GLAM/Newsletter/March 2019/Single

This Month in GLAM – Volume IX, Issue III, March 2019

Albania report • Armenia report • Australia report • Brazil report • Colombia report • Czech Republic report • France report • India report • Italy report • Macedonia report • Netherlands report • Serbia report • Sweden report • UK report • USA report • Wikidata report • WMF GLAM report • Calendar

WikiFilmat SQ - new articles about the Albanian movie industry!

By Silva

WikiFilmat SQ

Wikimedia Community Usergroup Albania continues the series of the WikiFilmat SQ hackathons to create new articles which aim to improve the online information on SQ Wikipedia about the Albanian movie industry. Through the materials provided by the Albanian National Film Center, the first two series of hackathons were held during this month. They resulted in creating 81 new articles on various films, which did not have an article on SQ wikipedia so far. The new articles can be found in this categoroy: https://sq.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kategoria:WikiFilmat_SQ

Other hackathons will continue during the two upcoming months.

Art+Feminism+GLAM, Collaboration with Hovhannes Toumanian museum

Art+Feminism+GLAM

By Armine Aghayan (User:Armineaghayan)

During the first week of March the world celebrates the international day of women. I got a suggestion from Art + Feminism group to organize an Edit-a-thon on this event. I write about women every day (#OneWomanADay). So this time I decided to mix Art+Feminism with GLAM under the influence of panel-discussion at Tel Aviv GLAM conference entitled "Closing the gender gap and increasing diversity through GLAM collaborations". In Armenian Wikipedia Art+Feminism Collaboration runs from March 10till April 14. It includes editing in Wikipedia (covering Women in Red links), Wikidata (writing data of the artworks from the database of National Gallery of Armenia, Eduard Isabekyan Gallery), wikicommons (uploading images of women, statues depicting women, motherhood) and Wikiquite (quotes of women writers and poets).

Together with Eduard Isabekyan Gallery we had an edit-a-thon during which the editors created articles on the topics Isabekyan Gallery provided: that is the artworks of the Soviet-Armenian painter Arpenik Nalbandyan mainly depicting women or women's labor. Some editors covered Wikidata items thus making the work of the other editors much easier as there was no need to fill the Infobox because of the power of Wikidata. I do hope that this collaboration will go deeper and this institution will also provide the photos of the paintings the editors wrote about.

On their official web page Eduard Isabekyan Gallery put a wiki logo under the images which have a Wikipedia article. When the reader pushes it, it will take him/her strait to the Wikipedia article created during the Art+Feminism Edit-a-thon.

Edit-a-thon at Isabekyan Gallery
Edit-a-thon at Isabekyan Gallery
Edit-a-thon at Isabekyan Gallery

Inspiration

During Art+Feminism Collaboration Armenian artist Mariam Galstyan who is also taking part in Art+Feminism collaboration and translating articles about prominent artists, decided to open licence some of her works which also include images of women, and uploaded them to Wikimedia Commons.

Autumn portrait by Mariam Galstyan
Nude model by Mariam Galstyan
From the art serie "Thoughts in blue vacuum" by Mariam Galstyan

The collaboration runs till April 14, and there might be more insiration and we get more nice works with the group of active editors.

Collaboration with Hovhannes Toumanian museum

By Mher Bekaryan (User:Beko)

In 2019 Armenia celebrates Hovhannes Toumanian’s 150th anniversary. Hovhannes Toumanian is a famous Armenian writer, poet, translator, national and public figure. On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the great Armenian poet Wikimedia Armenia and Hovhannes Toumanian Museum in Yerevan started GLAM collaboration. The main activities of collaboration were scanning of Toumanian's documents, taking photos of Toumanian's personal items and uploading them, using collected materials, data and photos in Wikipedia, Wikidata and in Sister Projects' pages; creating of Wikidata items concerning these objects.

Wikimedia Armenia volunteers took photos of Toumanian's personal items, artifacts from his collections during a visit to the museum. They scanned Toumanian's personal documents, manuscripts, signature copies, the board games created by the writer, prepared the photos from Hovhannes Toumanian's archive for uploading to Wikimedia Commons.

In March we uploaded for about 300 photos, in Wikisours Armenian Wikiclubs members proofreads works of Hovhannes Toumanian and this is going to be a continuous collaboration. All the photos from this collaboration provided by Hovhannes Toumanian Museum can be found in the special category of Wikicommons.

Art+Feminism 2019 in Australia

By Pru Mitchell

Art+Feminism 2019

Several Australian states took up the Art+Feminism event challenge during March.

The Brisbane, Queensland Art Architecture and Feminism event was organised by Louise Mayhew and Susan Best from Griffith University of Technology, and was held at the Queensland College of Art, South Bank on Saturday 9 March, 2019.

In Melbourne, Victoria, Wikimedia Australia was pleased to partner with the Women's Art Register again, who hosted this year's Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon, on Saturday 9 March, 2019. It was held in the Richmond and Burnley Historical Society rooms, in the basement of the Richmond Library. This is next to the Women's Art Register Archives, making it very convenient to access physical as well as online resources for articles.

It was wonderful to hold this year's event in conjunction with other long-term partners, the #WikiD team at Parlour: women, equity, architecture who joined forces with us for the edit-a-thon.

Pru Mitchell and Alex Lum facilitated the day's training, and used the very useful Outreach Dashboard. The Australian Feminist Art Timeline was a much-used resource. Collectively we added just under 20,000 words about creative women to Wikipedia, with new articles on:

Architecture criticism was another theme of the edit-a-thon, with many additions to the Wikipedia list of architecture critics. As a result of the day the #WikiD team donated the book Women Architects in Australia 1900-1950 by Julie Willis & Bronwyn Hanna (RAIA, 2001) to the Women's Art Register archives.

