GLAM/Newsletter/November 2021/Single
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Migration from Outreach to Meta: your opinion is needed
About five years it was the first moment that I know of when the idea of migrating the contents from Outreach Wiki to Meta Wiki was discussed. At a meeting in Paris a large group of GLAM projects coordinators had a meeting in what various topics have been spoken about, including the topic of migrating the contents to Meta Wiki. In the meeting there was agreement without objections, but after the meeting nothing was done with the proposal. In 2021 this topic was also spoken about in a meeting about education coordinators and since then the idea slowly developed.
In October I was asked to join a meeting in what the migration was discussed. In this meeting I indicated that I think there are three requirements so that both the GLAM and Education communities will not get the burden of having to fix the thousands of links to the Outreach pages and that we as community can stay in one place all together. In the meeting WMF agreed with the three requirements, however in the weeks after it appeared that WMF only wants to move the GLAM and Education newsletter to Meta (as they announced), and that there hasn't been any decision taken on moving the rest the contents.
The idea of moving only the GLAM newsletter to Meta, while the rest of the GLAM documentation pages stay on Outreach would cause a series of difficult technical problems and would mean that the community has to split itself in two. Not a good idea!
At the same time community members have indicated to me that they, as this is common within Wikimedia, wish to have a say in the question if the contents should be migrated. Therefore a proposal has been posted. The proposal describes the idea of the full contents being migrated to Meta under three conditions so that the change would have an as limited impact as possible on the community, but we can enjoy the benefits and improvements that Meta Wiki has to offer. For example, on Meta the visual editor is available for everyone so that editing becomes easy for new contributors and GLAM professionals.
Study day on open content; Open content GLAM report
Study day on open content
On November 15, Wikimedia France participated in a study day organised by Bretagne musées, Musée de Bretagne and Musée Saint-Brieuc, dedicated to open content. That was the opportunity to share with 20 GLAM professionals the use of open content in general and in the scope of Wikimedia projects. Another study day is planned for the beginning of 2022.
Open content GLAM report
Wikimedia France has finalised a national report about open content practices in French GLAMs. The Phare agency was appointed to work on it from March to October 2021. There will be an official presentation on February 2022. If you're interested in this project, please contact us: xavier.cailleau@wikimedia.fr
Second proofread competition ended on Bengali Wikisource in collaboration with the British Library
A 3-months long proofread competition which started from 1 Spetember 2021 on Bengali Wikisource ended. The event was organized by West Bengal Wikimedians User Group in collaboration with the Two Centuries of Indian Print project of the British Library. Unlike the first competition which happened during March-April 2021, this one saw fewer participants and winners. Only 12 people enrolled, 15 people actually participated in the event to proofread 2,848 pages, out of them only 2 people crossed the threshold of proofreading 500 pages to win prizes. Prior declaration about the legal constraints to send prize to winners residing outside India, competition running during the festive season, series of proofread competitions this year leading to boredom and exhaustion among the competition participants might be the reasons behind the low turnout. But, the low number of participants led the participants follow lesser errors and higher quality than before and also gave a breathing space for the organizers to clear maintenance backlogs to a certain extent. The winners are contacted to gather necessary information so that the assured prizes from both the user group and the British Library can be sent to them. The detailed on-wiki documentation of the collaboration can be found here.
Training course and conference in November
IAML conference
IAML Italy organized training course, online, in collaboration with the museums, archives and libraries Wikidata group (GWMAB) and the University of Pavia - Department of Musicology and Cultural Heritage.
GWMAB is a working group founded in October 2020 and aims to investigate how italian libraries, museums and archives can contribute and improve the integration of their metadata into Wikidata, to facilitate access to cultural resources on the web and provide an informal space to share information, experiences and knowledge about Wikidata.
On November 12th from 16:00 to 17:30 Valeria Luti from Archivio Ricordi and Marta Arosio and Marco Chemello from Wikimedia Italy have presented "The data integration project of the Archivio Ricordi in Wikimedia". Archivio Ricordi (Ricordi Historical Archive) is committed to donate content to Wikipedia, Wikisource and Wikidata. By sharing contents from its library collections and archive (publications, images, texts), the Archive intends to enhance its heritage and contribute to the improvement of Wikipedia entries, open access and open content. All wikipedian/ wikimedian can contribute to this project. Information here: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progetto:GLAM/Archivio_Ricordi.
