GLAM/Newsletter/November 2021/Contents/Content Partnerships Hub report
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We continue building for the hub; SDC for fun and profit: detecting bad coordinates; Needs assessment – video recorded interviews; Improving ISA
We continue building for the hub
Within the fields of Needs Assessment, Helpdesk, Capacity building, International partnerships, Software and Strategic data uploads, our work continues. We are working on updating our Meta portal to be even more informative and clear, and we are starting to look for participants in the first trial run of The Grand Tour of Wikimedia, hopefully taking place in the autumn of 2022. On all of these areas, we work on creating bonds between people of the Movement, so don't hesitate to contact us if you have any suggestions, questions or ideas around building a strong hub for content partnerships.
SDC for fun and profit: detecting bad coordinates
Structured Data on Commons can help you analyse information about media files and spot inconsistencies and errors. One example is geographical coordinates.
Many photographs on Commons contain the coordinates of where they were taken in their metadata, as saved by the device (mobile phone or camera). This is very useful information, but it's not always correct. If your camera saves erroneous coordinates with your photo, there's a risk you won't notice it when uploading the photo to Commons.
Then a bot comes and automatically copies the coordinates to SDC as coordinates of the point of view. Now the error is in two places!
But now that the coordinates are included in SDC, it also makes them easier to spot. We can use the Wikimedia Commons Query Service to plot photos on a map, and anything suspicious will stand out.
We discovered this when working with structured data in Wiki Loves Monuments photos. First, we add information about the competition to all photos in a country's category, for example Images from Wiki Loves Monuments 2021 in Iran.
Then we can write a query to put all photos participating in WLM Iran on a map.
We can easily see all the files whose coordinates are clearly not in Iran! We can now remove the coordinates from both the file page's wikitext and the SDC.
Note that the Wikimedia Commons Query Service is still in beta, and doesn't update automatically. The data is updated via weekly dumps. So you won't be able to see your edits reflected in the map until after a couple days.
You can follow our work with SDC and WLM photos here. There you can find a list of the countries we've worked on – some recent updates include Georgia and Venezuela – as well links to the SPARQL map queries.
How many bad coordinates can you spot in your country?
Needs assessment – video recorded interviews
Previous interviews have shown quite similar needs and where more resources are needed. We have now switched over and started recording interviews to be able to go back and follow longer reasoning on certain issues. Examples of questions we've discussed - Do we need more Wikimedia ambassadors to talk about the benefits of the platforms? How could one conduct courses and collaborations with a global perspective? What would a mentorship program for content partnership look like?
Do you have any more ideas? Feel free to get in contact with: tore.danielsson
wikimedia.se
Improving ISA
ISA is a tool that allows you to add structured data to images on Wikimedia Commons. It was developed in collaboration between Wiki In Africa, Histropedia and the Structured Data on Commons project. While it is still running and being used frequently, it has seen few updates since the initial development project ended.
We will be helping out with some development time to make sure that the tool will continue to be usable. So far we have solved a couple of security issues. We have now started working on some of the more noticeable issues, including slow loading of campaign pages and localisation, with more features planned to come.