The GLAM at USP Museum of Veterinary Anatomy: a history of learnings and improvements

By Sturm

A GLAM initiative sometimes carries with it not only the stories of a whole process of approaching, partnering, matching inventories and uploading content on Commons, but it can also be confused with the history of learnings and improvements of a whole group and individuals that are part of the Wikimedia movement. This seems to be the case with the GLAM initiative that involved the USP Museum of Veterinary Anatomy, a museum open to the public at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine and Animal Science (FMVZ) at the University of São Paulo (USP).

Context

The initiative dates back to 2016, when after a series of preliminary meetings, the so-called “Wikimedia in Brazil” user group (currently “Wiki Movimento Brasil” group) participated in the launch and dissemination of this GLAM together with RIDC NeuroMat, a Brazilian research center dedicated to integrating mathematical modeling and theoretical neuroscience. At that time, we reported in the August Newsletter: GLAM initiative with the Museum of Veterinary Anatomy will load hundreds of valuable images.

At the time, it was one of the first GLAM initiatives led by the group and was rich in challenges and learnings. The first one deals with the collection inventory itself, which was in need of a real restructuring and, so, that made us adopt the tactic of upload the collection monthly split into small sets, which allowed us to control more precisely the quality of the information as the inventory was being checked and restructured.

Throughout the process, we tested some mass-upload tools, and our best results were due Pattypan, a desktop uploader that enables a high amount of flexibility when proper, detailed image descriptions are important for the images' reuse on Wikimedia projects. We were glad in even help in bug reporting for that tool, just like we did for the most recent Pattypan release until now.

Throughout almost two years, more than 600 files were uploaded from the museum's collection, from which we exclude only a few images related to the human anatomy due to image rights issues. Talking about the nonhuman animals, however, we were able to illustrate some very specific articles such as the hippopotamus Teteia (a long-lived individual that died of a rare type of cancer), the orca named Nandu (Samoa and Tilikum's "Brazilian" brother) and the famous Cacareco rhinoceros, a female black rhinoceros that became famous as a candidate for the 1958 São Paulo city council elections with the intention of protesting against political corruption. Electoral officials did not accept Cacareco's candidacy, but she eventually won 100,000 votes, more than any other party in that same election. Cacareco's candidacy inspired the Rhinoceros Party of Canada, nominally led by the rhinoceros Cornelius the First.

The widespread use of images only in March 2019 resulted in over 6,000,000 views.

Spin-offs

In addition to the uploads themselves, we were careful to create some unique contents related to the images, such as several articles on anatomical preservation techniques, such as Diafanização, for instance. Some of them were created during some edit-a-thons we did, just like this one.

A main spin-off was a movie on the exhibition "Por Dentro do Cérebro", at the University of São Paulo.

Another spin-off material related to this GLAM initiative was a handout on the use of Wikipedia in Veterinary academic courses, - it was inspired by the work developed by the Wiki Education Foundation.

Read more on this GLAM initiave at Wikipedia.pt

Gallery

Moving GLAM institutions inside and outside Colombia

By Hiperterminal

Notes from Iberoconf 2019

Colombia was part of the Iberoconf 2019 in Santiago (Chile). Here you can find the notes of the meeting from Monica (Indigenous Languages) and Leonardo (GLAM) who were there. Iberoconf 2019: notas posteriores

The public domain in Colombia

The copyright changed in Colombia on 2018. We wrote an explanation from the GLAM team about the changes for the public domain and an invitation to visit libraries, archives and museums to discover what is in public domain and share it. El dominio público en Colombia en 2019

An editathon in Bogotá

The GLAM project from Wikimedistas de Colombia and the University Santo Tomás ran a workshop in the library of this university. The librarians and participants learn about Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikibooks, Wikisource and Wikidata among others. The notes in Encuentro GLAM.

Edit-a-thon Prachatice

By Juandev

Edit-a-thon Prachatice, fewer barriers better results

Introduction

Edit-a-thon Prachatice took place in Prachatice, on the south of the Czech Republic March 8^th to 10^th, 2019 and has officially ended March 31^st. It was organised by informal group Via Wiki (users Juandev (main organiser) and Elektracentrum (on site negotiations and preparation)) with the partnership of Prachatice Museum, under the patronage of Ing. Martin Malý, the mayor of the town.

Ten Wikimedians from the whole country had arrived. Most of them were from Prague, two of them from České Budějovice (town close to Prachatice) and one participant was from Brno. Moreover, about four participants have contributed online.

The goal of the project was to cover local topics on Wikipedia and build a local wiki community. This was proposed to the Wikimedia Foundation, which was requested for funding and the funding was received. We set a concrete goal: 45 articles to be edited, at least two new participants to be recruited and two local wiki events to be scheduled. The Wiki participants spent most of the time editing, photographing, helping others and collecting resources for editing. Of course, we haven’t forgotten about Wikidata. Two of the participants were designated to take pictures, one of them directly in the town and the other one around the town and in the countryside.

Participants from out of town were financially supported on transportation, accommodation and refreshment. Prachatice Museum, led by Mgr. Peter Berkovský, accommodated the participants in a room equipped with the internet connection and further provided them with literature sources and other professional support.

Participants have to get to know the place first

The results of the edit-a-thon were following: 134 articles created or improved, 1667 photographs uploaded, 74 new Wikidata items added, 1 new contributor recruited, 4 potential partners gained and 1 future common project planned.

