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GLAM/Newsletter/September 2018/Contents/Brazil report

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Brazil report

Developing tGLAM: a landing-page generator for GLAM initiatives

Reasons for having an on-wiki landing portal for GLAM initiatives are manyfold. Firstly, it provides a reference point for Wikimedians to discuss and improve editorial strategies. Secondly, it gives visibility to the initiative, converging to a same site context, metrics, contact information and more. Thirdly, it can be a mechanism for tracking initiatives in different countries and projects.

To some extent, it is no exaggeration to say that each one of the GLAMWiki initiative Wikimedians run should have a landing page. Even more so: there might be a case for having landing pages on the same initiative in more than one project (Wikipedia, Commons, Outreach).

Nevertheless, to code this kind of pages can require a lot of work. Some GLAM initiatives, like the one Brazilian Wikimedians are running with Museu do Ipiranga, have a very sophisticated portal: see here. This requires quite some technical understanding of wiki-coding, bots, etc. In this context, and particularly for smaller GLAM initiatives, we might be at a point at which initiatives have no landing page at all.

This was our case in Brazil. We have been running very large initiatives but also smaller ones. Large initiatives have landing pages; smaller initiatives did not. Every time we wanted to provide a link to the smaller initiatives we would just give the general Commons category. We thought this was definitely not nice.

So, we have come up with the idea of developing a semi-automated landing page generator for GLAM initiatives. It has been called tGLAM, where the lower-case t stands for template. Ideally, it works like a form to be quickly filled out, with the name of the GLAM initiative, the main category on Commons, the general Commons category of uploads associated to the GLAM, contact information, Wikimedians involved, projects associated, key images, etc. The visual end result --though this example was not tGLAM-generated-- would be similar to the the landing portal of our initiative with the Brazilian National Archives. The template code and documentation in Portuguese are at: w:pt:template:TGLAM.

We have developed test cases for our first landing page generated with tGLAM:

Our main challenge at this point is to make sure we include on the template every key pieces of information that our GLAM and all GLAM initiatives --as the idea is to have this generalized, multilingual (now, it exists exclusively in Portuguese, though we are considering an English version)-- need to have. We have had a first meeting on what we are missing and should be there with the WMF GLAM team and are working on including their suggestions to the template.

And we need your inputs too, particularly before we develop an operational template. It is easier to code the template with what we need on it before we have an easy-to-use, fully operational version. Please, do not hesitate to contact us if you are interested in this.

At the GLAMWiki Conference 2018, we hope to inform part of the section on landing pages, here, around the development of this tool. Hopefully, many of you who are reading this will be interested in joining this conversation in Tel Aviv, in November.

We appreciate the support provided by Alchimista for coming up with the dynamic GLAM upload counter.


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