GLAM/Newsletter/September 2023/Contents/WMF GLAM report
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Wikisource Loves Manuscripts, ICOM outreach, Flickr Foundation partnership, OpenRefine adoption, new sources in The Wikipedia Library, Image Description Month events, and the GLAM Wiki Conference
ICOM conference in Valencia
We supported Wikimedia Spain and other European affiliates (Amical Wikimedia, Wikimedia Italy, Wikimedia Germany, Wikimedia Switzerland, and Wikimedia Portugal) to engage with museum professionals at the ICOM conference in Valencia. In the lead-up to the conference, we collectively developed content for Meta, highlighting past collaborations with ICOM and museums and the particular opportunity of ICOM's new definition of museum. Our call to action for the conference was 'Help us share museums' knowledge with communities everywhere.' Let us know if you're contacted by an ICOM member as a result of the conference.
Wikisource Loves Manuscripts learning partners network
- We formed a learning partners network of 21 members representing seven different regions across the world. The first meeting is scheduled for 10 October and will introduce the main topics, such as an advanced introduction to Wikisource, partnership building, and digitization and transcription practices.
- Transkribus, which is integrated within Wikimedia OCR (optical character recognition), now supports 27 Wikisources.
- READ-COOP published a blogpost on about the Wikisource-Transkribus collaboration
- Our partner, IIIT Hyderabad, updated their Seamformer model, which is a high precision line text segmentation for handwritten documents that was tested on Sundanese manuscripts.
- Our technical fellow produced a technical patch so the Wikisource contest tool now supports multilingual Wikisource.
- We co-authored a blog post with the British Library, linking their Wikimedia collaborations to cultural restitution.
- We hosted the Wikisource community meetings, covering topics such as Google not indexing Wikisource.
OpenRefine adoption
There were more than 80 applicants to the Wikimedia Foundation-funded OpenRefine Train-the-trainer program, leading to a cohort of more than 12 people, with staff and Wikimedians connected to the Wiki Education Foundation, meemoo - Flemish institute for archives, Wikimedia Italy, Wikimedia UK, Wikimedia Portugal, Wiki Movimento Brasil, and Wikimedia District of Columbia, plus individual contributors from Algeria, Germany, India, Indonesia, and New Zealand.
Flickypedia
Inspired by Flickr2Commons, which supported around 2,000 users to upload 5.4M Flickr images to Wikimedia Commons, the Flickr Foundation is building a new bridge between Flickr and Wikimedia Commons. To understand what improvements they should prioritise, the Flickr Foundation surveyed >60 potential users of Flickypedia and attended a meeting of the Commons Photographers User Group. They have published their first UI sketches and a data model for community review. Like the Wikimedia Foundation's own Upload Wizard Improvements project, they are hoping to reduce the proportion of images leading to deletion requests.
The Wikipedia Library content partnerships
We're focused on diversifying the languages represented in the Library. To achieve this, we're connecting regularly with Wikimedia groups like Wikimedia Deutschland and the Wikimedia UAE user group. We're pleased to share two new partnerships in languages other than English: De Standaard and Duncker & Humblot.
Image Description Month
From October 1st to 31st, we are promoting Image Description Month, a month-long invitation to improve the description of visual content on any of the Wikimedia projects. The goal is to make these images more accessible, discoverable, connected, and usable in different languages.
You, your group, or your organization can participate by just adding an event to the table on the Image Description Month page. You don't need to ask to participate. Simply add your event and we will promote it and provide support in any way we can.
At the time of publication of this newsletter, we're expecting events in English from the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), the Biodiversity Heritage Library, and the National Archives and Records Administration. In Spanish, we have two seminars by Wikimedia Colombia as part of their Seminario Abrir la Cultura y el Patrimonio and an event by Wikimedia Argentina to address different guidelines in order to generate accessible descriptions for artistic and historical images on Wikipedia articles. CIS-A2K is organizing a description-a-thon in many Indian languages on Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Wikimedia Commons. Other events are still being organized and added, so there is more to come.
GLAM Wiki Conference
In September, we contributed to scholarship and program reviews for the GLAM Wiki Conference, which is being organized by the Wikimedistas de Uruguay. We're really excited by the final conference program, which will be shared soon. You can now register to attend the conference in person.
We're also supporting the organizers to host a series of Towards GLAM Wiki Conference meetings to understand the needs of the whole GLAM Wiki community. The next meetings are on October 11th (register here) and November 2nd. There will also be regional meetings, which started with the European GLAM coordinators group on October 3rd. Dates are still to be determined for other regions.