This contribution was not measured by the Programs & Events Dashboard but was rather administered manually. This represented a rather complicated way, but it gave us a deeper insight into the ways of contribution and furthermore, by the means of sending the participant questionnaire post-event, we will be able to improve conditions for future edit-a-thons which in result will make the event more contributive. The results have shown, that rather than having a narrow model, where participants come, sit and edit for two days in a library, it is better to approach a new model, where everybody is free to schedule their work in whichever way they want. This model also seems to be more welcomed by the participants. Understandably the venue with the internet and resources is still available to the participants. Our results show that there are some participants who rather enjoy the traditional model since all of their contributions were made during the editing hours. Others preferred to get in touch with the town on their own, take photographs, collect information resources, rise professional questions to the museum personnel and afterwards do most of their work at home – as they have an extra time till the end of the month. The ways of online contribution were less effective due to the limited time and fewer literature sources available to them. Here we clearly see, that the contribution was almost the same – 68 articles (54 by participants on the site and 14 by participants online) were edited during the event, while the contribution after editing event was slightly lower – 66 articles, including 4 articles from a new local participant. On the other hand, articles that were written after the edit-a-thon usually tend to be longer than those created during the event. Online participants did not contribute after the event itself has ended.

Organ in the Church of Saint James the Greater
Coat of arms at the Lower Gate Tower
House sign
Renaissance sgraffito at one of the local houses
Light pillbox from pre World War II times

The statistical analysis shows us, that while some participants were merely editing their articles, the others were helping them. One on-site and one online participant have reached a high participation level. Therefore without any previous selection, we ended up with a rather diverse group which created such a fantastic result. There was also a high usage of the photographs taken – 31 %. This could be explained by the fact that most of the photographs taken were taken in order to be implemented into the edited articles and as some of the articles were longer, they in result could contain a higher amount of pictures.

Local participation and the future

On the other hand, the local participation was lower than we expected, even though the local participants had shown a great degree of interest. Therefore after the evaluation of the contributions and the discovery that the open model appears to be more beneficial, it has been applied into the management of local organisations, which brought us a first collaboration that starts in about a month.

With the contribution of local nongovernmental organization KreBul, o.p.s, which targets social problems and provides help to its target audience in their office, we are planning to establish the so-called Wiki Club (or Wikipedia Club) which is going to represent a low barrier way how to integrate interested locals into Wikimedia community. In the beginning, we will show people how to not fear to edit Wikipedia and encourage them to edit lists, for which the contributors will not need so much knowledge when editing an article. In the second phase, we will be moving to articles themselves, providing the participants with Q&A sessions and training. The future will show whether this model will be successful or not.

Hopefully there will be another establishment of cooperation with the local museum. The same museum that has provided us with the venue and had previously realized that the impact of Wikipedia is immense. Traditionally the aim of such an institution is to research and spread information. However, the old ways of spreading information in a world where the role of the Internet is becoming more and more significant, are becoming more complicated and expensive. We are extremely lucky that the museum has provided us with the venue, promised us to release some old photographs from their archives, and shown an interest in further cooperation.

From what has been written so far, one can conclude that Edit-a-thon Prachatice was not an isolated activity, but it rather represented the part and the beginning of a larger project, which was established and scheduled to take place in the area. The negotiations have started about 10 months ago and have brought us two Wikipedia presentations that took place in February and March 2019, the edit-a-thon itself, and concerning the future, there will be a Wiki Club establishment and possible future cooperations. The time invested into the preparations of this edit-a-thon was spent on the detailed choice of topics for editing, clean-up of categories on both Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, standardising the names and creating the online database of articles from hard print local professional magazine. Therefore if there will be enough time, we would like to organise another editing event later this year, in which our great team would participate. We expect and hope for many new local contributors to join us and continue to strengthen the local community. In the future, we hope for collaboration between Wikipedia and local organizations such as the library, archive and even the local schools.

Main square
Countryside
Decorative rail of the chapel
Prachatice from the hill

Wiki day at the Institut national d'histoire de l'art; Age of wiki at the Musée Saint-Raymond

By VIGNERON & Christelle Molinié

Wiki day at the INHA

On March 29 and in partnership with Wikimédia France was organized a seminar day at the Institut national d'histoire de l'art (INHA, National Institute for Art History, Paris). More than 80 person were there to learn about Wikimedia projects and how to use them to promote and enrich their collections or for art and history research (full program in French). This day will combined presentation of experiences (in the morning), training and contribution (in the afternoon). The morning session focused on various projects and actions, initiated by both Wikimedians or institutions, aimed at enhancing heritage collections and art history research on Wikipedia, WikiCommons and WikiData. The afternoon was devoted to contribution training workshops (introduction or advanced uses, workshop on professional uses).

Age of wiki at the Musée Saint-Raymond

The inauguration of the new exhibition Age of Classics! Antiquity in pop culture and the celebration of the Month of the Francophone contribution were two good reasons to justify the organization of a contribution workshop at the Musée Saint-raymond, the museum of archaeology in Toulouse on Saturday, March 30. After a visit of the exhibition, a small group of highly motivated contributors focused on the issue of the reception of antiquity in contemporary times in the field of art and popular culture (comic strips, manga, cinema, video clips, video games). The main activities were the creation of Wikidata items concerning objects and artists on display, the uploading of images of antiquities and the enrichment of Wikipedia pages about the contemporary artists, their works and the objects of the past that inspired them.

A great opportunity to travel back in time, to cross cultures and identify their common ground and to discuss societal issues that echo the stories of the past.

