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< GLAM‎ | Newsletter‎ | October 2023


Celebrating Wikipedia's 20th Birthday in Albanian Language

Celebrating Wikipedia's 20th Birthday and the Wikimedian in Residence Project at Qemal Baholli Public Library

With the support of the Qemal Baholli Public Library, Wikimedians of Albanian Language User Group hosted an event that marked the 20th anniversary of Wikipedia in Albanian Language and the significant achievement of having a Wikimedian in Residence within the Public Library located in Elbasan, Albania.

This event highlighted the importance of free knowledge and the bridge between traditional and virtual communities through the world of the Wikimedia Projects.

It was a moment of reflection on the library’s commitment to encouraging open access to information and brought together a diverse group of participants from the library community and director, Ethnographic Museum of Elbasan, local government, high school principals, teachers, and students.

The event was honored by the presence of the Vice Mayor from the Elbasan Municipality, Vesa Liço. She highlighted the value of open source and access to knowledge of Wikimedia projects and the role of libraries in connecting traditional and virtual communities.

Everyone discussed their role in Wikimedia Projects so far. Teachers and students shared their experiences in contributing to Wikipedia. All the participants served as an inspiration for further collaboration and raised their awareness to support the Wikimedia projects. It was a momentum to emphasize the power of open knowledge and community engagement.

Here are some pictures from the event.

Social media

  • We have a public Telegram channel (language used mostly Albanian) if you want to join and discuss Wikimedia projects.

If you want to see more about our activities, you can:



Content, resources and platforms for open access!

Photo collection released in Santa Fe

The Santa Fe city government, in alliance with Wikimedia Argentina, released once again a collection of 60 photos about urban and social life in the city between years 1864 and 1943. These were made fully available in Wikimedia Commons as a commemoration of the 50° anniversary of the founding of Santa Fe.

Noel Sbodio and Valeria Ansó, from the Archivo de la Imagen Documental Santafesina, were in charge of restoring, making research and digitizing this valuable collection that recover data and narratives about the city's traditions around those years.

Some of the recently uploaded pictures:

Watch them all in this gallery!

Podcast in the Open Access Week

We released a podcast series of 6 chapters around open access initiatives in different points of the country. With the idea of an "open culture map", we interviewed our main partners in the Santa Fe, Buenos Aires, Chaco, Jujuy and Neuquén province, recognizing their big efforts on making knowledge more accessible within their communities: Archives, human rights and Wikimedia projects; popular libraries, local content and Wikipedia; indigenous communities, open access and Wikidata; collaboration, memory and identity through Wikimedia Commons; innovation, Wikimedia projects and open knowledge. You can hear the podcast in our Youtube channel as well as on Spotify (only available in Spanish).


Trying out "Cartografías abiertas"

On September, Wikimedia Argentina and the Centro de Documentación Indígena's project, "Cartografias abiertas: qom, wichi, moqoit", finally came to an end after a year of work within Fundación Williams and Potenciar funding. But this doesn't mean the project is over! Our partners on Chaco province delivered two workshops with indigenous communities to start socializing the platform, that uses Wikishootme to gather relevant information about uses, traditions and cultural artifacts the communities themselves decide to share. The testing of this platform in the real territories resulted on new feedback to continue working towards much more accessible ways for indigenous people to contribute to Wikimedia Projects. We specially thank Shailili Zamora Arayfor her hard work leading this initiative.


Accesibility resources in the Image description Month

During October the Image Description Month was celebrated. Powered up by the Wikimedia Foundation, the aim of this initiative was to make visual content on Wikimedia Commons, especially images, well described on the Wikimedia projects, making them more accessible, discoverable, connected, and usable in all languages.

Wikimedia Argentina and Gladys Benitez (audiodescriptions in TNC Accessible program from Teatro Cervantes, Argentina) offered a series of resources to make videos and images more accessible, by adding descriptions both in audio and text. We worked on a couple of Wikipedia Articles and added Text ALT to practice what we had learnt during the session.


October Report

Superstars of STEM

On the 7th of October 2023, in collaboration with the Superstars of STEM Science & Technology Australia, and Wikimedia Australia, we held an edit-a-thon to highlight the achievements of Australian women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

The event facilitated some great networking opportunities between Women in STEM and Wikimedia Australia's volunteer member base. Together, we edited and created Wikipedia articles to showcase the achievements and contributions of women in STEM fields.

There were three locations for the edit-a-thon, including two in-person venues in Melbourne and Sydney, and also an online session to support those who could not attend in person. The event culminated in the editing of 56 articles, the addition of 177 references, and the incorporation of nearly 14,800 words. The dashboard is available to view on our Outreach Dashboard.

We take immense pride in these accomplishments and want to thank our Wikimedia Australia members and the Superstars of STEM edit-a-thon participants for their support and contributions to the event.

Wikimedia Australia Partner Projects highly successful

Opal gemstone
Yowah Nut opal from the opal fields by Project Partner Shire of Paroo

Wikimedia Australia has been actively supporting free knowledge as part of their commitment to fostering open-access information.

Earlier this year we announced an Expression of Interest, and then funded four Partner Projects grants, aiming to educate and empower organisations through furthering their knowledge and engagement in contributing to Wikimedia projects and platforms.

Projects were selected to align with our strategic priorities on regional Australia, gender equity and First Nations perspectives.

These four remarkable Partner Projects have now concluded with a range of successful outcomes for the organisations and Wikimedia platforms, benefitting local and global communities. Read more on our website.


Wiki Loves Monuments Brasil 2023 and Open Midiateca

Wiki Loves Monuments Brasil

Mercado de Carnes, Belém, Pará - By Paul R. Burley

The Wiki Loves Monuments Brazil 2023 contest occurred between September 1st and 30th in Brazil and it counted more than 13 thousand images from 122 photographers. Those photographs represent monuments of 146 cities of 20 of the 26 states and the Federal District.

Wiki Loves Pará

This year, in commemorations of the Wiki Loves Pará initiative, we had a prize category exclusive for the best photograph of that state! In addition to that, we promoted events to engage participants in Pará, such as the Wiki Takes Bragança and Wiki Takes Cachoeira do Ariri. The winner was a photograph of the Francisco Bolonha Municipal Meat Market, taken by the photographer Paul R. Burley during the contest in September of this year.

Best images and Best contributors

The other categories of prizes were Best Contributors and Best Images. In the first one, we gave prizes to the 10 photographers that have more illustrated monuments previously without free-licensed images; Together, they illustrated for the first time almost 740 monuments, of the total of 1060. The later category is the main one, in which the jury selects 10 images to represent the country in the international phase of the contest. The ten images represent the states of Goiás, Pernambuco, Rio de Janeiro, Santa Catarina e São Paulo and are displayed next:

In total, we had expressive numbers of photographs (more than 13 thousand), a recovery in the number of participants (12% more than the last year), with a general retention rate of approximately 24% and 9% for newcommers.


See the winners announcement and the images uploaded.

Open Midiateca

The "Open Midiateca" project is another great contribution of the Secretary of State for Culture of Espírito Santo (SeCult-ES) to the free knowledge movement. Over the last month, Wiki Movimento Brasil, with the support of InternetLab, has been analyzing items from the collections of 10 institutions from Espírito Santo in order to help them with copyright issues and free licensing. And we already uploaded 1,200 images from the collections of Palácio Anchieta, Galeria Homero Massena, Arquivo Público do Estado do Espírito Santo and Museu do Colono; as well as images of the interior of their buildings, most of which are of historical importance to the state.

Once again, SeCult-ES is a pioneer when it comes to the free dissemination of Espírito Santo culture. And WMB maintains its commitment to supporting actions like this, which contribute to increasing the international visibility of Brazil's multiple cultures.

The other GLAM institutions that are part of Midiateca Capixaba are:


See the Midiateca Capixaba's GLAM page and the uploaded media.

