GLAM/Newsletter/May 2023/Single
E-mail account issue
Once a month the newsletter This Month in GLAM is sent out, including two Wikimedia mailing lists. For this a Gmail account is used (and only for this). Sadly this account has been disabled as it would violate the Google's policies somehow, however unclear how it has violated the policies. An appeal has been submitted, but not yet been processed. As long as the account has been disabled, please send e-mails to me instead.
As a result of this, the Twitter account used to promote the stories from the newsletter is also inaccessible.
Update 19 June 2023: access to Gmail and Twitter has been restored.
Summer of Wikivoyage Edit-a-thon in Shëngjin, Albania, 2023
Summer of Wikivoyage Edit-a-thon in Shëngjin, 2023
Summer of Wikivoyage Edit-a-thon took place in Shëngjin, Albania, on May 19-21, 2023. 16 contributors from Kosovo and Albania joined the edit-a-thon to create and update articles about Lezhë county and other places travel guides on Wikivoyage.
WoALUG tried to create a collaborative environment and an inclusive editing process by inviting enthusiastic contributors from Lezha to engage the local community and raise awareness of the smaller towns about Wikimedia projects in Albania and Kosovo. People increased their editing skills and gained some insights into Wikivoyage.
At the edit-a-thon, participants worked on structuring articles and shared knowledge about Lezha’s traditions, cuisine, transport, and much more.
Below are some statistics from the edit-a-thon.
Contributors: 16
Wikivoyage
- Articles created: 9
- Articles edited: 39
Wikipedia
- Articles created: 16
- Articles edited: 28
Wikidata
- Articles created: 7
- Articles edited: 28
Commons uploads: 44
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 canː
- Like our Facebook page, follow us on Twitter or Instagram
Improving Wikipedia pages about Australian women filmmakers at ACMI
Goddess
ACMI are currently holding an exhibition titled Goddess : Power, Glamour, Rebellion. The exhibition celebrates women and gender-transcending superstars from around the world, and includes costumes, posters, film, and material such as original sketches from pre-production.
ACMI and Wikimedia Australia partnered to hold two editathons around this same theme, and improve existing Wikipedia pages of Australian women filmmakers and their filmographies.
We held two editathons in one day, one in the morning and the other in the afternoon. Both started with a short complimentary tour of the Goddess exhibition, before we went upstairs to learn about Wikipedia and start editing.
Across the day, we had 10 participants who were all eager to learn how they could improve Wikipedia. Some had edited before, while others had only just signed up for an account that morning!
Impact
Our ten editors worked on just over 20 different articles on Wikipedia. These ranged from adding an infobox and additional references to Paulette McDonagh and Phyllis McDonagh, to adding awards tables to Maya Newell and Garage Days.
At the end of each session, participants discussed what they'd learnt and how editing Wikipedia had been demystified for them. Being able to use the automatic citation tool and visual editor made things much more accessible to newcomers, while existing editors spent time exploring the Wikipedia Manual of Style and even made some additions to Wikidata.
Friday morning vs afternoon
This was the first time we held two events in one day. We thought it was an interesting experiment to get an idea of what time suited people better, so we held them across a Friday. But most of the people who attended the morning session admitted they'd taken time off work to attend, and that Friday mornings actually weren't ideal!
Everyone said they'd be interested in follow up events, but there was no consensus on a day or time, so further experimentation will be required.
ACMI were very happy with the events (and were excellent hosts!), so we hope to hold more with them in the future. All attendees were given a complimentary ACMI membership and video rental accessible to the ACMI website, which was greatly appreciated.
First GLAM-Wiki partnership from Pará
As we announced in our report of March, Pará is the Brazilian state chosen for the project Wiki Loves Pará. This is an one-year-effort for filling the gap of information on cultural, historical, and natural heritage about Pará on Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia in Portuguese.
And we would like to present our first GLAM partner in Pará State: LAHCA (Laboratório de Historiografia da Arquitetura e Cultura Arquitetônica or, in a free translation to English: Laboratory of Historiography of Architecture and Architectural Culture). LAHCA is a research group at Federal University of Pará that studies the Modern Architecture of the city of Belém, capital of the state. Its collection of photographs will help us improve the quantity and quality of the coverage of these buildings in Wikimedia Commons and also illustrate articles in Wikipedia.
Museum Week
Every year, IBRAM (Brazilian Institute of Museums) coordinates an entire week of events in celebration of the International Museum Day (18 May). All the museums around Brazil present activities and Wiki Movimento Brasil was invited by two of its GLAM partners:
- Montepio Geral de Economia dos Servidores do Estado (MAG)
Montepio Geral de Economia dos Servidores do Estado was the first official social security institution in Brazil. It was created on January 10, 1835, by a decree of the Regência Trina, that ruled in the name of the young boy Pedro de Alcântara, successor to Pedro I. The collection uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by a WMB partnership was recognized by UNESCO as a Documentary Heritage of Humanity under the name "Memory of the World".