Gujarat Vishw Kosh Trust content donation to Wikimedia

By KCVelaga

Gujarat Vishwakosh Trust publishes Gujarati Vishwakosh, an encyclopedia in Gujarati. User:Gazal world has been consistently working with the organisation for more than a year now. He regularly collaborates with them to resolve requests for sources on the resource exchange page of Gujarati Wikipedia, and also for content on Gujarati Wikisource. Previously, he convinced them to release forty-five images under CC BY-SA 4.0. Most of them are of Gujarati authors, whose photographs aren't otherwise available. Fostering the relationship further, he convinced the organisation's officials to donate images in their possession to Wikimedia Commons and generally, these images are quite rare. In January 2019, the trust's president sent an email to OTRS identifying the Wikimedia user account, User:Gujarat Vishw Kosh Trust, to their organisation, and are willing to release all the works uploaded through that under CC BY-SA 4.0. Over the past two months, they've uploaded several images of high encyclopedic value. Some of them are showcased below;

Italian librarians in Milan

By Daniele Saibene & Alessandro Marchetti

Stelline 2019

On the 14th and 15th of March, the most important conference for Italian librarians has been held at Stelline Fondation. The title was "La biblioteca che cresce. Contenuti e servizi tra frammentazione e integrazione". Our members Chiara Storti, Marco Chemello, Luca Martinelli and Claudio Forziati had speeches and Wikimedia Italia was co-organizer of the side conference "Strategie digitali per la scuola", with speech of the member Luigi Catalani and 6 workshop on Wikimedia projects.

WLM award ceremony

On the 23rd of March, 71 people took part, in Sala Studio Bertarelli (Castello Sforzesco, Milan) at the award ceremony of WLM Italy. 15 photographer received award, certificate and clapping form the audience. Moreover, it has been inaugurated the exhibition with the 21 winning photos.

Tuscany libraries

Preparation for WLM2019 in Tuscany is warming up. After the intense effort in the province of Pistoia during last year (18 out of 20 municipalities taking part to WLM2018), this year we sent emails to all the civil parishes in the provinces of Prato, Lucca and Livorno and part of the provinces of Pisa and Florence. After the first courses for wikidata and cultural heritage (see February report) in Pontedera, in March we organized another event at the library of the Department of Social Science of the University of Florence with User:Alexmar983, followed by a 2-day event about Wikipedia and Wikidata at the municipal library "Ernesto Ragionieri" in Sesto Fiorentino under the supervision of User:Giaccai and User:Manuelarosi. In total, we gathered more than 24 librarians who will help us further in our effort to classify and list the cultural heritage of our region on Wikidata, and create related articles on Wikipedia. Another course will take place at the Lazzerini library in Prato in April.

March 5th, biblioteca Ernesto Ragionieri

Palestra Wikipedia

On March 28th the "Palestra Wikipedia" ("Wikipedia Gym") started in Florence, organized by WMI, Fondazione Strozzi and the University of Florence. it's the third event where volunteers teach students majoring in history of art at the University of Florence how to create and improve articles about modern day artists. In total, the course will encompass seven lessons and will be attended by 15 students.

Art and Feminism 2019 Salerno

On the occasion of the Art + Feminism 2019 campaign, the Computer Science Department of the University of Salerno, in collaboration with the Mind the Gaps and Wikimedia Italia, hosted the sixth international women's writing marathon. After the greetings of the organizers and a detailed introduction to the use of Wikipedia, the participants discussed the political activism of women in favor of human rights and the issues of the gender gap; after, the editathon of the previously selected entries based on encyclopedic relevance criteria: this year the focus was on biographies of activists awarded with the International Women of Courage Award. Ten biographies were written and there was great enthusiasm for the subject and for the approach to Wikipedia.

Art and Feminism 2019 Potenza

On the occasion of the Art + Feminism 2019 campaign, the Walter Gropius Art School of Potenza hosted an initiative promoted by the Gender Citizenship Purpose Committee and CIDI Potenza, with the support of Wikimedia Italia, to enrich the pages dedicated to women of Basilicata on Wikimedia projects. The participants developed the wikibook dedicated to the biographical profiles of Lucan women.

WikiLeague: Edit-a-thon on German Literature

By Македонец

On 30^th of March, we have organized the first of the for edit-a-thons dedicated on German culture related topics. WikiLeague came up as a project in collaboration with Goethe Institute in Skopje that aims to bring content related to the German culture to Macedonian readers through their translation from Wikipedia to German on Wikipedia in Macedonian. The project consists of four six-hour editing marathons with training and instruction on editing Wikipedia and four consecutive three-weekly editing competitions on topics: German Literature, German Film, German Music and World Heritage in Germany. The event started at 10 o'clock and took place at the electronic class room of the National and university library, our longtime GLAM partner institution, where 12 participants have been editing for six hours until 16 o'clock. All of the attendants who have different professional profiles have been introduced to two main editing ways through the coded and visual editor and the translation tool. After the initial training all of the participants have been choosing offered topics for articles from a list consisting 100 topics divided in three main groups about: 1) German writers, novelists, poets, 2) literature works such as books, dramas, poems and 3) Literary genres, groups, events (book fairs). This first edit-a-thon went successfully with a total outcome of 36 newly created articles. The topic of German Literature will remain open for editing for the participants in the next 20 days until the next edit-a-thon scheduled for 20^th of April.

WikiconNL, International Womens Day and working together with Amnesty, Field study Dutch Libraries and Wikimedia

By Ciell & Denise Jansen

WikiconNL

On the 8th and 9th of March we held our National Conference: WikiconNL.

WikiconNL was a worthy follow-up of our one day Wikimedia Conference, which was held from 2006 until 2016. This year at WikiconNL we welcomed over 100 guests. On Friday the focus was on GLAMs and partners working within this field: Saturday was more of a hands on day, and we had workshops on Open Refine and an editathon.

