatly improve the environment of Wikidata, thus, improve the accessibility of Wikidata. However, a complete white paper which cover every aspect and every principle is too much to be established in once, therefore we decided to take it steps by steps, principle by principle.
Shin Leh Yuan Art Space is having its 25th anniversary in 2020. They are hopping , by the help of Wikidata, to organize, open and share its stories and data all by once to the public. And this create the perfect opportunity for two community to cooperate writing a Wikidata white paper.
How
There are three main stages in the process:
- Input all the information and data from Shin Leh Yuan:
Follow the already existed tutorial document of Wikidata to upload and trying to find out what are causing issue during the process. And according to the reports start the discussion of correction.
- Using CDWA(Categories for the Description of Works of Art), DC(Dublin Core)[2] as reference to clarify the Wikidata tutorial document:
Due to the international nature of Wikidata, different language might have different lexical gap in between. Therefore, by using CDWA, DC, etc. as reference, can not only help us trying to clarify the ambiguity cause by the translation but also improve Wikidata’s compatibility to other regulations.
- Hosting public conference, invite experts in the principle to discuss the Wikidata’s usability:
By discussion with different principles allowing us to gather different opinions from different points of view, enable us to discover the possible blind spots and thus helping us stacking another brick to the foundation to the white paper.
- [2] CDWA and DC are both international approved regulation of the art and culture principle. The Chinese translation of both is done by Academia Sinica Special Project team. More info at: CDWA V2.0 中文元素一覽表、國家圖書館詮釋資料規範(DC)
Issues and Solutions
Already we have entered 250 titles of Shin Leh Yuan relative artists and exhibitions into wikidata and discovered some issues:
- The lack of important concept in Wikidata: take exhibition as example, within current wikidata structure, there are no concept of “ Adviser ”, “Co-organize”, etc. after some further research we found out that might be cause by lexical gap between English and Chinese culture. However, these concept is quite important in Taiwan exhibition context.
- The structure of Wikidata is differ from other archives or information archiving devices, and will require some degree of logic translate while inputting the data. The exact know-how is still under heavy development and it will be one of the main focus of the white paper.
The issues listed above will be discussed with professional librarians and archivists before October.
Goal
Achieved
- 249 new Entries, 305 edited.
- 4 conference, and covered four different topics: art critique, museum technology, data authorization, and aboriginal culture. More than 100 people participated and over 3000 viewed online. (dated 22th, June, 2020)
- Cooperate with 5 local artist organization.
Planned
- Deliver a stage report at COSCUP 2020 OpenStreetMap x Wikidata.
- Host at least 6 more conference and 2 workshop.
- Deliver a white paper.
New project on Islamic art
Khalili Collections
Biographies of the artists Plácido Zuloaga and Yabu Meizan, created by this project, reached the front page of English Wikipedia through the Did You Know process. A volunteer has translated the Yabu Meizan article into Vietnamese. Two new draft articles were created this month and just two new images were uploaded this month.
The current project is due to end in August 2020. I put in a proposal for a further six months which would take the placement to February 2021 and which would be mainly focused on Islamic art. This has apparently been received positively and I will have more details when we have a signed agreement.
Juneteenth2020 +Pride
Juneteenth2020
AfroCROWD held workshops and a plenary talk on zoom, AfroCROWD/Juneteenth2020
Pride and Black Lives Matter
Wikimedians of Minnesota User Group held a workshop, Wikipedia Editathon for Pride and Black Lives Matter/Zoom
PRIDE Wikipedia Edit-a-thon
Arlington PRIDE partnered with Wikimedia DC and held a workshop on zoom, Mastercard Volunteer Day Pride Edit-a-thon
#BecauseOfHerStory.
Smithsonian’s American Women's History Initiative and the National Museum of Natural History held a workshop, Women in Science - Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History Wikipedia.