Due to this collaboration, public domain and freely licensed media are available on the Archive website, here: https://www.archivioricordi.com/chi-siamo/glam-archivio-ricordi#/. Much of them have already been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Media_from_Archivio_Storico_Ricordi
Creative Commons Certificate
Five people from Wikimedia Italia (some of the staff, volunteers and board) took part at Creative Commons Certificate course, that ended the last week of November. The 10-week online course, composed of readings, quizzes, discussions, and practical exercises to develop learners’ open skill, provides an in depth study of Creative Commons licenses—helping to become an expert in open licensing and the Commons. People attending the course learn how to adapt and innovate on existing openly licensed materials, keeping Wikimedia’s knowledge base relevant and up to date. For sure this course will help the whole community of Wikimedia Italia in the new projects (that are already in the pipeline). Challenging and very useful traingin course!
GLAMorous November
Wikipedians in residence
Dadov Youth Theater
During November, the at the Dadov Youth Theater wrote 109 new articles, improved 16, and illustrated 129. 211 photos have been posted on Wikimedia Commons, which are of great importance for the theater scene of Serbia.
National Library of Pirot
The Wikipedian in residence at the National Library of Pirot has been completed. During the project, 27 new articles were written, 24 were improved, and 16 were illustrated. There are 51 files on Wikimedia Commons, which contain photos important for illustrating articles on Wikipedia and as many as 13 collections and books.
The Association of Fine Artists of Serbia
The Wikipedian in residence at the Association of Fine Artists of Serbia has begun. So far, 16 new articles have been written, and work is underway to digitize the catalogs of the Spring and Autumn exhibitions.
Castles of Serbia
Thanks to the Castles of Serbia project, another 110 photos of villas and castles have been posted on the Wikimedia Commons, illustrating articles about Ingus Castle, Karas, Villa Vlaškalić, Engelman Castle and many others.
Wiki librarians
An edit-a-thon was organized by Wiki Librarians called "Cafes:Then and Now". Twelve editors participated and wrote 62 new articles. Another edit-a-thon is organized by Wiki Librarians started on November 26, entitled "My Street", which has so far achieved 34 new articles.
Cultural heritage on Wikidata
The thematic activity "" was held, during which four editors edited as many as 518 items and made 2. During the activity, a editing Wikidata workshop was held, which was attended by two editors.
New cooperations
A Memorandum of Cooperation was signed with the Ilija Kolarac Endowment.
CEE Meeting
During the CEE conference, Gorana Gomirac held a session and presented one of the most important GLAM projects called "Wikipedian in residence in the battle for cultural heritage".
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Ethnological material and discussions from Luznica and Nisava -
Pirot Proceedings 8 - 9.pdf -
Photo from the performance "Violence" in the Youth Theater DADOV -
General rehearsal of the play - Goat ears in the emperor Trojan - Youth Theater DADOV -
Maldeghem Castle, Novi Kneževac -
Engelman Castle, Bačka Topola
Art, design and history from the museums of Göteborg; Maps in the National Archives of Sweden
Art, design and history from the museums of Göteborg
Wikimedia Sverige's partnership with four museums in Göteborg continues. The museum staff have been working on selecting images and cleaning up metadata for the last several weeks. Now finally the uploads are underway, with the goal of reaching 2021 new files by the end of the year. Since four different museums are participating, there's a broad selection of material, from classic paintings to handicraft and design, to photographs documenting the past of the city. You can follow the ongoing upload in this category.
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Allmänna vägen, a street in Göteborg, in early 20th century. -
An Old Man by Edvard Munch, from the collections of the Art Museum of Gothenburg -
An 18th century console table from the collections of the Röhsska design museum
Maps in the National Archives of Sweden - and one very special photo!
The National Archives of Sweden has uploaded a small selection of historical maps and plans to Wikimedia Commons (also creating Wikidata objects for each map). The maps and plans are of Malbork Castle and surroundings in Poland and of the Ukraine and places in the Ukraine. The maps are available in this Commons category.
As we were searching our holdings for maps of the Ukraine we came across a digitised prisoner release record for a person whose life inspired an Oscar-winning film! The person is Salomon Smolianoff who inspired the character of Salomon Sorowitsch in the film The Counterfeiters. We uploaded the record itself and also cropped out the photograph of Smolianoff from it. We're happy to see it is now used in the Wikipedia article about him in many language versions!