The chair of WMNL, Frans Grijzenhout at the WikiCon
Working together
Discussions
Networking
Learning

International Womens Day

International Womens Day on the 8th of March was celebrated in cities throughout the Netherlands. There were Wikimedia-gatherings in

Utrecht: at the WikiCon NL, several topics on the Gendergap during the conference
Utrecht: at the WikiCon NL, we had a small exposition of a selection of images the Gendergap working group got donated in the past years, with a QR code to their corresponding Wikipedia article
Amsterdam - Bits of Freedom organised Edit-a-thon
Eindhoven: Watershed, a LHTBQ+ writers initiative, organised a Art + Feminism edit-a-thon
Hengelo: at the library in Hengelo, the Wikipedia Writing Collective organised a lecture on female artists in the 20st century
Maastricht: the Cell Foundation joined the Swedisch in a WikiGap event
Amsterdam, Atria and Wikimedia organised WikiFriday

Amnesty International Wiki-a-thons

On the first of March we kicked of a series of Amnesty wiki-a-thons in Amsterdam, with the goal to have more articles on female human rights defenders on Wikipedia. The system of a wiki-a-thon is simple, preparations are key. Amnesty makes sure there are sources on the human rights defenders en prints them: names of the rights defenders go on post-its up on the wall. Wikimedia volunteers take care of the Wikidata-part. Participants choose post-it with a name they are interested in and collect the paper with sources from Amnesty and start writing. Wikimedia volunteers go around and help the participants with their first steps and collect their usernames. Afterwards, all articles are checked for the Wikipedia markup, categories and Wikidata connections.

We wrote about 40 articles in Dutch and English with 38 participants this first afternoon: the Amnesty wiki-a-thons are ongoing in April.

See also the new Learning Pattern: Organising a Wiki-a-thon the Amnesty way.

Field study Dutch Libraries and Wikimedia

In recent years, there have been several collaborative projects between libraries and editors of Wikipedia, for example. Cooperation therefore seems obvious and is becoming increasingly common worldwide. Because libraries that share their collections through Wikipedia and related projects have a wider reach than through their own channels. Wikipedia articles are also written in the library during special Wiki meetings.

Six months ago, Wikimedia Nederland, with the support of the Pica Foundation, started a field study into the collaboration between Wikimedia and libraries in the Netherlands. The aim is to map common goals, to gain insight into (time) investment and to assess what a structural collaboration can yield.

Knowledge meeting

On 15 May Wikimedia Nederland will organise a knowledge meeting for library staff. The results of desk research and network analysis will be presented, as well as examples of collaborative projects. These data serve as a basis for a subsequent work session to go deeper into the possibilities of collaboration.

Spring residences and a wiki competition

By Ivana Guslarevic

Translation corrections by Mickey Mystique

Wikipedians in residence

The Wikipedians in Residence are still in GLAM focus of Wikimedia Serbia. Two WIR programs were realized in March: the first one in the Museum of Science and Technology in Belgrade, and the second one in the University Library, as part of the Wiki Librarian project. Teodora Lukić, the WIR in the Museum of Science and Technology, has uploaded more than 500 images, and created 12 new articles on Serbian Wikipedia, but also significantly improved 7 articles from the available sources in the Museum. She has illustrated more than 180 articles with 410 (out of 505) released images, and digitized two books - Industrial heritage of Belgrade, by Rifat Kulenović, and Charles Darwin’s Becoming a fella, published in 19th century. One of the residence activities was the workshop for the Museum staff (mostly curators).

Electric fan dr Max-Levy, Berlin N.65. Made and used in 1920.
Folding camera Unicum
Gramofon His Master's Voice
Old UV lamp
The lamp designed by Gojko Varda

At the same time, Dragana Popović, the Wikipedian in residence at the University Library, has digitized 10 rare books (2607 pages), created 16 new articles, and improved 13 articles on Serbian Wikipedia. Dragana also made some photos of notable people in Serbia, during the events at the University Library, but this institution has released images from its archive too.

Pavle and Josip Slavenski
Milica Prodanovic
Milica Prodanovic
Mitropolit Stefan Stratimirovic
Ciklus slovenska fantastika
Ivana Stefanovic

WMRS Spring Cleaning 2019

Wikimedia Serbia has started a campaign of file improvement on Wikimedia Commons, especially the editing and improvement of the images that were uploaded within the Serbians GLAM projects, Photo contests and other projects of the community. The goal of this campaign is to increase the file usage throughout wiki projects, as well as proper image categorization, file description, and illustration of articles on Wikipedia. The action began with a Practical Workshop, comprised of a lecture about Wikimedia Commons, as well as the fundamentals of Copyright when it comes to this and other wiki platforms. Since then, the participants have the opportunity to edit photos and other files on Commons within a month. Upon completion of the campaign, and within the local conference WikiLive, we will announce the results and reward the participants with the most contributions.

Heritage of southeast Serbia

Đorđe Marković, a volunteer from Niš, has submitted his project to Wikimedia Serbia’s open call for grants, for establishing GLAM partnerships in the southeast region of Serbia. Wikimedia Serbia approved the project, and gave the initial communication and administrative support. The first institution who joined GLAM within this project is the Museum of healthcare culture, part of Public Health Institute in Niš. This museum will release the rare materials and photos of history of healthcare and medicine, and Đorđe will take photos of the museum exhibitions and create articles on Serbian Wikipedia. Đorđe is planning to cooperate with other GLAM institutions too, expecting around 2000 released and created images, and 30-50 new articles on Serbian Wikipedia by the end of the year.

UNESCO; Working life museums; Swedish Performing Arts Agency shares historic music; Upload of glass plates photographs

By Axel Pettersson, Alicia Fagerving, Albin Larsson & John Andersson

UNESCO

Two staff members and one volunteer from Wikimedia Sverige participated at the UNESCO Mobile Learning Week. During the conference we shared a table with staff and volunteers from a number of other Wikimedia affiliates and informed the conference participants about the Wikimedia movement. This was a very interesting crowd to reach as a number of high level decision makers from around the world took part. See also the report in the Education Newsletter.