During the Museum Week, three activities was proposed to the community:
- Improve the Wikipedia articles of Brazilian historical characters who are mentioned in the meeting minutes of MAG,
- Transcribe the pages of the meeting minutes of MAG where those historical characters are mentioned,
- Transcribe the pages of dossiers MAG organized with the pages where 11 historical characters are mentioned.
- USP Museum of Veterinary Anatomy
USP Museum of Veterinary Anatomy is a museum open to the public at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine and Animal Science (FMVZ) at the University of São Paulo (USP). It is also one of the first GLAM partners of Wiki Movimento Brasil (see our March 2019 report). During this youtube live, the museologist at MAV, Maurício Cândido da Silva, talked about some initial obstacles and learnings and also about the great results for disseminating MAV's collection around the world. And the GLAM & Culture manager, Sandra Soster, explained the four steps of a GLAM-WMB partnership.
First upload from Museu Republicano de Itu
The first upload from Museu Republicano "Convenção de Itu" is a precious set of 74 watercolors by Miguelzinho Dutra depicting landscapes, buildings, urban details and people from the 19th century.
| “ | Miguel Arcanjo Benício de Assunção Dutra (Itu, August 15, 1812 - Piracicaba, 1875), better known as Miguelzinho Dutra, was a Brazilian painter, sculptor, goldsmith, architect, poet, carver, church decorator, musician, and watercolorist, who stood out for his style, which combines a naïf character of popular taste with a spontaneous and original realism, intertwined with traditionally baroque formal solutions. [...] Of his vast oeuvre, little remains, with highlights including numerous watercolors depicting landscapes, cities, churches, farms, human types of all social classes, and street scenes common in rural Brazilian life of the first half of the 19th century, now of great iconographic importance. - Portuguese Wikipedia article translated to English. |
” |
Large upload from Musica Brasilis
The project Musica Brasilis provided 710 new sheet music by 51 Brazilian composers. Among them:
- One woman: Isaura Freitas,
- One composer from the State of Rio Grande do Norte: Paulino Chaves,
- Seven composers from the State of Pará: Alípio Cézar Pinto da Silva, Bernardo Martins Bragança, Clemente Ferreira Junior, Eduardo Sebastião das Neves, Henrique Eulálio Gurjão, Manuel Tibiriça de Lemos, and Raymundo Pinto de Almeida,
- 17 composers from the State of Maranhão.
Wikimuseos lecture
In 26 May, Wikimedistas de Uruguay organized a panel on international and national experiences on open access, in the context of the "Wikimuseos" cycle. Sandra Soster was invited to present the case of the GLAM-Wiki partnership between Wiki Movimento Brasil and USP Museum of Veterinary Anatomy. This case of success is an example of how to digitize the collection, organize its metadata and make it available on Wikimedia platforms with little financial resources and really high quality.
During the presentation, Soster also mentioned the Museu Portátil -“Portable Museum”- Project, coordinated by the art historian and curator Carolina Matos in a partnership with Goethe-Institut São Paulo, Instituto Moreira Salles and Wiki Movimento Brasil. The Project released a manual (in Brazilian Portuguese and also in Spanish) with a low-cost set of equipment for digitization, information on how to start a GLAM Wiki initiative and guidelines on legal aspects to make collections available under open licenses.
GLAM WikiCon 2023 Scholarship
GLAM WikiConference 2023 organized by Wikimedistas de Uruguay has place and date! It will happen in Montevideo, Uruguay, 16-18 November.
The application for a travel scholarship may be submitted HERE. This submission form will be available until 30th June.
Adding authority control templates with Pywikibot
In early 2023, Wikimedia Finland began contemplating ways to increase the utilization of Wikidata in Finnish Wikipedia. In March, there was a request on the page bottipyynnöt (bot requests) of Finnish Wikipedia to add authority control and taxonomy bar templates to all related articles. As it would align well with the preferences of active Wikipedia editors on how to use Wikidata, Wikimedia Finland stepped up and undertook this task.
For those unfamiliar, authority control is a term common in libraries, and in Wikipedia, it refers to content that exists across various library databases. Some external sources provide extensive biographical information, while others furnish names and dates useful in identifying discrepancies, like determining whether two different names correspond to the same person or vice versa. Incorporating easy access to these external databases can facilitate the creation of high-quality articles. The taxonomy bar functions similarly, except it links to many biology-related databases rather than biographical ones.
Technically, the authority control and taxonomy templates appear as a bar at the bottom of the page. They utilize Wikidata as a common database for identifiers, which a module at the end of each page retrieves. This data is shared across Wikipedias in various languages. Articles related to taxonomy have a comparable bar at the bottom of the page, linking to several biology databases. The task began with Ipr1 updating the Finnish Wikipedia authority control module written in the Lua programming language to the latest version from English Wikipedia and conducting the necessary localizations.