Open Access Week and Wikidata; Opening Culture and Heritage training

Open Access Week and Wikidata

Free stories

Keynote talk by Vladimir Hernández Botina. In this talk, Vladimir puts into dialogue his personal experiences with Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui's decolonial perspectives on community, storytelling, and access to information. These first reflections have given a particular meaning to his view of information and systematization in local contexts. How do we build our own community? How do we collect and tell our own experiences? What does a library hold? These are some of the questions that arise from these reflections and that have given rise to the Saberes de los Machines -library- project. Here we tell you the details (in Spanish)

Wikidata and the editorial management

Workshop "Wikidata and the editorial management" by Luis Alvarez. In this session, we were accompanied by a friend and colleague of Wikimedia Colombia, Luis Alvares from Mexico. In his workshop-conversation, we discussed the use of Wikidata as a mechanism for the visibility, openness, and interoperability of digital and printed academic journals. The questions asked by the participants about the possibility of registering community journals gave way to a conversation about the need to make community media visible in order to make the act of opening these publications political. Here we tell you the details (in Spanish)

Wikipeetia Project

Keynote talk "Wikipeetia Project" by Neima Paz. This talk presented the progress, challenges, and also successes of the Wikipeetia project -the Wayuunaiki version of Wikipedia, which this year received recognition as an official language project in Wikipedia. The expositor reflects on the role of Wikimedia tools and platforms in the revindication of the identity of the Wayuu people, the project seeks to articulate the agendas of the communities, for the use and appropriation of the Wayuu communities, "it is written by the Wayuu, for the Wayuu". Here we tell you the details (in Spanish)

WikiJournal

Keynote talk "WikiJournal" by Andrew Leung. In this talk, Andrew gave an overview of this platform. His presentation focused on the advantages that the use of WikiJournal could have for researchers, teachers, and students in Latin America. Afterward, thanks to the interventions and questions from the audience the expositor presented some reflections on the importance of strengthening open access in the country and the great challenges we have due to the great prestige that journals and platforms that privatize knowledge still have. Here we tell you the details (in Spanish)

Metadata for open science

Keynote talk by Silvia Gutiérrez "Metadata for open science". This talk presents ways to use Wikidata, the open-linked data network, and how it can help open science. It takes a tour through the history of the library, referring to the library of Alexandria and its beginnings, and how information was organized and categorized there. Wikidata is a collaborative space that allows visualizations of complex topics and information that has already been added to the open database by others. This presentation also shares examples of how different universities around the world are using Wikidata to open science and spread knowledge. Here we tell you the details (in Spanish)

Panel "Artificial Intelligence and Open Data

The panel "Artificial Intelligence and Open Data", was moderated by Luis Fernando Medina and with the participation of Juan Pablo Angarita, Camila Rocca, Juliana Guerra, Marco Giraldo, and Elizabeth León. In this panel, the participants presented social, community, data mining, editorial, and feminist projects, framed in discussions about open data. Throughout the panel, participants reflected on the challenges, opportunities, and challenges of artificial intelligence systems. Here we tell you the details (in Spanish)

Art Historians. Art History I class

Day of contribution to Wikiquote "Women Art Historians. Art History I class". On this contribution day, thirty students added famous quotes from female art historians to Wikiquote. This work was done in groups, 3 pages were created and 3 more were edited. A total of 72 edits were made as part of this activity and we had the page of the writer and academic Rihanna Eisler and the art historian Gloria Cortés Aliaga. Here we tell you the details (in Spanish)

Cataloguing and Semantic Web

Lecture "Cataloging and Semantic Web" by Martha Muñoz. In this workshop an approach to cataloging is made, starting from the principles of finding, identifying, selecting, browsing and exploring, acquiring or obtaining information. In the workshop it is proposed that it is necessary that the data to be collected, be collected on the basis of the principle of use, that is to say, that they serve other people, agencies, institutions, and the citizens. Here we tell you the details (in Spanish)

UNAL open patrimonies

We closed the open access week with another day of contribution to Wikimedia Commmons through the photographic tour "UNAL open patrimonies". On this day students from the Universidad Nacional, registered on Wikimedia platforms and added more than 30 images to give visibility to the heritage of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia Sede Bogotá in the open platforms of the Wikimedia Ecosystem. Here we tell you the details (in Spanish)

  • Edifición nuevo de Artes UNAL Bogotá
    Edifición nuevo de Artes UNAL Bogotá
  • Edificio Yu Takeuchi UNAL Bogotá
    Edificio Yu Takeuchi UNAL Bogotá
  • Mural edificio humanas UNAL Bogotá
    Mural edificio humanas UNAL Bogotá

Opening Culture and Heritage. training Seminar on Wikimedia Tools for Implementation in Cultural Institutions

By Paula Duran (WMCO)

Through collaboration between the Foundation Culture and Heritage Team, the Programa de Fortalecimiento de Museos del Ministerio de Cultura de Colombia and Wikimedia Colombia, a training seminar was organized in four keynote sessions. The Seminare brought participants closer to the various possibilities for collaboration between cultural institutions and the Wikimedia Ecosystem. It was primarily aimed at individuals associated with these institutions, but also saw participation from independent cultural managers, teachers, and those interested in the topics covered.

The seminar incorporated tools that opened up new channels for collaboration between Wikimedia Colombia and the cultural sector in Colombia.

First Session: Wikipedian in Residence. Collaborative Work and Skills Transfer
This session was led by the current Culture and Heritage Team Program Officer, Giovanna Fontenelle. Through her experience, Giovanna shared with the participants the possibilities that arise when incorporating a Wikipedian in Residence, including the integration of Wikimedia Commons into museum and cultural institution collections. Here you can watch the session.
Second Session: Artificial Intelligence in Museums. Supporting Tools
Sakti Pramyuda, Senior Partnership Manager for East South East Asia and the Pacific (ESEAP) at the Wikimedia Foundation, was the guest for the second session of the seminar. He shared the experience of Wikisource Loves Manuscripts and explained the process of digitizing and transcribing palm-leaf manuscripts in Bali, as well as how the Transkribus tool has been instrumental in this endeavor. Here you can watch the session.
Third Session: Opening Collections. Digitization Projects
This session received support from Angie Cervellera and Mauricio Genta from Wikimedia Argentina, who shared their experiences in working with cultural institutions. They specifically expanded on the outlook for digitization projects, open access regulations, and the procedures followed in digitization efforts. Here you can watch the session.
Fourth Session: Making Collections Visible. Metadata for Open Knowledge
The seminar concluded with a presentation by Silvia Gutierrez, Senior Program Officer for Libraries. On this occasion, Silvia shared data on the dissemination of heritage collections through Wikidata. Additionally, she introduced some exercises to help participants become familiar with and learn how to use the query builder for data visualization within the tool. Here you can watch the session.

Finally, the seminar opened channels of communication with various institutions for the proposal and planning of activities to be implemented during the year 2024.