We also had dedicated meetings with a number of UNESCO staff members. We met with the UNESCO archive where we discussed a formalized long term partnership around increasing access to their digitized material. We also met with the Swedish UNESCO delegation to discuss how we could engage other national UNESCO delegations in FindingGLAMs and convince them to share national datasets of their GLAM institutions. To that end we will organize a meeting at UNESCO HQ in May 2019. There was also a very interesting meeting about minority languages with the person responsible for the International Year of Indigenous Language. With the work around the Wikispeech tools and more we see a lot of possibilities for working together. WMSE intend to become a formal partner of the year and to take part in a number of activities together.

Working life museums

Continuing the work with working life museums two courses (so far, and one more in April), with focus on recording sounds and uploading them to Wikimedia Commons have been held. The participants have both learned how to use sound recorders and also how to cut and edit recordings before uploading them to Commons, as well as how to edit articles to make use of the recordings. Sounds, films and photos from soundsofchanges.eu will also be uploaded through cooperation in this project.

The Swedish Performing Arts Agency shares historic music

Till Pieljekaisse – a joik performed over a hundred years ago.

Wikimedia Sverige is continuing its cooperation with the Swedish Performing Arts Agency. This time, our focus is on audio files, as we have uploaded over a hundred files made available by the Agency's archive. The files are a selection that spans over several decades, showing a sample of Sweden's rich cultural history and reminding us that before television and the internet took over our lives, people had fun by creating and listening to music!

An especially interesting part of this upload is the joik collection. Joiks are a traditional form of song of the Sámi people (who were here before us), and these particular recordings were made around 1913 using a phonograph. And today we can all be culturally enriched by these beautiful voices that are over a hundred years old.

Upload of glass plates photographs digitalized by the Swedish Performing Arts Agency

As a part of the Wikimedia Commons Data Roundtripping project 1200 glass plates negatives digitalized by the Swedish Performing Arts Agency has been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. The photographs are mainly portraits of actors in early twentieth century plays.

Wiki-people and Wiki-museum-data

By Jason.nlw & MartinPoulter

News from the National Library of Wales

The National Library of Wales has this month finished working on its 'Wicipobl' (Wiki-People) project, which was funded by the Welsh Government. The project was the first Wikimedia focused project to be planned and delivered using the Impact Playbook, developed by Europeana. The end result is a comprehensive impact report which looks at a rages of changes, or impacts, brought about by the activities of the project. The report will be published very soon. Headline output of the project includes the release of 4862 portraits and associated metadata to Commons and Wikidata, 6 events, including a Hackathon and 4 events in schools, which were run by Aaron Morris, WiR with Menter Iaith Món in North Wales, and the creation of nearly 1500 new Welsh language Wicipedia articles about people featured in our portrait collection and the Dictionary of Welsh Biography.

I can also announce that we have secured a grant from the My-D Foundation to develop a Wikidata powered timeline feature for the new Dictionary of Welsh Biography Website. We will be working with developers at Histropedia to deliver this over the coming months. Jason.nlw (talk) 06:51, 2 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Oxford

A new data set has been shared: 1,779 manuscripts and early printed books have had items created in Wikidata. These cover nearly all the multi-page documents that have been fully digitised in the Bodleian's digital platform. To publicise this, I blogged about using Wikidata to create a custom view of these documents.

The History of Science Museum has been reaching out to other museums to get more contributions of data for Astrolabe Explorer, with some success that I hope to more fully report soon. In the meantime, I have made various cosmetic changes to the application.

I have been using the Ashmolean Museum data set on Wikidata to improve Commons, drawing in facts and links from Wikidata to photos taken by museum visitors. To invite a wider community to do similarly, I wrote "A call to action: Wikidata-fy your Commons photos".

A call went out on the Museums Computer Group mailing list for museums that are working with Wikidata, looking for partnerships for potential future work. Apparently there have been some responses and we are following up on this after Easter.

A mini-project is under consideration which, if funded, will pay for a few days of my time to work on Wikidata calendar queries.

Advocacy

I gave the opening keynote for the University of Oxford's Open Access Week (slides here), followed by a quick, 1-hour introduction to Wikipedia editing. The Bodleian Library's Juliet Ralph blogged about the event, which 15 people attended.

"What Wikidata offers Oxford’s GLAM Digital Strategy" is a blog post about how Wikidata helps address some of the strategic goals of Oxford's GLAMs.

I've been finishing up a simple animated video illustrating how Wikidata can help GLAM collections. This is for internal use in the first instance, but I hope to get it made public later on. I have written also most of a briefing for the Ashmolean Museum about the representation of their collections on Wikimedia projects.

Women's History Month and The Met has two Wikimedians in the house

By Slowking4, Avery Jensen, Kelly Doyle & Andrew Lih

Smithsonian Votes for Women Edit-a-thon

AWHI Votes for Women Edit-a-thon attendees show the reference works used

The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery and Wikimedia DC held a meetup Votes for Women edit-a-thon with Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery to update articles related to the history of women's suffrage in the United States. This was produced in connection with an exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery: "Votes for Women: A Portrait of Persistence" which outlines the women's movement to "obtain the right to vote as part of the larger struggle for equality." It was a lively kickoff event for a series of meetups focused on the Smithsonian's American Women's History Initiative (AWHI) organized by the Smithsonian Institute's Open Knowledge Coordinator, Kelly Doyle.

Kate Lemay, curator for the exhibit, spoke to attendees about the history of women in suffrage in the United States and women who need to be written back into history. The NPG is in the process of adding more than 240 images from the exhibit to Wikimedia Commons. Some of these images were added to articles at the event as part of the Whose Knowledge? #VisibleWikiWomen challenge.