Given the enormity of the task—targeting 12% of all Finnish Wikipedia articles—the Pywikibot tool was used to automate the page edits. Pywikibot is a Python-written library used in conjunction with scripts to perform desired edits on Wikipedia articles. While a bot doesn't eliminate the need for human intervention, it significantly reduces the repetition involved in tasks. The Python-written scripts also enable the addition of various checks and validations when dealing with different types of articles.
For Ipr1, new to Pywikibot and Python, Zache created a documentation page on Finnish Wikipedia and provided example scripts on GitHub as a starting point for template additions. Ipr1 conducted three major bot runs from these resources and several smaller ones to add the templates. The task also involved normalizing article layouts to ensure uniformity and facilitate bot-added templates. While a bot was used for normalization, considerable manual editing was needed for corner cases. In the latter half of May, Ipr1 completed the task, updating a total of 70,000 articles.
Digitization of Behar Herald starts in Patna
Bengalee Association Bihar is an organization based in the city of Patna in the state of Bihar, established during the British colonial rule to protect the rights and preserve the language and culture of the Bengali speaking population residing there. Among its many activities, this organization took the responsibility of publishing the oldest English weekly published from Bihar named Behar Herald since 1938, which started its journey in 1874. Even if the journey of the newspaper was not very smooth due to lack of resources, the quality of its reporting was held in high esteem, with frequent publications of articles from renowned personalities from all over the country. An initiative was taken by the West Bengal Wikimedians User Group to engage with the organization for a GLAM partnership to digitize Behar Herald, which were in a very dire condition without any maintenance due to lack of resources. After the organization authorities have kindly agreed to have their collection digitized, a short visit was taken to check the current condition of the newspapers, catalogue them and to discuss logistics and strategies to run a digitization program. A rapid fund proposal was approved by WMF to purchase a scanner and assign a Wikimedian-in-residence (WiR) to complete the digitization project. A CZUR Pro 18 digital scanner was purchased recently and one WiR has been trained and assigned the task, who has started the digitization process.
Wikisource Workshop in Madura; Outreach to Bandung; Indonesian Wikisource Competition
Wikisource Workshop in Pamekasan, Madura Island
On May 14th, the Indonesian Madurese Wikimedia community gathered to learn how to edit Wikisource for the first time, in Pamekasan Regency, Madura. The training was done via pre-recorded session. They started by editing an paper in Indonesian language about infant mortality in Madura, and then continued with a Madurese book made by Wikimedia Indonesia about Wikipedia.
The workshop was attended by 13 participants. About half of them would continue to participate in the Indonesian Wikisource Competition a week later.
GLAM Outreach to Bandung, West Java
GLAM Indonesia continued its outreach to various institution around Indonesia. This time we visited Bandung, the capital of West Java, and 150 km from Jakarta. Our team visited several institutions: the first one was Ajip Rosidi Library, with whom we had the pleasure of working together in the past (before the pandemic). We were greeted with enthusiasm, and there was around 48 microfilms that contain important Sundanese manuscripts, that needed to be digitized with special machine. We borrowed one of them, to be processed in Jakarta's National Archive (ANRI), and hopefully we will be able to digitize those microfilms to Commons.
Next we headed to Indonesian Post Museum, in the headquarter of Indonesian Post national company, and introduced our movement and digitizing activities of GLAM Indonesia. Although Commons already had quite a complete collection of Indonesian stamps thanks to a 3rd party website, we were still interested in working together to digitize their non-stamps collection, such as books, envelopes, and historical collections. Other than that, we also took the chance to visit 3 other museum in the city: Indonesian Education Museum, Sri Baduga Museum (West Java Provincial Museum), and Asian-African Conference Museum.
Proofreading Competition in Indonesian Wikisource
From 16th-30th of May, the Indonesian Wikisource Community organized the fourth annual Indonesian Wikisource competition. This year's highly anticipated competition saw a fierce race between the participants, and resulted in 32 books (8632 pages) being validated, with 1763 edits per day from 38 active participants. That's 616 pages being proofread and validated every day, or 227 pages per participants. The competition grew in size each year, from 5 books in 2020, 16 in 2021, 10 Indonesian books in 2022, and finally a record of 32 books this year. The participation rate was beyond what the team had anticipated.
From the 76 registered users (with 61 of them contributing at least once) - many of them are new to Wikisource and/or Wikimedia movement, and many of them joined after participating in previous workshops or competition (Balinese Wikisource competition last July, Javanese Wikisource competition last March, and Sundanese Wikisource competition last April). We hope that in the future competitions, we can keep the high contribution rate and attract many more volunteers to the Indonesian Wikisource.
Open access from North to South
Alessandro Manzoni 150 years after
Editathon presso la Biblioteca Braidense a Milano, con Archivio Storico Ricordi e Wikimedia Italia.
Poet, playwrighter and the greatest exponent of the Italian novel, Alessandro Manzoni marked the history of Italian culture, language and politics, leaving us works and writings that have continued to influence academic and popular culture.