Semana del Acceso Abierto 2023; Abrir la Cultura y el Patrimonio

Semana del Acceso Abierto 2023

Relatos libres

Charla magistral por Vladimir Hernández Botina. En esta charla Vladimir pone en diálogo sus experiencias personales con las perspectivas decoloniales de Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui sobre comunidad, relato y acceso a la información. Estas primeras reflexiones han dado un sentido particular a su mirada sobre la información y la sistematización en contextos locales. ¿Cómo se construye la propia comunidad? ¿Cómo recopilamos y contamos nuestra propia experiencia? ¿Qué alberga una biblioteca? Son algunas de las preguntas que surgen de estas reflexiones y que han dado lugar al proyecto Saberes de los Machines -biblioteca-.Aquí te contamos los detalles

Wikidata y la gestión editorial

Taller “Wikidata y la gestión editorial” por Luis Alvarez. En esta sesión tuvimos el acompañamiento de un amigo y colega de Wikimedia Colombia, Luis Álvares desde México. En su taller-conversatorio se trató el uso de Wikidata como mecanismo de visibilización, apertura e interoperabilidad de las revistas académicas digitales e impresas. Las preguntas formuladas por lxs participantes sobre la posibilidad de registrar revistas comunitarias dio paso a una conversación sobre la necesidad de visibilizar los medios comunitarios para hacer político el acto de apertura de estas publicaciones. Aquí te contamos los detalles

Proyecto Wikipeetia

Charla magistral “Proyecto Wikipeetia” a cargo de Neima Paz. Esta charla presentó los avances, desafíos, y también éxitos del proyecto Wikipeetia -versión en wayuunaiki de Wikipedia, este año recibió el reconocimiento como proyecto idiomático oficial en Wikipedia. Neima reflexiona sobre el rol de las herramientas y plataformas Wikimedia en la reivindicación de identidad del pueblo Wayuu, el proyecto busca articularse con las agendas de las comunidades, para el uso y apropiación de las comunidades wayuu, “es escrita por el wayuu, para el wayuu”. Aquí te contamos los detalles

WikiJournal

Charla magistral “WikiJournal” a cargo de Andrew Leung. En esta charla Andrew ofreció un panorama general de esta plataforma. Su presentación se centró en presentar las ventajas que podría tener para los investigadores, maestros y estudiantes de América Latina el uso de WikiJournal. Posteriormente, gracias a las intervenciones y preguntas del público Andrew presentó algunas reflexiones sobre la importancia de fortalecer el acceso abierto en el país y los grandes retos que tenemos debido al gran prestigio con el que todavía cuentan revistas y plataformas que privatizan el conocimiento. Aquí te contamos los detalles

Metadata para la ciencia abierta

Charla magistral a cargo de Silvia Gutiérrez “Metadata para la ciencia abierta”. Esta charla presenta formas de uso de Wikidata, la red de datos enlazados abiertos y como puede ayudar a abrir la ciencia. Hace un recorrido por la historia de la biblioteca, refiriendose a la biblioteca de Alejandría y sus inicios, la forma como se organizó y categorizó la información allí. Wikidata es un espacio colaborativo que permite hacer visualizaciones de temas complejos y con información que ya han sumado otras personas a la base de datos abiertos. En esta presentación también se comparten ejemplos de como diferentes universidades del mundo están usando Wikidata para abrir la ciencia y difundir el conocimiento. Aquí te contamos los detalles

Panel “Inteligencia Artificial y Datos abiertos

El panel “Inteligencia Artificial y Datos abiertos”, moderado por Luis Fernando Medina y que contó con la participación de Juan Pablo Angarita, Camila Rocca, Juliana Guerra, Marco Giraldo y Elizabeth León. En este panel las personas participantes dieron inicio presentado proyectos sociales, comunitarios, de mineria de datos, editoriales, feministas, enmarcados en discusiones sobre lo abierto. A lo largo del panel, sus participantes reflexionaron respecto a los desafíos, oportunidades, y retos de los sistemas de inteligencia artificial. Aquí te contamos los detalles

Historiadoras del Arte. Clase Historia del Arte I

Jornada de contribución a Wikiquote “Historiadoras del Arte. Clase Historia del Arte I”. En esta jornada de contribución treinta estudiantes sumaron citas célebres de historiadoras del arte a Wikiquote. Este trabajo se realizó en grupos, se crearon 3 páginas y se editarón 3 más. En total se hicieron 72 ediciones en el marco de esta actividad y contamos con la página de la escritora y académica Rihanna Eisler, y de la historiadora de arte Gloria Cortés Aliaga. Aquí te contamos los detalles

Catalogación y Web Semántica

Charla magistral “Catalogación y Web Semántica” por Martha Muñoz. En este taller se hace una aproximación a la catoligación, partiendo de los principios de encontrar, identificar, seleccionar, navegar y explorar, adquirir u obtener información. En el taller se plantea que es necesario que los datos que se recojan, se sepan recoger, partiendo del principio de uso, es decir que sirvan a otras personas, dependencias, instituciones, y a la ciudadania. Aquí te contamos los detalles

Patrimonios abiertos UNAL

El cierre de la semana del acceso abierto la hicimos con otra jornada de contribución a Wikimedia Commmons a través del recorrido fotográfico “Patrimonios abiertos UNAL”. En esta jornada estudiantes de la Universidad Nacional, quienes se registraron en las plataformas Wikimedia y sumaron más de 30 imágenes para dar visibilidad a los patrimonios de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia Sede Bogotá en las plataformas abiertas del Ecosistema Wikimedia. Aquí te contamos los detalles

  • Edifición nuevo de Artes UNAL Bogotá
    Edifición nuevo de Artes UNAL Bogotá
  • Edificio Yu Takeuchi UNAL Bogotá
    Edificio Yu Takeuchi UNAL Bogotá
  • Mural edificio humanas UNAL Bogotá
    Mural edificio humanas UNAL Bogotá

Abrir la Cultura y el Patrimonio. Seminario de formación en Herramientas Wikimedia para implementación en Instituciones Culturales.

A través de la colaboración entre el Equipo de Cultura y Patrimonio de la Fundación Wikimedia, el Programa de Fortalecimiento de Museos del Ministerio de Cultura de Colombia y Wikimedia Colombia desarrollamos un seminario que permitió acercar, a través de cuatro sesiones de charlas magistrales, a las y los participantes a las diversas posibilidades en las colaboraciones entre las instituciones culturales y el Ecosistema Wikimedia. Este, estuvo dirigido principalmente a personas vinculadas a estas instituciones, sin embargo, participaron también gestores culturales independientes, docentes y personas interesadas en las temáticas tratadas.

El Seminario incorporó herramientas que permitieron abrir nuevos canales para las colaboraciones Wikimedia Colombia y el sector cultural en Colombia.

Primera Sesión. Wikipedista en residencia. El trabajo mancomunado y transferencia de capacidades
Esta sesión estuvo liderada por la actual Oficial de Programa del equipo de Cultura y Patrimonio, Giovanna Fontenelle. A través de su experiencia, Giovanna compartió con las y los participantes las posibilidades que se abren al incorporar un Wikipedista en residencia. Pasando por las integraciones de Wikimedia Commons en las colecciones de museos e instituciones culturales. Acá puedes ver la sesión.
Segunda sesión. Inteligencia Artificial en Museos. Herramientas de apoyo.
Sakti Pramyuda, Senior Partnership Manager, East South East Asia and Pacific (ESEAP) at Wikimedia Foundation, fue el invitado a la segunda sesión del Seminario, en la que compartió la experiencia de Wikisource Loves Manuscripts. Allí, nos contó cómo se desarrolló el proceso para la digitalización y la posterior transcripción de los manuscritos en hojas de palma en Bali y como la herramienta Transkribus ha servido a este fin. Acá puedes ver la sesión.
Tercera sesión. Abrir las colecciones. Proyectos de Digitalización.
En esta ocasión el acompañamiento fue recibido por parte de Angie Cervellera y Mauricio Genta, quienes desde Wikimedia Argentina compartieron sus experiencia en el trabajo con instituciones culturales y específicamente, ampliaron la mirada sobre los proyectos de digitalización, las regulaciones del acceso abierto y los procedimientos que siguen en las digitalizaciones. Acá puedes ver la sesión.
Cuarta sesión. Hacer visibles las colecciones. Metadata para el conocimiento abierto.
El cierre del Seminario estuvo a cargo de Silvia Gutierrez, Oficial Senior de Programa para Bibliotecas. En esta ocasión, Silvia dió a conocer algunos datos sobre la difusión de las colecciones patrimoniales a través de Wikidata. Adicionalmente, compartió algunos ejercicios que permitieron acercar y aprender a usar el constructor de consultas para visualizar datos en la herramienta. Acá puedes ver la sesión.

Finalmente, el Seminario abrió canales de comunicación con diferentes instituciones para la propuesta y planeación de actividades a implementar durante el año 2024.