One example of this is the replacement of the low resolution lead photograph of the Sojourner Truth article, to the high resolution image from the NPG. The meetup hosted Smithsonian employees, Wikimedia District of Columbia members, and a number of brand new Wikimedians (even a mother/daughter team). Among the special guests were the Wikimedia Foundation's chief community officer Valerie D'Costa who made her first-ever edit to Wikipedia at her first edit-a-thon.

Metropolitan Museum of Art's new Wikimedia Strategist: Andrew Lih

The Met Museum open access anniversary 2018-02-13 with Katherine Maher and Loic Tallon

In March, Andrew Lih (User:Fuzheado) joined The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as their Wikimedia Strategist and will complement the continuing work of The Met's Wikimedian in Residence, Richard Knipel (User:Pharos). Among the projects Andrew and Richard will focus on are the creation of systematic workflows for Wikidata and Commons contributions from the Met's collections to Wikimedia, and to provide a useful best practices toolkit for cultural institutions with open access initiatives. They are also leading The Met's work in conjunction with the Wikimedia Foundation's Structured Data on Commons team for a pilot project related to the launch of depiction properties for artworks. Andrew will be working remotely while based in Washington, D.C.

As previously reported, Andrew has worked with The Met to pioneer work in artificial intelligence and image classification for artworks, which has contributed thousands of artwork depiction statements added to Wikidata via the Wikidata Distributed Game. He has detailed the project in a blog post at The Met - Combining AI and Human Judgment to Build Knowledge about Art on a Global Scale (March 4, 2019). He will be continuing work in this area of combining the best of machine learning and humans in the loop for metadata creation.

In April 2018, the Met's chief digital officer Loic Tallon and the Wikimedia Foundation's Katherine Maher celebrated a year of open access at The Met by posing the question: how might we formalize Wikimedians as permanent members of a cultural institution's staff in an accessible and sustainable manner? (Wikimedia and The Met: A Shared Digital Vision, April 19, 2018)

A year later, The Met has answered that challenge and more. With two Wikimedians working with their full-time curators and collections managers The Met is not only contributing the museum's existing content, but investigating forward-looking projects in machine learning and linked open data for the benefit of Wikimedia's content and contributing to the world's knowledge base.

Black Lunch Table and Art + Feminism

Black Lunch Table and MoMA held a meetup, Black Lunch Table/ArtFem NY 2019 with a photobooth of artists, Black Lunch Table at MoMA 2019 AF.

Art + Feminism, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Philadelphia Museum of Art Library and Science History Institute held a meetup, Art+Feminism Edit-a-thon with the poet laureate of Philadelphia, Raquel Salas Rivera.

Berkeley Center for New Media - Art + Feminism Edit-A-Thon

Berkeley Center for New Media held a meetup, [1]. There was coverage in the Wikimedia Foundation blog

Vancouver ArtAndFeminism 2019

Emily Carr University of Art and Design, and Belkin Art Gallery held a meetup, Vancouver ArtAndFeminism 2019

Art+Feminism - Minneapolis Institute of Art

Minneapolis Institute of Art held a meetup, Minneapolis - Art+Feminism - Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia)

Herstory of Deaf Women Workshop

Gallaudet University and Wikimedia DC held a meetup, Herstory of Deaf Women Wikipedia Editing Workshop

Women in Natural History workshop

The National Museum of Natural History Library, Biodiversity Heritage Library, and Wikimedia D.C. held a meetup, Women in Natural History Wikipedia Editing Workshop. The livestream is archived here.

Celebrating Influential Latinas

Hispanic Reading Room at the Library of Congress and Wikimedia DC held a meetup, Celebrating Influential Latinas: A Library of Congress Wikipedia Edit-a-thon. Highlights of the Hispanic Reading Room include the Portinari murals, by Brazilian muralist Cândido Portinari, and on the wall behind the participants, a Salvador Martínez Báez portrait of former Mexican president Benito Juárez, known for the quotation, "El respeto al derecho ajeno es la paz." (Respect for the rights of others is peace.)

National Museum of Women in the Arts & Art+Feminism 2019

The National Museum of Women in the Arts and Wikimedia DC held a meetup, National Museum of Women in the Arts: Art+Feminism Edit-a-thon 2019

Women Scientists Boulder March Wiki-thon

Boulder Public Library and Wikimedians of Colorado User Group, held a meetup, Boulder/Wikipedia Day 2019, a dashboard is here

Women in Art in Asia

Asia Art Archive in America, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs of the New York Public Library and Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong, held a Art+Feminism meetup, Art + Feminism Wikipedia Edit-A-Thon, a dashboard is here

Art & Community

College of Architecture, Art, Planning, Cornell University held a meetup, Art And Community.

LMU Library Edit-a-thon

Loyola Marymount University William H. Hannon Library held a meetup. LMU Library Edit-a-thon 2019

Diverse Young Adult Authors

The University of Maryland iSchool and Wikimedia DC held a workshop University of Maryland iSchool Diverse Young Adult Authors Wikipedia Editing Workshop.

Go Siobhan!

By Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing)

Breaking news

WikidataCon 2019 application, program submission and scholarship processes are now open until April 29th
An official WMF URL shortener is due to launch on 11 April; see Wikidata:URLShortener. This will be incorporated into the Query Service in due course.
Structured Data on Commons: You can now test creating depicts statements
The Property Statistics dashboard was launched in the Sum of all Paintings project - this visually tracks the completion % of the most commonly used properties for paintings, on a per-collection basis. You can now see very quickly where any given GLAM, in any given country, is ahead (or behind) others in the consistency and completeness of their metadata. The system has already been adapted for use on the railways, and the video games, wikiprojects.
OpenRefine 3.2 beta was released, with a collection of new features and bug fixes, many of which improve the Wikidata integration.
Discussion going on in W3C SPARQL 1.2 Community Group about the improvements in SPARQL language
OpenStreetMap is participating in this year's Google Summer of Code, and quite a few of the project ideas involve Wikidata integration.