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1630 map of then Prussia and northern Poland. -
1639 map of Malbork Castle and its immediate surroundings. -
Old map of the rivers in the Ukraine and southern Russia, c. 1700. -
Portrait photograph of Salomon Smolianoff, 1931.
Khalili Collections
Khalili Collections
On Wikipedia, I have created a draft for an article on bibliomancy in Islam. There are no new translations to report this month. The six images uploaded this month were cropped versions of existing images to make them more visible.
Categorisation of images continues: there are now 771 categories with Khalili Collections images (98 more than last month) including Mughal jewellery, Islamic pen boxes and Art from Tabriz.
A lot of new effort has gone into more describing objects on Wikidata, particularly connecting objects to what they depict. There are now 341 depiction properties attached to Khalili Collections objects. I've created a kind of visual dictionary: 179 things and a randomly-chosen Khalili Collections object that depicts them. Wikidata can now generate such things as an image gallery of items in the Khalili Collections that depict the Kaaba or timeline of Islamic metalwork in the Collections (use mouse wheel or +/- to zoom, double-click to get more information about an object).
The depictions data are available to Wikidata-driven sites. Going to Reasonator and clicking to depictions of hares or depictions of Noah's Ark, for example, shows art works from a variety of collections, including the Khalili Collection of Islamic Art.
British Library
We ran our first in-person event as part of the Thought Bubble Comic Festival in Leeds. On 11 November, a group got together at Leeds Central Library to participate in a comics Wikithon. It was a great event, with the dashboard available here.
The full set of data from the New Media Writing Prize is now available on Wikidata. Winners, shortlisted authors and texts from the last ten years are now available to query as part of the New Media Writing Prize Special Collection.
Aricle contest for librarians «Local cultural heritage and prominent people»
Wikimedia Ukraine’s largest project in the GLAM field right now is the article contest “Local cultural heritage and prominent people”, which encourages librarians to improve coverage of these topics on Ukrainian Wikipedia. This year it lasted whole month from October, 5th to November, 5th.
Wikimedia Ukraine’s largest GLAM project is the article contest for librarians “Local cultural heritage and prominent people”, which encourages librarians from all around Ukraine to share their knowledge on local monuments, historical sights and buildings; scientists, writers, and other prominent people who were born or lived in their region. This contest not only helps to improve Wikipedia content on this topics but also is brining librarians to XXI century and helping them to learn and use digital technology, whose adoption is still lacking in Ukrainian libraries.
Article contest logo refers to one of the unofficial symbols of Ukraine — guelder rose (ukr. chervona kalyna) and shows how every little peace while placed together are making a beautiful and meaningful flower.
While communicating the project with a help of our partners charity fund “Live Library Ukraine” and regional state administrations using television, internet resourses and social media, we were able to reach more than 5 000 librarians. Before the start and during the contest Wikimedia Ukraine orginased and hosted three webinars and provided on-demand support for participants via email; 400 librarians engaged with the project in this way. By November the 5th, 50 participants from different Ukrainian libraries actively participated in the contest, having created or significantly improved about 800 articles.
As for today, 12 wikipedians, wikimedians and outside on-topic experts are working on evaluating participants' work and presenting the list of the contest winners. We plan to hold an award ceremony in February 2022.
It is the second time Wikimedia Ukraine is organizing the “Local cultural heritage and prominent people” article contest. In 2018, during one week 45 libraries participated and created and improved almost 300 articles. Detailed results of the previous contest edition are available here (in English) and here (in Ukrainian).
Smithsonian demos new Wiki API Connector tool and other meetups
Smithsonian Edit-a-Thon combining Wikidata and Commons
On November 16, the Smithsonian American Women's History Initiative (AWHI) hosted an edit-a-thon that trained more than a dozen librarians at the Smithsonian Institution to upload high resolution images from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) to Wikimedia Commons and link them to Wikidata items. Training was headed by Smithsonian data specialists Sonoe Nakasone and Mariah Wahl. It was also supported by Kelly Doyle, open knowledge coordinator for AWHI and Andrew Lih, Smithsonian Wikimedian at Large.