Wikimedia Côte d'Ivoire and Apsid-ci collaboration for Glam

On October 21, 2023, Association for the Promotion of Documentary Information Sciences in Côte d'Ivoire (Apsid-Ci) and Wikimedia Côte d'Ivoire jointly organised a day of reflection aimed at revitalising the Glam sector (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) in Côte d'Ivoire. This initiative brought together members of both organisations to discuss the challenges and opportunities linked to the preservation of cultural heritage and the dissemination of information.

The main objectives of this activity were to define medium, short and long-term strategic orientations for the Glam sector.

Follow the [Commons category] for to find out more.


Looong summer is over

By Zblace

Looong summer is over

It is almost and of a year with longest summer season... Following A+F work in Museum of Contemporary Art we had another MeetUp with youth group and have started making 2024 plans.

abcDNK.hr on MediaWiki+Wikibase.cloud

Center for Documenting Independent Culture

After a few summer months we transitioned https://abcDNK.hr database and website (both) migrated to MediaWiki+Wikibase.cloud switching from custom solution to most recent and maybe one of the most complex transitions as (too?) early adopters of Wikibase, initiatily testing remote frontend client on MiraHeze.org, but them moved to self-hosted MediaWiki. This was done white quite a bit of display hacking and data modeling. Neither is fully polished or close to finished, but is stable enough and functional for basic features. We will likely report more elaborately later once the dust settles around this.

#3 A+F MeetUp

On the October 24th we did #3 outreach and education MeetUp in the (Art+Feminism mode) with the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, towards the opening of the exhibitions of ‘Container’ (Croatian: Kontejner) exhibitions, this time in the internal caffe space wallpapered in modernist male architects :-) We hope to advance this work with other groups and Museums in 2024.

#03 A+F Wikimedia MeetUp

If you're interested in our work, please get in touch at: GLAM@mi2.hr and https://w.wiki/uQT or follow via #GLAMwikiCROATIA #GLAMwikiHR on: FB +Insta. +T and Mastodon.Social ! <3


Great first results in State Regional Archives and Wikiresident Group coworking

The State Regional Archives in Prague

The cooperation between Wikimedia Czech Republic and State Regional Archives in Prague, which was announced in the Newsletter in April this year, has had its first results: a set of 85 photographs of important archival materials has been published here: Collections of the State Regional Archives in Prague. The files are gradually being added to the corresponding articles on Wikipedia. New articles have also been added to the Czech Wikipedia or existing articles about the Regional Archives and its eleven subordinate district archives have been updated. It is planned to publish another set of photographs of approximately the same quantity by the end of 2023. Workshops for archivists and Wikipedians are planned. You can also join the project by placing images in articles in your language version of Wikipedia.

The Man of Sorrows 1486 (SOkA Kutná Hora, folio 136 detail)


Wikiresident Group established

In October, the first meeting of the Wikiresident Group was also held. Representatives of WMCZ, wikiresidents from Prague Zoo, National Library in Prague and Museum of Eastern Bohemia in Hradec Králové discussed technical issues, possibilities of editorial work and especially forms of further continuous cooperation of this coworking group. The aim is to create a functioning network for sharing specific experiences with the support and mentoring of the main co-director. The group will continue to meet roughly once a month in the online coworking space as well as consult on an ongoing basis as needed, in a shared online workspace.

First Wikiresident Group meeting in Prague 2023


Wikimedia Community Ireland Host WikiWomen Partner Meeting at Dublin's historical Port

Wikimedia Community Ireland collaborates with Partners from the Basque Country and Friesland

Wikimedia Community Ireland was delighted to host the Wiki Women Erasmus+ Partners meeting last week (October 24th-26th). We were joined by partners from Coláiste Oiriall in Monaghan, Learning Hub Friesland, Afûk (which promotes the Frisian language and culture), Mercator-Fryske Akademy (who facilitate interdisciplinary research on the Frisian language and Culture and minority languages), Euskal Wikilarien Kultura Elkartea (the Basque Wikimedia Group) and Antigua-Luberri BHI (A Basque Secondary School).

The WikiWomen Project addresses many imminent challenges the need for digital skills and literacy, the position of Europe’s smaller and minority languages, the need for multilingualism to be mainstreamed across school curricula, and the importance of gender equality, not only in society but also in the information we access.

The Meetings took Place at the Renovated Substation at Dublin Port

Dublin Port kindly provided a space for the meeting to take place. Discussions about Teaching materials and GLAMs Toolkits took place overlooking vistas of Dublin’s Docklands, the Liffey, and the distant Dublin mountains.

The teaching materials discussed included lesson plans and student activities on the gender gap, digital literacy, and the importance of elevating minority languages. These activities have been implemented in schools on an ongoing basis since the project began and are being developed and fine-tuned so that more schools can take part in the program.

The partners are also designing materials to provide GLAMs and language institutions with a step-by-step action plan to implement the WikiWomen program structurally in their educational outreach activities and collaborate with schools.

On the second day, the partners made important plans for the Basque and Frisian Wikithons taking place in 2024. These discussions took place in the renovated historical Substation building on the Dublin Port HQ grounds.

The Substation is a 20th-century redbrick building located on the corner of East Wall Road and Alexandra Road once played a pivotal role in the early electrification of Dublin Port. During renovations, part of the city’s 18th-century sea wall was discovered running under the Substation. The wall is now preserved under a glass floor in the building and on permanent display to the public and forms an integral part of the Port’s history. The partner meeting was followed by a guided tour of Dublin Port where we learned about its rich maritime history and heritage zone.

The partners left feeling inspired and motivated by the discussions, eager to get to work on the plans.

You can find out more about the WikiWomen Erasmus+ Project at wikimedia.ie and the WikiWomen website.


Results of funded projects within Call GLAM 2023

Libraries are still today a central place for the free dissemination of knowledge. Wikimedia Italy with the call Musei archivi biblioteche 2023 wanted to make these places of culture protagonists.

Biblioteca Lazzerini and industrial culture of Prato

Lanificio Romei (woolen mill) in Prato in the early 20th century

One of the projects that has seen the light thanks to this call is the one realised by Biblioteca Lazzerini in Prato, Tuscany. The project consists in rediscovering the industrial culture of the city through the use of Wikimedia projects. Several entries have been written on Wikipedia on the history, places and protagonists of Prato's textile production, such as those on Piero Benintendi or Piazza San Domenico. 250 historical photos were also uploaded on Wikimedia Commons. The images were collected through a campaign inviting anyone who had historical photos on Prato's textile industries to deliver them to the library by 31 July. These also include:

Civico Museo Insubrico di Storia Naturale and fossil specimens

Pozzo Carsico
Xiloteca, Civico Museo Insubrico di Storia Naturale

Civico Museo Insubrico di Storia Naturale (Insubric Museum of Natural History in Clivio), houses a large collection of artefacts from the Insubric region, focusing in particular on the Monte San Giorgio site and also preserving study collections in addition to the material on display. The UNESCO site of Monte San Giorgio extends between the province of Varese and Canton Ticino in Switzerland. It is an area of particular interest for its paleontological findings, so much so that since 2003 the Swiss area has been part of the UNESCO World Heritage list, while the Italian area has been on this list since 2010.

The aim of the project was to create and enhance images and encyclopaedic entries that tell not only about the collections and objects in the Civico Museo Insubrico di Storia Naturale but also about the natural history of the Monte San Giorgio UNESCO site. 106 images were produced, specifically for the fossil specimens focus-stacking and imaging-composing techniques were used. With this project, the Civico Museo Insubrico tells the remote history of its territory by making the exhibits active protagonists of the narrative.

Here the media in Wikimedia Commons category "Fossils in Civico Museo Insubrico di Storia Naturale": https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Fossils_in_Civico_Museo_Insubrico_di_Storia_Naturale

Wiki Loves Fashion in the Netherlands

Wiki Loves Fashion in the Netherlands

In October, the kick-off of the second Wiki Loves Fashion in the Netherlands took place in Hengelo, the home of the Netherlands' only permanent 'Wikikring', a monthly gathering of 'Twentse' editors of Wikipedia. The event, which took place in the library downtown, kicked off with a lecture by the multi-faceted artist Theodorus Johannes on Gender-expression in fashion, this year's theme. Afterwards, people who were interested were assisted with their first steps on Wikipedia. There is still an ongoing online event that ends in November, though the first articles and photos on gender expression in fashion have already been posted!