Award for Wikidata contributor

Congratulations to Siobhan Leachman (d:User:Ambrosia10), awarded the "Companion of the Auckland War Memorial Museum" medal for her volunteer work, including contributions to Wikidata.

Reading list

Data Quality Management in Wikidata – Workshop write-up, by Cristina Sarasua, Claudia Müller-Birn, and Mariam Farda-Sarbas
Museum Collections on Wikipedia: Opening Up to Open Data Initiatives by Elena Villaespesa and Trilce Navarrete
What Wikidata offers Oxford’s GLAM Digital Strategy, Martin Poulter, Bodleian Digital Library blog
A new data type is available : musical notation
A project to link branded businesses in OpenStreetMap to Wikidata
"Build your own Digital Bodleian with IIIF and SPARQL", Martin Poulter, Bodleian Digital Library blog
"Combining AI and Human Judgment to Build Knowledge about Art on a Global Scale", Andrew Lih, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Wikimedia Strategist
The panEuropean Research Infrastructure "Mobilising Data, Experts and Policies in Scientific Collections" initiative's kick-off meeting had a workshop on the "Authority Management of People Names". Wikidata featured strongly - and was highly praised: Twitter thread

Other news

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

Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons; Bengali Wikisource case study

By SandraF & SGill

Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons

Deployment updates

Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons is in the process of being deployed step by step.

In March 2019, it became possible to test Depicts statements on Test-Commons.

The deployment timeline for April 2019 is, as of April 5:

Early April 2019

Add/view/edit depicts on file pages

Phabricator ticket: T204264

Add/view/edit depicts in UploadWizard

Phabricator ticket: T215304

Mid - late April 2019 Phabricator ticket: T215305

Search depicts statements
Depicts qualifiers

Phabricator ticket: T215306

Filter search results
Depicts of depicts
Depicts and annotations

GLAM pilot projects

While the first features for Structured Data on Commons are further developed, the first GLAM pilot projects are in progress too.

Project Wolfers

In March 2019, Packed/VIAA (BE) has been doing preparatory work on Project Wolfers, a pilot project for Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons that brings the vast oeuvre of the Wolfers dynasty together on Wikidata and - where copyright allows - on Wikimedia Commons.

Louis Wolfers (1820-1892), his son Philippe Wolfers (1858-1929) and grandson Marcel Wolfers (1886-1976) were part of a family of prominent Belgian silversmiths and designers of decorative arts - jewellery, sculpture and other decorative items. Many objects that they have designed have been spread out through Belgian and international museum and private collections; their company's archive and many design sketches have been preserved as well.

In March, many Wikidata items have been uploaded for this project. As soon as Depicts and other statements for Structured Data on Commons are deployed, additional images of the works and sketches will be uploaded in structured data format, and existing images on Wikimedia Commons will be enhanced with structured data too.

Study of flowers, drawing (1895) by Philippe Wolfers, collection King Baudouin Foundation
Civilisation et Barbarie, file box (1897-98) by Philippe Wolfers, collection King Baudouin Foundation and Royal Museums of Art and History
Design drawing for vase 'Peacock Feathers' (1899) by Philippe Wolfers, collection King Baudouin Foundation
Peacock Feathers, vase (1899) by Philippe Wolfers, collection King Baudouin Foundation and Royal Museums of Art and History
Design drawing for comb 'Birds and Irises' (1899) by Philippe Wolfers, collection King Baudouin Foundation
Birds and Irises, comb (ca. 1900) by Philippe Wolfers, collection King Baudouin Foundation and Royal Museums of Art and History
Swan Pendant (ca. 1901) by Philippe Wolfers, collection Rijksmuseum
Ondine table centrepiece (1958) by Marcel Wolfers, collection DIVA and King Baudouin Foundation

In general, the pilot project experiments with the following new questions and challenges around structured data:

Uploading data to Wikidata and related media files to Wikimedia Commons, in structured data format
Data modelling on Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons for decorative arts
Data modelling for a detailed collection where many objects have a close relationship to each other - for instance, inspirational drawings and design sketches for pieces of jewellery
Copyright clearance and copyright data modelling for objects with several creators, sometimes also (historical) companies

Other GLAM pilot projects

The (growing) list of other GLAM pilot projects is available at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Structured_data/GLAM/Projects

Consultation about UploadWizard for Wiki Loves... campaigns

In the not so far future, it will also be possible to organize Wiki Loves... (Monuments, Earth, Africa, Art, Love, ...) campaigns on Wikimedia Commons with structured data.

In the course of 2019, the SDC development team wants to improve Wikimedia Commons' UploadWizard to support the campaigns that want to be powered by Structured Data 'new style'.

Do you have ideas and wishes for this? The team wants to hear which structured data features you want to see in UploadWizard. A community consultation runs during the first two weeks of April 2019.

Case Study about Bengali Wikisource 10th Anniversary Proofreading Contest

As an effort to document projects related to Wikisource, we have started by writing the first case study about Bengali Wikisource 10th Anniversary Proofreading Contest held in 2017 with the help of contest organizers Bodhisattwa and Jayantanth. If you know about, or have organized interesting Wikisource related projects that you would like to be documented in form of a case study, feel free to reach out to us at sgillwikimedia.org.

April's GLAM events

Explore Wikimedia-GLAM history by browsing through the archives.

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