On may 15 in Milan was organized ad editathon to remember Alessandro Manzoni, 150 years after his death, on the occasion of the new exhibition organized by the Biblioteca di Brera and the Pinacoteca di Brera, in collaboration with Archivio Storico Ricordi.
The exibition is called "THE PESTE "HORRIBLE FLAG" BETWEEN LIVING AND WRITING - Exhibition for the 150th anniversary of Alessandro Manzoni's death"; for more detail and information visit the website bibliotecabraidense.org.
During the event, 13 new entries were created and 2 existing entries expanded. Take a look to Wikipedia page, here.
Verona, free images of the Academy of Agriculture Science and Letters
Founded in 1768 in Verona, the Academy of Agriculture Science and Letters preserves an important heritage of books, documents and works of art, which will be increasingly accessible to the public. Thanks to fruitful discussions with volunteers from Wikimedia projects, after hosting a conference in March dedicated precisely to the theme of open access and free reuse of images, the Academy has chosen to made all its images available the CC BY license or with the Public Domain Mark.
Wikimedia projects and southern Italy
The Cultural Heritage system of the city of Ugento, Puglia, organized a seminar on May 23 and 24 on Wikimedia platforms and the Wiki Loves Monuments photo contest, bringing examples and testimonies from volunteers and other cultural workers already active in this field. The seminar was designed for tour guides, librarians, archivists, educators and museum workers and was organized in collaboration with Wikimedia Italy, as part of activities funded by the call Musei, Archivi e Biblioteche 2023.
The seminar was held online and the main theme was "Strategies and experiences of cultural heritage enhancement in Basilicata, Calabria, Apulia and Sicily"; during the weekend, the first trip dedicated to the local area was also organized, with the aim of collecting photos of monuments in the area, to be upload for Wiki Loves Monuments 2023 and shared on Wikimedia projects.
Project page on Wikipedia here: GLAM/Sistema dei Beni Museali e Culturali della Città di Ugento
Summer of Wikivoyage Edit-a-thon 2023
Summer of Wikivoyage Edit-a-thon, 2023
Summer of Wikivoyage Edit-a-thon took place in Shëngjin, Albania, on May 19-21, 2023. 16 contributors from Kosovo and Albania joined the edit-a-thon to create and update articles about Lezhë county. Albania, and other destinations from the two countries on Wikivoyage.
WoALUG created a collaborative environment and an inclusive editing process by inviting enthusiastic contributors from Lezha to engage the local community and raise awareness of the smaller towns about Wikimedia projects in Albania and Kosovo. People increased their editing skills and gained some insights into Wikivoyage.
Below are some statistics from the edit-a-thon.
Contributors: 16
Wikivoyage
- Articles created: 9
- Articles edited: 39
Wikipedia
- Articles created: 16
- Articles edited: 28
Wikidata
- Articles created: 7
- Articles edited: 28
Commons uploads: 44
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:
- Like our Facebook page, follow us on Twitter or Instagram
Women in Architecture Edit-a-thon and Auckland suburb updates
Women in Architecture Edit-a-thon
The New Zealand Women in Architecture WikiProject began in late 2022. The project, a collaboration between members of the Wikimedia User Group of Aotearoa New Zealand and Architecture + Women NZ, focuses on ways to improve coverage of New Zealand women in architecture and landscaping on the English Wikipedia and Wikidata, such as by creating articles on women, or better documenting buildings and projects that were designed by women.
On 20 May, an edit-a-thon was held for this project, initiated by Pakoire which included an in-person event at Auckland War Memorial Museum, organised by the museum, WANZ and the University of Auckland. The edit-a-thon was one of the largest in-person Wikipedia events held in Auckland, with over 23 participants and was run by Susan Tol and others. The event was a big success: between the editors in Auckland, Wellington, Dunedin and those participating online, with 17 new biographies being created, with a total of 58,400 words and 351 references added to Wikipedia and Wikidata.
In preparation for the day of the edit-a-thon a Wikidata item was created, New Zealand Women in Architecture WikiProject by DrThneed with 281 items linking to it at the beginning of June. The number of related Wikipedia articles is also growing, before the project the category New Zealand women architects had nine women listed, now there are 40.
Auckland War Memorial Museum suburb project updates
Another major milestone was reached after the publishing of the new and improved article on South Auckland. At this stage, two major areas of metropolitan Auckland are left to complete, as well as articles on centres across the Auckland Region, including the Hibiscus Coast and Matakana Coast. 18 articles were created and greatly improved on Auckland localities, including features of South Auckland, such as the Ōtara Creek, Māngere Mountain, Oruarangi Creek and Kiwi Esplanade.
Wikisource promotion at UNC Museum
Faculty members of University of Nueva Caceres, and college students from two colleges and the host university attended a Wikimedia forum on Preservation of old publications through Bikol Wikisource at the UNC Museum in Naga City, Philippines.
The Philippine Wikimedia Community User Group and Bikol Wikipedia Community co-organized the event held on 4 March 2023 following the Wikimedia Forum at Ateneo de Naga University which included Satdeep Gill's talk on Wikisource in December last year.