Biodiversity Information Standards Conference 2023 (TDWG2023) and the Entomological Collection Network Meeting (ECN2023)

Biodiversity Information Standards Conference 2023 (TDWG2023)

Dag Endresen presenting on modelling research expeditions in Wikidata at TDWG2023

Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand provided me (User:Ambrosia10) with funding to attend, in person, the Biodiversity Information Standards Conference (TDWG 2023). More about the society can be found here on it's website. This conference was held in Hobart from 9th to the 13th of October and was hosted by the Atlas of Living Australia and the National Research Collections Australia. Many of the attendees and participants were representing natural history museums and institutions. The conference was an amazing opportunity for me to reconnect and enrich existing relationships with attendees and participants in the biodiversity information standards community and also to network and make new connections. It gave me the opportunity to advocate for more engagement with various Wiki projects but most particularly Wikidata.

I, along with Dag Endresen (from the University of Oslo Natural History Museum), had the opportunity to help raise awareness of our Wikidata WikiProject Research Expeditions project. I also co-led a popular unconference session during the conference with David Fichtmueller from the Berlin Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum. We instructed attendees on the process of making a Wikidata property proposal. David and I were particularly keen to ensure that attendees of our session gained a more in depth knowledge on the property proposal process in order to obtain a wider range of natural history people identifiers added into Wikidata.

As part of my obligations undertaken to obtain funding, I produced a conference report which can be found on a subpage of my English Wikipedia userpage. I felt privileged to have been able to attend, to learn, and to contribute to community discussions concerning biodiversity data and data standards. I am extremely grateful to Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand for providing me with this opportunity.

Entomological Collections Network Meeting 2023 (ECN2023)

I (User:Ambrosia10) was invited to present at the annual ECN2023 on the 5th of November. I gave a presentation on "Connecting Entomological Collectors through the Wikiverse". This presentation introduced attendees to Wikidata and gave information on how to go about researching biographical information on entomologists in order to enrich their Wikidata items. I gave further information on the reuse of a Wikidata Qid in such platforms as Bionomia. I also explained how this research and reuse can be used to generate Wikipedia articles should there be sufficient secondary sources to hurdle the Wikipedia notability criteria. I gave examples of round tripping of Wikidata Qids in GLAM collection management systems and websites. I concluded by pointing attendees to particular resources to assist them in their Wiki editing journey. My slides for this presentation can be found here.


WikiMatejko, Internships, Open Heritage, folk costumes

Call for internships in partnership with the National Museum in Krakow

Plaque at the entrance to the NCK building
Main Building of the National Museum in Krakow

In October we completed the recruitment process for interns within the framework of the Internship in Culture program of the National Cultural Center. This time we offered internships in partnership with the National Museum in Krakow. With our offer, we want to convince people that Wikipedia is a great place for humanists who want to develop their digital competencies.

In response to our offer, we received a record number of applications so far, as many as 25. Our Open Culture manager conducted about 20 interviews. As a result, we selected 5 people. The choice was not easy, as each of the candidates was motivated to do an internship and had the potential to develop as an intern within the program. Therefore, all candidates were invited to participate in the WikiMatejko editing campaign and can take part in it while doing an internship at the National Museum in Krakow.

Our Open Culture Manager says: Such conversations with candidates, while challenging because they take a lot of time, are also of great value. I have the opportunity to find out if what we offer them is interesting to them and if so, why. During my conversations with candidates, I learned that the internship offer stands out from other offers, that the combination of humanities knowledge and digital competencies is interesting, and that the value of the offer is the opportunity to do it online and at the same time get internship credit at a major national museum. This reinforces my conviction that such a joint experiment with a museum can be very valuable, both for the interns themselves and for free knowledge, as these people will bring expert knowledge about art and our cultural heritage to Wikimedia projects. I believe there is value in jointly offering apprenticeships that combine our know-how, and I would like to continue this model in future collaborations with other GLAM institutions.

The National Cultural Center is a state cultural institution whose statutory task is to undertake activities for the development of culture in Poland. As part of its activities, the NCK conducts its own long-term programs and one-time projects, as well as partnership projects with other entities in the cultural sector. One of the programs is Internship in Culture, where cultural sector entities through NCK recruit interns. The Internship in Culture program allows students and graduates to gain their first work experience, and organizations to recruit members to their teams.


Official opening of the WikiMatejko editing campaign at the National Museum in Krakow

Participants of the official opening of WikiMatejko
Agata Jablonska presenting the activities of the National Museum in Krakow related to the public domain
Kamila Neuman (Wikimedia Poland) during the presentation of WikiMatejko
Participants in the WikiMatejko action in the museum's library
WikiMatejko participants in the library

October 28 marked the official opening of the WikiMatejko editing campaign at the National Museum in Krakow.

As part of GLAM-Wiki's partnership with the museum, preparations had been underway for several months for an action related to the Year of Matejko (2023 marks the 185th anniversary of the artist's birth and 130th anniversary of his death) and the exhibition currently on display at the museum entitled "Matejko. Painter and History." One of the museum's branches is the Jan Matejko House, a biographical museum dedicated to the life and work of the artist. The museum also has the artist's paintings in its collection, which are on permanent display in the Cloth Hall, among other places.

The goal of the campaign is to enrich Wikipedia and other sister projects with high-quality content, illustrations and data related to the artist, his life and work. As part of the collaboration, digital reproductions of paintings, sketches and other museum artefacts related to the artist have been already uploaded to Wikimedia Commons.

As a result of the action, we will increase the quantity and carry the quality of Wikipedia articles on Jan Matejko's work, his life, the circle of people close to him, and objects that were an important part of his creative activities.

The campaign will last until January 2024, and will include online training for newcomers and one-on-one support by experienced Wikipedians. The newcomers will create new and develop existing articles on the work of Jan Matejko. We want to use these articles to create open educational resources that will enrich the school curriculum, which often refers to Matejko, who depicted important events and historical figures for Poland as part of his work. As part of the proposed narrative, we also want to touch on less obvious themes, including the fact that Matejko collected and recreated historical objects and costumes, which later served as "models" in his artwork. As part of the action, we also want to translate new and developed content about Matejko, his life, loved ones and works into other languages.

The main target of the action are newcomers who will learn how to edit Wikipedia with the support of experienced Wikipedians. Our goal is to encourage editing Wikipedia among humanities students, especially art history majors, who have an easy time writing about culture and art, and at the same time are interested in improving their digital competence.

The action's opening event was a great success, with as many as 16 newcomers and 5 experienced Wikipedians participating. And there is even more interest in participating in the action, as not all participants had the opportunity to attend the opening event.

Kamila Neuman sums up the event as follows: We really wanted to start the editing action with a live event at the museum, which was an opportunity to talk about the action as such, but also to introduce newcomers to experienced Wikipedians, to visit the museum's library and learn about the sources, and to see the Matejko exhibition, which was guided by an expert from the museum. I think it's extremely important to start an editing campaign that will be running online with just a live meeting, accompanied by good energy, and it's such a good start that motivates further activities. We were very positively surprised by such a large response from new people, mainly humanities students, who learned about the action from the Association's and MNK's internship offers and at their universities. Conversations with them have shown us that they are very eager to share their knowledge and do it in an accessible way, so that knowledge about the artist and his work is available to everyone at their fingertips. I am also very pleased that the museum is open to developing our cooperation and implementing new activities that also involve its audience in actively processing knowledge about its collections.

  • More photos from the opening of the WikiMatejko editing campaign by Robert Drózd can be found HERE.