The session focused on plant specimen illustrations by Mary Vaux Walcott, which were recently made part of the Smithsonian American Art Museum collection.
The 308 Walcott illustrations already had Wikidata items, created as part of the Sum of All Paintings project, but had no corresponding images in Commons yet, even though the JPG files are available under a CC0 license from the Smithsonian. Work was done beforehand to identify all the unique SAAM identifiers/accession numbers of the desired images, with all the metadata prepared beforehand in a spreadsheet.
Upload via url2commons
Because the Pattypan spreadsheet-based image upload tool has been in flux for the last month, other methods were preferred for uploading images. Rather than upload images manually through Upload Wizard, the url2commons tool was used, with the participants using a spreadsheet of the metadata and filling in the Artwork template manually. This had the benefit of loading images from remote URLs and not local files and resulted in more than 190 images being uploaded and linked to Wikidata items over the course of the 90 minute session.
A number of reporting tools were used to show the results, including Listeria, Pagepile, Petscan, TABernacle and special SPARQL queries, all of which can be found in the edit-a-thon page.
First demonstration of Wiki API Connector
As a parallel experiment, this also marked the first demonstration of Andrew Lih's Wiki API Connector project for auto-generating "one click" uploads of images to Commons, based off the Smithsonian Institution's open access API.
The Wiki API Connector tool can take a single Smithsonian identifier as input (e.g. "saam_1970.355.317"), consult the Smithsonian API, and create a pre-populated url2commons link to upload the image to Commons from a Smithsonian image URL, with the proper metadata and categories filled in.
A table with all of these one-click links was created, so users can easily upload images to Commons, as an alternative to the manual method. The tool is still under development and will be released soon with a user interface for generating url2commons links, and plans for simple REST API access. That is, accessing a URL such as "https://wikiapiconnector.toolforge.org/url2commons/saam/saam_1970.355.317" will return a url2commons command fully completed and ready for image upload.
Future plans include the ability to define a mapping for any API to a Commons upload task, using a YAML configuration file based on JSONPath syntax. This will allow any GLAM institutions to create their own YAML file mapping that is specific to their API fields in order to perform the same uploads to Commons, and in the future, Wikidata.
Black Kansas Citians
Kansas City Public Library and the Black Archives of Mid-America, held a workshop, more Black Kansas Citians on Wikipedia
San Diego 78
San Diego Wikimedians User Group held a meetup at an American Legion post, San Diego/November 2021
Black Lunch Table
Black Lunch Table held a workshop, Black Lunch Table Nov 2021
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.
Wikisource birthday celebration, Community Tech Wishlist, and upcoming conversation about courses for GLAM professionals
Wikisource birthday celebration
Wikisource turned 18 years old on 24th November 2021. Wikisource enthusiasts, partners, and Foundation staff celebrated the occasion with the incoming CEO of the Foundation, Maryana Iskander. The event attracted more than 70 participants and was the fourth most attended event in Maryana’s Listening Tour. A second birthday party was organized on 28th November 2021 and attended by another 10 people.
The slidedeck, video presentations, and community feedback are all documented on the event page: Wikisource:Eighteenth Birthday.
Community Tech Wishlist 2022
The Foundation will be running the Community Wishlist Survey 2022 in January. The Community Wishlist Survey is run annually to help identify the features and fixes that are most important to Wikimedia contributors. Eligible proposals that attract the most votes are then prioritized for development by the Community Tech product team. Last year, the Community Tech team worked on ebook export and OCR improvements to Wikisource.
While you wait for the full announcement, you can use a dedicated sandbox to develop your GLAM & Culture feature requests for 2022.
Conversation about courses for GLAM professionals
In December, the GLAM & Culture team will close the year by reflecting on recent trainings and courses for museum workers and librarians.
On Monday, 13 December at 15:00 UTC, Wikimedia Argentina will present their Cultura para abrir course, which attracted more than 600 GLAM professionals in Latin America, and Wiki Movimento Brasil will share their GLAMs tutorial and its use in the Wiki Loves Bahia campaign.
On the next day, Tuesday, 14 December at 10:00 UTC, we will have Alice Kibombo talking about the Wikipedia in African Libraries course she delivered for AfLIA, and Wikimedia UK presenting the Connected Heritage webinars and program.
Joining instructions are available on Meta. We hope to see you there!
December's GLAM events
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