Bikol Wikisource contributor and community organizer Irvin Sto. Tomas presented how Wikisource can help save rare books found in libraries and private collections thru digitization to the students taking History and BS Library & Infomation Science from Camarines Norte State College, Camarines Sur Polytechnic Colleges, and University of Nueva Caceres.
The UNC Museum is the oldest university museum in the Bicol Region and the second oldest in the country. It has collections of Bikoliana and Filipiniana materials and publications printed during the colonial period.
Wikisource Forum at University Museum - University of Nueva Caceres on March 4, 2023
Air travel and city streets
Air travel and city streets from the Nordic Museum archives
Wikimedia Sverige is continuing the work with the project 100 000 Bildminnen, where we upload previously unpublished archival photos from the Nordic Museum in Stockholm. In May, we worked with several thematic areas. These include 900 photos from Scandinavian Airlines, where we can see various types of airplanes both in the air and on the ground, as well as depictions of work of the airline staff in different environments. For those who are interested in the history of air travel, these photos offer an insight into what it looked like a couple decades ago.
Another thematic area are city photos from Copenhagen and Göteborg. We've had great help from Danish and Swedish Wikipedians who have been categorizing the photos and using them to illustrate articles. Since working with the photos requires a lot of local knowledge, it's been really appreciated! We've also seen that the photos inspired discussions on Wikipedia, where the users shared their own memories of the depicted places. This emphasizes how important diversity of knowledge and experiences is for the Wikimedia platforms!
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Mechanical work on the Bromma airport. -
The airplane LN-MOD in the sky. -
A view from Göteborg. The gasometer in the background has since been demolished. -
The Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, as identified by a Wikipedian.
Swiss GLAM Programme
International Museum Day
The 18th May, we celebrated the International Museum Day. Wikimedia CH, with the support of Wikimedia Germany and Wikimedia Austria, organised an international campaign with a focus on the new definition of museums.
The new definition for museums that was developed over the past five years and now is ready to become a living benchmark for all our content. We wanted to underline the importance of museums for our society and future. Museums are key contributors to the wellbeing and to the sustainable development of communities. As trusted institutions and important threads in shared social fabric, they are uniquely placed to create a cascading effect to foster positive change. Museums contribute to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals from supporting climate action and fostering inclusivity, to tackling social isolation and improving mental health.
A photo contest, an awareness campaign with the Wikimedia CH Map Service and a GLAM Digital event were organised during around the International Museum Day. You can have a look at our project page for more information.
GLAM-On-Tour St.Gallen
Our 11th GLAM-On-Tour took place from the 18th to the 21th of May in St. Gallen. GLAM-on-Tour offers a unique occasion to bring the community in the GLAM institutions.
We got the incredible opportunity to spent this GLAM-On-Tour in the Abbey Library of St. Gallen, a significant medieval monastic library and an outstanding example of a large Carolingian monastery and was, since the 8th century until its secularisation in 1805.
We welcomed 20 participants. They mainly worked in the Greman Wikipedia, creating and bettering many articles. On this occasion, the participants also uploaded photos, available in the following category, and also worked on Wikidata.
For more information about the project and the work done (in German).
These last few months in Uganda
The last few months have been a bit more exciting than usual and we are glad to report what we have been up to...
January
Wikisource
We continued with the WikiSource campaign that started in December 2022. This was eventually concluded on 10 January.
It was a time for new things as we experienced the Wikisource Contest board. We later had a community meeting in which we solicited feedback about the viability of WikiSource for us. Volunteers expressed interest in further contributing to the project but would appreciate it more if the contributions were on Uganda-specific content in addition to being in a local language such as Luganda.
The result was a customised WikiSource editing guide and plans to visit information institutions to know more about the digitisation process.
#1Lib1Ref
We could not miss this opportunity to contribute this time round though we had to extend the duration because of a challenge with the dashboard.
At the end of the drive , a total of 20 editors had signed up to the dashboard and collectively contributed 1.54K references in addition to creating 105 articles both on English Wikipedia and Wikidata Link to the meta page is here Link to the dashboard is here
March
Personal Data Protection Community Information Session
As an organisation that collects, creates , consumes and enables the dissemination of a number of resources under a free licence, the Wikimedia Community Group Uganda (WMUGU) is still resgistered and recognised as a legal entity bound by a legal mandate to protect any personal information it may collect. The community we serve and interact with needed further sensitisation on this.
The community information session was facilitated by staff from the PDPO Office and aimed at :
- Introducing attendees to PDPO ;
- Creating awareness for the Data Protection and Privacy Act (2019) , how it concerns both individuals and organisations and how it is being enforced ;
- Addressing the knowledge gap on Data Protection and Privacy hence increasing levels of compliance and citizens’ trust on how their personal data is accessed and shared ;
- Creating awareness on who data collectors, data controllers and data processors are and their respective designations ;
The recording can also be accessed via the day's meta page
#1Lib1Ref/WikiSource celebration
It was celebration time as met and interacted over the end of WikiSource in Uganda 2022 and #1Lib1Ref January 2023. It was also gift time as the volunteers that contributed were not only recognised but rewarded for their efforts
The day's meta page is here;
April
Wikidata for African Librarians - Uganda Meetup
There are a number of participants from Uganda enrolled in the AfLIA-sponsored Wikidata in African Libraries Course.