Open Heritage Conference at the Wojciech Korfanty Institute

Photo from the Open Heritage Conference at the Wojciech Korfanty Institute. Pictured from left: Ewa Caban - Wikipedian, initiator of the conference, Klara Sielicka-Baryłka, Kamila Neuman (Wikimedia Poland)

Representatives of Wikimedia Poland spoke about sharing and using free heritage resources during the conference OPEN HERITAGE at the Wojciech Korfanty Institute.

The aim of the "OPEN HERITAGE" conference was to show how tangible and intangible heritage can be creatively disseminated, using the example of projects run by Wikimedia Polska and by the Mobile Digitization Center department at the Wojciech Korfanty Institute. The conference was attended by employees of cultural institutions and people interested in the dissemination of tangible and intangible heritage.

Kamila Neuman, Open Culture Manager from Wikimedia Poland talked about the recipe for successful GLAM-Wiki cooperation, i.e. the first steps of cultural institutions to Wikimedia projects. Klara Sielicka-Baryłka, Open Education Manager from Wikimedia Poland talked about Regional Education and open educational resources. The conference also included a panel on Wikiresidency as a model of GLAM-Wiki cooperation with the participation of: Grzegorz Gogacz - wikiresident at the Public Library of the City of Warsaw - Main Library of the Mazowieckie Voivodeship, Filip Jankowski - wikiresident at the National Museum in Krakow, and Kamila Neuman from Wikimedia Poland. It was an interesting discussion, which showed how different the activities carried out as part of a wikiresidency can be and, using vivid examples, showed what a wikiresidency can consist of.

The Wojciech Korfanty Regional Institute of Culture is a provincial self-government cultural institution of dissemination and scientific and research character. The Institute's tasks include conducting research work, preparing conservation documentation, creating innovative programs of socio-cultural animation, cultural education, organizing improvement in organizing and conducting cultural activities, promoting culture and protecting the cultural heritage of the region, conducting publishing activities, conducting research analysing the state of culture and creating cooperation networks integrating entities active in the cultural sector.

Wikimedia Poland has been cooperating with the institute for years by spreading openness through GLAM-Wiki activities.

Interesting resources made available on Wikimedia Commons as part of the GLAM-Wiki collaboration with the National Library in Warsaw

  • From the land of Sieradz. Girl in velvet 1908-1913
    From the land of Sieradz. Girl in velvet 1908-1913
  • From the land of Sieradz. Bride
    From the land of Sieradz. Bride
  • Bride from Sieradz area
    Bride from Sieradz area
  • Portrait of Florian Piekarski with his wife Bronislawa 1900
    Portrait of Florian Piekarski with his wife Bronislawa 1900
  • Portrait of Florian Piekarski with his wife Bronislawa in the garden
    Portrait of Florian Piekarski with his wife Bronislawa in the garden
  • Wanda Siemaszkowa as Donna Alnica 1907
    Wanda Siemaszkowa as Donna Alnica 1907
  • Portrait of Wanda Siemaszkova in stage creation
    Portrait of Wanda Siemaszkova in stage creation
  • Wanda Siemaszkowa in the role of Julka in the play "In the Net" by Jan August Kisielewski
    Wanda Siemaszkowa in the role of Julka in the play "In the Net" by Jan August Kisielewski

As part of the GLAM-Wiki collaboration, more than 20,000 files were uploaded at the National Library in Warsaw in October, including folk costumes in paintings by Florian Piekarski and photos of people from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, such as actress Wanda Siemaszkowa.


Open Access Week celebrations and an edit-a-thon to increase the visibility of black lusophone communities

Slides of these webinars

To commemorate International Open Access Week, Wikimedia Portugal organized a couple of webinars in collaboration with two different universities, NOVA FCSH and University of Algarve. Focusing specifically on the copyright exceptions for teaching and research, the sessions highlighted the latest updates to the Portuguese copyright law (due to the most recent European Union copyright directive), framing Creative Commons licences as the default options for retaining rights while ensuring the best practises for open access. The webinars had a combined attendance of nearly 50 people, mostly researchers and librarians, as well as science managers and other support staff working with scientific publishing.

The slides are available on Commons (in Portuguese).

Wiki Editoras Lx partner with BANTUMEN for an edit-a-thon dedicated to black lusophone women, trans and non-binary people

Wiki Editoras Lx user group on this editathon

On October 28th, local user group Wiki Editoras Lx (WELx) organized an edit-a-thon dedicated to black lusophone women, trans and non-binary people. The meeting was curated by Vanessa Sanches, from BANTUMEN, a local news outlet focusing on the black lusophone community. The group welcomed various new editors, who travelled long distances to reach Lisbon on that (very!) rainy day.

This was the second time that WELx partnered with BANTUMEN. Expanding on the work started in 2022, the group used BANTUMEN's annual Power List 100, a list of influential black people in lusophone countries, to create new biographies on Wikipedia in Portuguese. Furthermore, a proposal for a new external identifier of the list was submitted on Wikidata, widening its potential to increase the visibility of these marginalized groups. If you can, make sure to support the creation of this new property.


Dynamic October in Serbia

Wikipedian in residence at ULUS

During the first month of the project at the Association of Fine Artists of Serbia, as many as 138 new articles were written, while 93 catalogs of the Association's exhibitions were digitized and then uploaded to the Wikimedia Commons. Thanks to these catalogs, it is possible to get a quality insight into the artistic scene of Serbia in the 20th century.

Wikipedian in residence at National Museum of Kraljevo

In the National Museum of Kraljevo, the first month of the ended, during which 21 new articles were written, 16 were illustrated and 16 were improved. A total of 181 files have been uploaded to the Wikimedia Commons. Among these articles and files there is significant information and content about the historical and cultural heritage of Kraljevo.

Wiki Loves Living Heritage edit-a-thon

As a part of a global campaign, Wiki Loves Living Heritage, a 15-day-long on Serbian Wikipedia was organized. During this activity, 9 editors wrote 99 new articles, and the most valuable editors of the campaign, Gzanag, Nikolina Šepić, and Sadko, will be awarded with book vouchers. We would especially like to highlight the efforts of these editors, as well as the editor under the user name Ljiljana Sundać, for the large number of articles written, but also to all other editors for their contribution to the preservation of the intangible cultural heritage, both of Serbia and of the whole world. Some of the topics of the articles included traditions and customs, traditional gastronomy, folk beliefs and religious traditions, various handicrafts, interesting national rituals, as well as places and organizations of cultural importance.

  • Catalog "Drawing and small plastic" from 1979
    Catalog "Drawing and small plastic" from 1979
  • Catalog "Drawings and small plastic" from 1970
    Catalog "Drawings and small plastic" from 1970
  • Uros Predic - Portrait of a lady
    Uros Predic - Portrait of a lady
  • J. B. Tito laying a wreath at the graves of the victims, Memorial cemetery, 1973.
    J. B. Tito laying a wreath at the graves of the victims, Memorial cemetery, 1973.
  • Master Vasa's lodging
    Master Vasa's lodging
  • Yugoslavian abacus with toys
    Yugoslavian abacus with toys


Edit-a-thon for Librarians at the annual Library and Information Association of South Africa 2023 Conference

photo of the edit-a-thon

There is very little on libraries in South Africa on Wikipedia (and even on Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons), so a group of Wikibrarians ran an edit-a-thon at the annual LIASA (Library and Information Association of South Africa) conference where attendees could add content.

The LIASA Conference theme was "Libraries - Writing the Next Chapter" so one of the ways in which libraries and librarians can write these stories, to tell the our stories is through Wikimedia and its various sister projects.

Our aim was to get each attendee to add a library to the List of Libraries in South Africa and it succeeded. This was low hanging fruit, but it meant that the 30 attendees, mostly newbies, made their first edits by adding 33 entries. Attendees were from across the library sector - school, academic, public and special libraries. Slides we used are here: File:LIASA Wikipedia Editathon 2023.pdf

We are about to have a Wiki Loves SA Libraries campaign (dates still to be finalised) but have created this Wiki Loves South African Libraries Campaign to get content added to Wikipedia, Wikidata and the Commons. The edit-a-thon was a way of getting interest in the campaign. Watch this space!