NYC 2020 Census Multilingual Wikipedia Edit-a-thon
Sure We Can and Wikimedia NYC held a workshop, SureWeCan2
Science History Institute
Sadly, the Science History Institute in Philadelphia, PA has cut 16 positions, including that of Wikipedian in Residence, for budgetary reasons. Mary Mark Ockerbloom has served as Wikipedian in Residence for the past seven years, releasing 1,481 images from the Institute's events and collections on Commons and averaging 1-2 new articles, deep editing of 5-6 more articles, and hundreds of small edits on Wikipedia and Wikidata each month. She has worked with numerous people and organizations throughout the Philadelphia/Delaware Valley area, via invited talks, workshops, edit-a-thons, and monthly WikiSalons.
Mary Mark Ockerbloom and Doreva Belfiore will continue to host a monthly Philadelphia WikiSalon online on a volunteer basis independent of the Science History Institute. Each meeting includes a demonstration, as well as opportunities to ask questions and discuss articles needing work. Doreva Belfiore has been creating short instructional videos, each a few minutes long, focusing on Wikipedia skills of interest to librarians and archivists.
Executive statement
The Wikimedia Foundation issued an executive statement about the Brand project, Communications/Wikimedia brands/2030 movement brand project/Executive statement.
Creative Commons invites Open GLAM stories from underrepresented communities
Creative Commons has a call available for (paid) stories about Open GLAM outside of the US and Europe. This call may be very relevant to the GLAM-Wiki community as well. Take a look and do apply if you have a relevant story to tell!
See the original announcement from Creative Commons.
Open GLAM: Call for story proposals
Creative Commons want to hear from Open GLAM in underrepresented communities.
The Open GLAM survey by Douglas McCarthy and Andrea Wallace has revealed a global picture where “Open GLAM” (“Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums”) seems to be happening mainly in the US and Europe. However, these types of maps and visualizations can also be tricky. The data collected might be reflecting particular data biases rather than the real practice happening in the ground.
There are institutions and practitioners in the Global South and in underrepresented communities that are participating in Open GLAM, through documenting intangible heritage, through releasing public domain content, or that might have good reasons to carefully approach “Open GLAM”. The reasons why these stories might not hit the front lines might vary, but sometimes it’s because the people behind those stories don’t have the time, the resources or the ability to produce them. Sometimes it’s very hard to run a volunteer project and then also write about that experience altogether.
To encourage people to write about those stories and document their practices and experiences, the Open GLAM Platform of Creative Commons approved to allocate a total of USD4,800 to produce a total of 16 pieces or stories, paying USD300 a piece to the person or groups writing them. We expect to grant half the money to stories coming from Africa and the remaining half to the rest of the Global South and/or underrepresented communities.
For the purposes of this call, underrepresented includes the following categories:
- Global South countries (see https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_regional_classification)
- Ethnic and racial minorities
- Indigenous people and communities
- LGBTQ++ diversities
- People with disabilities
These stories will be published under a Creative Commons license (CC BY, CC BY SA or CC0) through the Open GLAM Medium publication, edited by Douglas McCarthy and Evelin Heidel.
Creative Commons will be receiving stories on a rolling basis, until they approve the total amount of stories planned for.
The stories can be in a variety of formats (written pieces, podcasts, videos, among others). The stories can be in Spanish, French, English, Arabic, Chinese or Russian, but Creative Commons asks for the proposals to be written in English. The proposals will be evaluated by a small committee composed by Douglas McCarthy, Mariana Ziku, and Evelin Heidel.
If you have any doubts about the available funds for the Open GLAM Platform of Creative Commons, read the full proposal. If you have any doubts about the stories (such as formats, participants, licensing, among others), go to the relevant section of the document. If your questions are still unsolved, feel free to reach out to info [at] openglam.org.
Departure of Sandra Fauconnier
Departure of Sandra Fauconnier
Sandra Fauconnier left the Wikimedia Foundation at the end of June after a productive and impactful three years. Sandra documented all of her Structured Data on Commons pilots and just posted an invitation for you to work with the OpenGLAM community on best practices for describing copyright on Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons.
July's GLAM events
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