The usergroup therefore sponsored a local meetup at the Goethe Zentrum Kampala library . This had the varied aims of meeting the participants in person ; introducing them to the local usergroup and community ;interacting with participants to identify their particular challenges with Wikidata and identify solutions and opportunities around this
In the practical session, it was observed that some editors were not able to contribute using the SourceMD tool as the Run functionality was not active and had actually discouraged some from contributing. This is something we have sought help for and we are optimistic that a solution will be found...
The day's meta page can be accessed here
May
AfLibWk 4.0
May, once again presented us with the opportunity to collectively participate in the fourth edition of the African Librarian's Week (also referred to as AfLibWk 4.0) The usergroup was able to facilitate local volunteers to contribute to this campaign and we are glad that at least 3 of our number were among the top 10
ICOM 2023
A usergroup representative was invited to give a talk on digitisation, Wikimedia projects and information access at 2-day training workshop organised by the ICOM-Uganda Chapter between 15-16 May.
The session was designed for museum curators, heritage site caretakers and museum owners and the talk was a demonstration on how they can use open access platforms to showcase their collections.
This was memorable as it was the first time we were able to do a mini QR Code exhibition which further highlighted the gaps in quality information about their institutions on Wikipedia. We were also able to explore further possibilities for collaboration around this.
The near future
Looking at the community response , variety of participation and quality of contribution, we are optimistic about our engagements in the coming months. Activities include but are not limited to an edit-a-thon dedicated to the #EveryBookItsReaderCampaign and as a continuation of our WikiSource journey, our first ever GLAM on Tour at the Kyambogo University Library Digitisation Unit . Most of our events can be located on the Usergroup's meta page as well as the GLAM calendar
Promoting cultural diversity on Wikipedia
Khalili Foundation
This month saw the World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development which, for the first time, was celebrated on English Wikipedia's home page. A link in the On This Day section was seen by 4.7 million readers and clicked on more than two thousand times. There aren't any other observation days on 21 May, so I expect the link will appear on the home page each year from now on. Much of my work this month has been on improving articles related to cultural diversity.
I have extended the Cultural diversity article and continued the bold edits to the article on the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. Much of the article about the Convention has now been rewritten to be much more accessible, but there is a chunk of text at the start that still needs work. So far I have made 200 edits to the article; since this was a 6,500-word article, overhauling it is a big project. I've made smaller edits to Artistic freedom, Cultural policy, and Cultural expressions. I have also begun a draft on the International Fund for Cultural Diversity.
The Convention was signed on 20 October 2005, so I've added this fact to the articles on 2005 and October 20. Facts for the On This Day section of the front page are drawn from the article about the day, so there is a chance of getting a link to Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions on the front page on a future 20 October.
The Khalili Foundation hosted a celebratory event for the World Day of Cultural Diversity at UNESCO headquarters in Paris, at the climax of its World Festival for Cultural Diversity. In the coming months I will be sharing some media from that event to illustrate articles relating to cultural diversity.
Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam was Today's Featured Article on English Wikipedia on May 17, the first TFA from this project. A summary paragraph and image appeared on the front page that day, then a text link was shown for the next three days, getting exposure to around 4.7 million readers each day. Not only did this result in 45,000 click-throughs to the article, but several related articles — Kaaba, Hajj, Mecca, Fard, Five Pillars of Islam, Sitara (textile), Mahmal, Qibla compass, Khalili Collection of Hajj and the Arts of Pilgrimage, and British Museum — saw hundreds or thousands of extra views. We seem to have stimulated many readers' interest in Islam and drawn them into exploring a web of related articles. For May 17 we seem to have got five million image views in a 24 hour period. The GLAMorgan stats tool shows 5.4 million image views for Khalili Collections images in the month of May, but this excludes the 4.7 million from the TFA, so for the first time we have hit ten million image views in a single month.
I released a blog post, "Three ways to make links between collections", using Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam as an example of how Wikimedia can be used to make digital surrogates of past exhibitions.
There were five new translations this month:
- A volunteer translated a summary of the Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam article into Malay.
- A volunteer translated a summary of the Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam article into Urdu.
- A volunteer translated the Muhammad Sadiq (photographer) article into Indonesian.
- A volunteer translated a summary of the Muhammad Sadiq (photographer) article into Malay.
- A volunteer translated the Khalili Collection of Hajj and the Arts of Pilgrimage article into Indonesian.
This is the first content relating to the Khalili Collections on Urdu Wikipedia, and brings the total articles created by this project to 45.