Wikipedia for all of Sweden; Museums and Wikidata – why and how?; Photo memories from Stockholm and Rome; Negotiating Knowledge on Wikipedia

Wikipedia for all of Sweden

The team at the Swedish Air Force Museum

The project Wikipedia for all of Sweden has had a full day of lectures and workshops at the Swedish Air Force Museum for about ten organizations that want to integrate Wikimedia's platforms into their operations. There are many forms of digital collaboration that can be developed in the outward-facing activities of interested organizations.

The experiences from the workshop showed that there is interest from educational institutions in using sources and background material from, for example, memorial organizations which can then be realized as knowledge on Wikipedia. What is needed on site is basic knowledge of how to get started and edit - and where the project can be supported with training and knowledge of Wikimedia's platforms.

More images from the Wikipedia for all of Sweden-day at Wikimedia Commons. Many thanks to all who participated!


Museums and Wikidata – why and how?

The proceedings of the 2023 Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries conference have been published. One of the articles is of particular interest to the Wikimedia community: Wikidata for authority control: sharing museum knowledge with the world. It was authored by Wikimedia Sverige and presents a joint project that we've been working on together with two prominent Swedish GLAM institutions, the Nationalmuseum and the National Historical Museums of Sweden.

In this article, we outline the rationale behind the two museums deciding to embark on the journey of making their authority data more accessible, structured and discoverable through Wikidata. We introduce our shared working process and the tools we have been using. Most importantly, we share our insights from an intensive cooperation project between a GLAM and a Wikimedia chapter, hoping to lower the thresholds for others, be it Wikimedia affiliates or cultural heritage institutions, to engage in similar iniatives.

Photo memories from Stockholm and Rome

Our work in the project 100 000 Bildminnen continues, with several hundred photos from the collections of the Nordic Museum uploaded in October.

The new photos cover several, very different, areas. There are military airplanes as well as city views from Rome and Stockholm. If you're familiar with any of those topics, and can recognize what's in the photos, you can help out both the museum and the Wikimedia community by adding better descriptions and Depicts statements!

  • An unidentified street in Stockholm...
    An unidentified street in Stockholm...
  • ...and another one in Rome.
    ...and another one in Rome.
  • We have something for airplane enthusiasts as well!
    We have something for airplane enthusiasts as well!

Negotiating Knowledge on Wikipedia

The student Jonathan Arvidsson from Karlstad University has written a study focused on different views on Wikipedia as a source of information among Swedish scholars called Negotiating Knowledge on Wikipedia. Thanks to Jonathan for choosing a good topic, and for the post on diff about the study!


Swiss GLAM Programm

Wikimedia at ICOM Trienal in Valencia

The Triennale of the International Council of Museums (ICOM) takes place every three years. At the triennale end of September in Valencia, it was the first time that multiple Wikimedia chapters cooperated and participated with a stand and with lectures. Wikimedia CH was represented by GLAM Lead Sandra Becker.

The strategy of Museums and our movement interact in their purpose and museums are interested to open up collections and to work with us. For Museums the 17 sustainability goals (as also presented at the United Nations) are key for future work. It is a huge global change due to all the crisis situations in the world. Our projects are valued and in line with the ICOM strategy: the international museum day, the work on red lists of missing objects, open access to collections, decolonizing heritage, addressing the youth by opening up and provide access with future hybrid events, including the global south, better working conditions for qualified academics, work on closing the knowledge gaps etc.

Find the report on the Diff Wikimedia Blog.


GLAM Hack 2023

Once a year, the Swiss OpenGLAM working group brings together cultural institutions, software developers, digital humanists, artists, Wikipedians and other interested parties to promote openness among galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM). At the GLAMhack, we collaboratively experiment and innovate with cultural content and digital tools for research, web and mobile applications, Wikipedia and other uses. This edition focuses on colonial collections, provenance research, as well as the application of the FAIR and CARE principles in data governance.

The 2023 GLAM Hack took place at the Musée d'ethnographie in Geneva to develop prototypes with open cultural data to strengthen the digital transformation of the GLAM sector. It mainly addressed concerns around decolonialisation in the Museum. You can have a look at the report here.


First WikiWitch Atelier

The association Les sans pagEs hosted the first Swiss Wikiwitches workshop on the theme of witch-hunts in Switzerland on November 4, 2023 at the Geneva library. Other workshops will follow throughout Switzerland in 2024.

The term “witch” evokes a multitude of themes, from Halloween celebrations to horror stories, religious blindness, inquisition, power, violence and torture. However, much remains unclear on this subject. The association Les sans pagEs wishes to conduct Wikiwitches throughout Switzerland in collaboration with Wikimedia CH, in order to complete the mapping of people persecuted during the great witch hunts, and to make this history available to all. For more information about this project, read the interview of the general Manager of Les sans pagEs.


Good omens for a rosy future

National Trust

Readers can find out more about the National Trust's pilots at our new project page.

Khalili Foundation

A good omen from the Falnama graced the Wikipedia home page on Friday 13th.

I met with the founders of a new Wikimedia user group focused on Islamic Civilization. For one of their first meetings, I will give an online presentation about the Khalili Collections and their representation on the Wikimedia projects. This 1h30min session will take place on Saturday 11 November with live translation into Arabic and with slides available in English and in Arabic. This will be followed up by a workshop in which the group "Arabicise" the Wikimedia Commons files by translating captions and adding tags. When I uploaded images of more than a thousand Islamic artworks, I used Wikidata to hold most of the metadata so as to make the representation as language-independent as possible. That involved a bit more work, but has paid off in allowing this kind of inter-language collaboration.

The Falnama article DYK was on the front page of English Wikipedia on 13 October: the 23rd DYK from this project. 4.6 million readers visited the home page and will have been exposed to an image cropped from the Khalili Collections manuscript. 9,900 clicked through to the article itself.

The new article Gulshan-i 'Ishq, about an Indian love poem, went live on English Wikipedia and has already passed DYK review: "Article is in great shape for a DYK and highly presentable (GA-like quality)." This is the 49th new article created by this project. At about the same time, a volunteer has written a biography of Nusrati (the author of the Gulshan-i 'Ishq), so those articles link to and complement each other.

The article on the Empire of the Sultans travelling exhibition has been substantially worked on and is nearly complete. I have also used the exhibition catalogue to describe Khalili Collections astrolabes and paintings on Wikidata: two types of object for which Wikidata is trying to build complete indexes.

Wikidata has a new Wikiproject to organise data on manuscripts. As part of this, I have created a dashboard which shows the number of manuscripts from each collection that Wikidata knows about, with indicators of the data completeness for each collection. The Khalili Collection of Islamic Art presently has 132 manuscripts in this database, putting it ahead of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and behind the Vatican Library.

Volunteers are adding data and links from ArtUK to Wikidata. This resulted in the creation of some simple records for Khalili artworks that already had rich representations in Wikidata. So I have manually merged these representations and set up some database queries to monitor for new duplicates. This query brings up Khalili Collections objects whose ArtUK link has been added to Wikidata. I wrote a short briefing for ArtUK on how they can use Wikidata to populate their tags database, and how they can use a bulk data dump to add a lot of their links to Wikidata. Waqas (Executive Director of the Khalili Foundation and an advisor to ArtUK) has passed this on.

Sir David Khalili's autobiography, The Art of Peace will be released on 2 November. I was given an early copy and have put in citations from 11 Wikipedia articles.

I have been working with Nazia Mintz-Habib on an accessible summary of her research centre's Khalili-supported research which can go on the Khalili Foundation web site. She has given feedback on a draft.

There were no new translations this month. There were no new images uploaded, but two cropped versions of older images. GLAMorgan reports 4,920,000 image views this month.

Women in Environmental Justice; October WikiSalon

Women in Environmental Justice

The Smithsonian Institution and Wikimedia DC, held a meetup, Wikipedia Edit-a-thon: Women in Environmental Justice

October WikiSalon

Free Library of Philadelphia, and Wikimedia Philadelphia, held a meetup, Wikipedia and Wikidata Edit-a-thon.



AvoinGLAM joins the long-awaited GLAM Wiki 2023


AvoinGLAM at GLAM Wiki 2023

AvoinGLAM team will join GLAM Wiki 2023 in Uruguay. We have 3 presentations in the program.

  • 16.11. 15.00 UTC Stretching Meta (presentation, notes)
  • 17.11. 14.15 UTC Wikidocumentaries for collaboration (presentation, notes)
  • 18.11. 12.30 UTC Wiki Loves Living Heritage Bazaar at GLAM-wiki Conference (Project page, notes)

Stretching Meta 16.11. 15.00 UTC

Wiki Loves Living Heritage uses Meta-wiki in ways it was not designed to work. It hosts a campaign, blog, event calendar and showcase, content lists, wikiproject, material collection, learning materials, tasks, teams, content creation, contacts, documentation, design templates, metrics and maybe more.

We are advocating strongly for using Meta for sharing case studies and best practices. In an ideal planning, sharing, documenting, reporting and evaluation cycle, movement coordinators could be incrementally releasing engaging materials in all those stages. The materials would be connected with the original resources on Wikimedia projects, linked with automatic statistical measurements and outreach channels such as social media. Sharing open plans would allow us to build teams and partnerships before committing to the projects.

See the slides and come and discuss what could be developed further.

Wikidocumentaries for collaboration

The recent developments with media uploads and working with Structured Data on Commons will be the topic of the Wikidocumentaries presentation. Tuukka Hastrup will present the results of the Google Summer of Code project carried out with Zexi Gong to upload materials from the Finnish media aggregator Finna to Wikimedia Structured Data on Commons. He will also highlight a new feature to facet images from SDC in Wikidocumentaries. The feature was developed in a collaboration project with Aboa Vetus & Ars Nova.

Wiki Loves Living Heritage Bazaar at GLAM Wiki 2023

The Bazaar on the last day of GLAM Wiki 2023 is an event to share and hear experiences about working with living heritage, and to make new contacts. The format of the 1-hour session is flexible and depends on the participants. We will be gathering sharers throughout the conference days on location in Montevideo, and we encourage you to sign up as well. Follow the project page on Meta.

Activities in Wiki Loves Living Heritage

Several presentations have been organized in the Wiki Loves Living Heritage project. See the special section for Wiki Loves Living Heritage.

Hacking AI

AvoinGLAM has agreed to co-organize a hackathon about using AI in cultural heritage institutions together with the Finnish GLAM sector in the first half of 2024. If you are interested in discussing or planning the event from an Open Culture / Wikimedia perspective, please get in contact and let's work on it together.

European Culture & Creativity Days

EIT Culture & Creativity is an initiative of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) to support cultural innovation and initiatives in Europe. Helsinki is one of the six European co-location centers, and a launch event was organized 24–25 October at the Cable Factory in Helsinki. Open Culture has not yet found its way into the heart of the program, as we believe should happen.

Presenting Wikibase for community archives at Europeana Tech

Susanna Ånäs from AvoinGLAM and Ina Blümel from TIB presented the concept of a community archive Wikibase on 12 October at EuropeanaTech 2023. The concept to create a password-protected, conditionally open Wikibase to serve an ecosystem of community archives was developed in collaboration with Lozana Rossenova and Ina Blümel from TIB. Ukrainian focal point for intangible cultural heritage, Democracy through Culture, was collaborating as a content community partner in the proposal for EIT Culture & Creativity Community Catalyser call. While unsuccessful, we will continue developing the idea, which complements the vision of Wikidocumentaries as a browser of a heritage ecosystem.

Our session was not recorded, but we made a recording of AvoinGLAM's presentation in the session. It can be viewed on YouTube.


Let's Connect

Let's Connect – sharing Wikidata knowledge with Wiki Loves organizers and enthusiasts

Wikimedia Sverige has been working with Wikidata for a long time, and a lot of our work has focused on topics relevant to the Wiki Loves competitions, such as cultural heritage and protected nature around the world. This fall, we are sharing our experiences and helping others start contributing to Wikidata by participating in the Let's Connect peer learning program.

So far, we've had two learning clinics, organized together with Wikimedia Uganda, the recordings of which you can look at:

  1. In Session 1, we gave an introduction to Wikidata and SPARQL, with particular focus on cultural heritage data.
  2. In Session 2, we gave an overview of some useful tools that make using and contributing to Wikidata easier, such as Listeria and Petscan.

In the Let's Connect calendar you can find more information about these sessions, including the slides and Etherpad notes.

On November 9, it's time for the final session in the series, where we'll give an introduction to OpenRefine, a powerful data-wrangling tool that you can use to edit or upload large amounts of data to Wikidata. Something that can come in handy if you're organizing a competition like Wiki Loves Earth or Wiki Loves Monuments!


Learning and sharing

Wiki Loves Living Heritage at GLAM Wiki 2023

Two sessions will highlight Wiki Loves Living Heritage at GLAM Wiki 2023.

Wiki Loves Living Heritage Bazaar at GLAM Wiki 2023

The Bazaar on the last day of GLAM Wiki 2023 is an event to share and hear experiences about working with living heritage, and to make new contacts. The format of the 1-hour session is flexible and depends on the participants. We will be gathering sharers throughout the conference days on location in Montevideo, and we encourage you to sign up as well. Follow the project page on Meta.

Stretching Meta

Wiki Loves Living Heritage uses Meta-wiki in ways it was not designed to work. It hosts a campaign, blog, event calendar and showcase, content lists, wikiproject, material collection, learning materials, tasks, teams, content creation, contacts, documentation, design templates, metrics and maybe more.

See the slides and come and discuss what could be developed further.

Let's Connect on Wiki Loves Living Heritage

Wiki Loves Living Heritage was the topic of the Let's Connect session on 26 October. (slides, recording)

Wiki Loves Living Heritage with Dagbani Wikimedians

Dagbani Wikimedians hosted an WLLH event in Ghana on 28 October. They are launching editing activities and planning to coordinate importing living heritage inventories to Wikidata in West African countries.

Bring your data to Wiki Loves Living Heritage at WikidataCon

A prerecorded video was presented at WikidataCon on the topic of importing data about living heritage to Wikidata. The recording is subtitled in English and Chinese and available on YouTube.

This event will be followed by a presentation about data modeling for living heritage in a session about modeling for cultural heritage. It is scheduled to be held on 2 December at 11 UTC at Wikidata Data Modeling Days.

Wiki Loves Safeguarding Living Heritage in Europe winners announced

The European photo contest related to the campaign resulted in 1700 photos in Wikimedia Commons focusing on the various forms of safeguarding living heritage. The winners of the contest come from Austria, Germany and Finland. The contest was organized by the European Network of Focal Points for the 2003 Convention (ENFP).

Wiki Loves Living Heritage/European photo contest/Winners

Winners announced for the Wiki Loves Safeguarding Living Heritage in Europe photo contest, European Network of Focal Point (ENFP)

Winners announced for the Wiki Loves Safeguarding Living Heritage photo contest, Diff, Wikimedia Foundation

See all the photos in the contest by country


The Wikimedia and Libraries AI Salons

October AI Salon

AI Salon with Silvia Gutiérrez The Wikimedia and Libraries User Group held its second AI Salon at noon ET on Thursday, October 27, 2023. Our guest speaker this month was Silvia Eunice Gutiérrez De la Torre, Senior Program Officer, Libraries, Wikimedia Foundation. The recording of our conversation is now available on YouTube.

Upcoming AI Salon

We will hold our third AI Salon at 10am ET on Thursday, November 30, 2023 with members of the Women in Religion User Group. Our theme will be using AI to combat bias on Wikipedia. Stay tuned for specific details!


November's GLAM events

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