There were no image uploads this month. In the coming month I want to continue improving the cultural diversity articles, but also return to articles about masterpieces in the Khalili Collections, where I have two drafts nearly ready to go.
A Spotlight on Black Women Birders; DC Nobel Solution Sessions; Women of Color in the Renwick Gallery; Anthropology and Community Connections; SAGE edit-a-thon; WikiWednesday Salon; Into the Wikiverse: AANHPIs in Science Fiction and Pop Culture; Queering Wikipedia 2023
A Spotlight on Black Women Birders
The Smithsonian American Women's History Initiative, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, and Wikimedia DC hosted an in-person edit-a-thon titled, A Spotlight on Black Women Birders on May 17th. Naturalist Dara M. Wilson gave the keynote speech for the event. 1.22k words were added during the event. Nicole Jackson's, Kassandra Ford's and Dara M. Wilson's articles were created as well. Additional dashboard metrics can be found here.
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Dara M. Wilson
DC Nobel Solution Sessions
The National academy of sciences, and Wikimedia DC held a workshop, Wikimedia DC Nobel Solution Sessions May 26 2023
Women of Color in the Renwick Gallery
Renwick Gallery and Wikimedia DC held a workshop, Crafting a Better Wikipedia: Women of Color in the Renwick Gallery
Anthropology and Community Connections
Center for Archival Futures, College of Information Studies at University of Maryland, and Wikimedia DC held a workshop, Anthropology_and_Community_Connections
SAGE edit-a-thon
SAGE Publishing and Wikimedia DC held a workshop, SAGE edit-a-thon. Despite significant pushback by patrolers, many biographies of notable academics were created.
WikiWednesday Salon
Wikimedia NYC held a meetup, NYC/May 2023.
Into the Wikiverse: AANHPIs in Science Fiction and Pop Culture
To celebrate National Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) Heritage Month, the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, and the Smithsonian American Women's History Museum hosted a virtual edit-a-thon on May 4th called Into the Wikiverse: AANHPIs in Science Fiction and Pop Culture to address the underrepresentation of AANHPI women and others in Science Fiction and Pop Culture on Wikipedia.
Dr. Theodore Gonzalves, Curator of Asian Pacific American History at Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, shared Asian American Science Fiction and Pop Culture highlights from the recently opened Entertainment Nation exhibition.
Four articles were created, including Solomon Enos, Preeti Chhibber, Joan He, and Isabel Yap. A total of 15.3k words and 170 references were added during the event. Additional event metrics can be found here.
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Solomon Enos
Queering Wikipedia 2023
Wikimedia LGBT+, held an online conference, QW2023.
Help Wikimedia Map Your Efforts to Improve Copyright!
Modern and flexible copyright laws for the digital age are essential to help the free knowledge movement and Wikimedia projects flourish. This is because these laws and policies create the conditions in which we can freely and openly access, discuss and share, reproduce and remix knowledge and information.
Wikimedians around the world try to shape and improve their local policy environments in ways that will help them contribute to Wikimedia projects with articles, images, sound files, and videos, and add to the online information ecosystem by sharing digitized content from libraries, databases, archives, and more. What have we learned as a collective from these community-led copyright reform campaigns?
It’s time to take a good look.
The Global Advocacy team, in collaboration with others at the Foundation, wants to help Wikimedians have access to and learn from the work that communities and affiliates do to advocate for copyright reform. We are launching a mapping project to compile the public policy advocacy initiatives that affiliates and community members have pursued for governments to preserve or change copyright policies.
We want to learn about our movement’s shared copyright public policy priorities, the common obstacles that communities face, and the campaign materials (as well as other resources) that Wikimedians have created or are creating as part of these advocacy efforts. Everything is helpful: We’re interested in your open letters, emails to government institutions and officials, presentations and infographics, public events, and alliances with other organizations. We’ll share these materials on Meta-Wiki as a collaborative repository of resources to inspire, support, build connections, and create synergies among advocacy efforts across the Wikimedia movement.
Do you know of an initiative that Wikimedians have pursued to convince governments to preserve or change copyright regulations at a local, national, regional or international level since 2016? Have you launched a campaign to change existing copyright policies that restricted your work on Wikimedia projects? What reforms did you ask for? What have you found works and doesn’t work?
Please let us know! Here is how to do so:
Send an email with the subject “Copyright advocacy mapping” to Valentina Vera-Quiroz, our Human Rights, Policy, and Tech Fellow (vveraquiroz-ctr@wikimedia.org) and CC Ziski Putz (fputz@wikimedia.org), our Senor Movement Advocacy Manager. Let us know the time zone in which you are based. Wait for a follow-up reply from Valentina or Ziski. Schedule a time to meet with us! We are very excited to hear about your projects, and to discuss and decide together how we can better support, facilitate, and highlight peer learning about copyright advocacy within our movement. We can learn from each other and work together, as a movement, to reform copyright across the world so everyone, everywhere, can benefit from the free knowledge of Wikimedia projects!
GLAM Wiki Conference 2023: Announcing the venue & scholarship application process open
It is a pleasure for Wikimedistas Uruguay to host the next edition of the GLAM Wiki Conference: the conference on Culture, Heritage and Wikimedia, which will take place on November 16-18, 2023 at the Faculty of Information and Communication of the University of the Republic, located in Montevideo.
Scholarship process now open
The scholarship application is now open. To apply, please complete the application form by June 30, 2023, at the end of the day in your country. If you have any doubts about the questions to be completed in the application, please refer to the FAQ section of our Meta page.
About the conference
This is the global gathering of cultural heritage professionals, experts and volunteers of the Wikimedia movement. It is the first time it is held in Latin America, and we hope it will be an opportunity for a reunion after 5 years, following the GLAM Wiki Conference in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 2018. For its realization, we have the support of Wikimedia Chile, Wikimedia Argentina and Wiki Movimento Brasil, in addition to the Wikimedia Foundation and the Culture and Heritage team.
Goals of the Conference
The GLAM Wiki Conference is an opportunity for professionals and volunteers from heritage institutions and libraries, as well as members of the Wikimedia community, to meet to reflect, discuss, generate strategies and take actions to improve access to scientific and cultural heritage. We hope that the meeting will allow us to:
- Identify strategic priorities for the GLAM Wiki community for the promotion of equitable knowledge, diversity and inclusion.
- Exchange and build capacity around GLAM Wiki collaborative tools.
- Reflect, discuss and think about new roadmaps for our tools and platforms.
- Reconnect after the pandemic, re-network and think among all the people involved about the future of GLAM Wiki.
These goals emerged from the interest survey we circulated between November and December 2022, which was answered by more than 200 people in Portuguese, English and Spanish.
Calendar
- Scholarship applications open: June 6 – June 30.
- Open applications for the program: Coming! 2nd or 3rd week of June.
- Communication of scholarship decisions: Mid-late July.
- Travel logistics: July to September.
- Program communication: Late September – October.
- Conference takes place on November 16, 17 and 18.
About the conference venue
Montevideo is a city renowned for its architectural heritage, which combines different styles from art deco and art noveau, and its proximity to entertainment venues. The conference will take place in the facilities of the Faculty of Information and Communication (FIC), whose building was completely renovated and inaugurated in the last five years. The FIC has an accessible location, just a few meters from the rambla, Parque Rodó, the National Museum of Visual Arts, and other touristic attractions. For those coming from abroad, they will be accommodated near Punta Carretas – Pocitos, approximately half an hour walk from FIC, and with a wide range of leisure options in the area.
Learn more
To meet the organizing team behind the Conference, including the scholarship and program committees, to make inquiries, and to stay updated on the Conference, we recommend that you visit the Conference page on Meta.
Photo contests
Photo contests are among the most popular formats picked up by local organizers as collaborations are starting in Wiki Loves Living Heritage.
The European Network of Focal Points in the UNESCO 2003 Convention organizes a European photo campaign to document people making efforts to take care, transmit and safeguard the living heritage of humanity between 5 June 2023–15 September 2023.
Finnish Heritage Agency and Wikimedia Finland organize a photo contest in Finland to make living heritage visible between 9 May 2023–10 September 2023.
Wikimedia Norge and Arts and Culture Norway arrange an image uploading and Wikipedia editing campaign in Norway and Sápmi between 4 May 2023–30 November 2023.
Wikimedia Norge and Arts and Culture Norway jointly arrange a wiki contest in Norway and Sámi between 1 May 2023–30 November 2023.
Events
Individual events organized as part of the global program as well as locally have invited participants to focus on living heritage.
Workshop intangible heritage Flanders organized wiki activities as part of festivities in Flanders 3 June 2023.
The first Wiki Loves Living Heritage Bazaar brought together Wikimedians and living heritage coordinators in Europe. This model can be replicated in other parts of the world.
1 June 2023
Wikimedia CH arranged activities to highlight sustainability and wellbeing and ICOM's new Museum Definition 4 May 2023–18 May 2023.
participatory event that seeks to contribute to the collection of information on expressions, practices or creators of intangible heritage in Chile
1 May 2023–31 May 2023
The event in Veles ion 13 April 2023–17 April 2023 was organized by GLAM Macedonia User Group.
Wiki Loves Living Heritage is initiated jointly between the European network of focal points for the UNESCO 2003 Convention (ENFP) and AvoinGLAM.
WILMA, DPLA + SDAW, and BHL whitepaper updates
Before diving into this month's updates, we want to share the section of the Wikimedia Foundation's annual plan that describes our priorities for July 2023-June 2024 and a post from Creative Commons about an Open Culture roundtable that we contributed to.
Wikisource Loves Manuscripts (WILMA) updates and Transkribus integration
After the launch of the Wikisource Loves Manuscripts project in February 2023, manuscript digitization activities have been conducted in Bali and Yogyakarata. This included complete digitization of 30 manuscripts which were catalogued during the WikiLontar project. Wikisource workshops have also been organized in Bali and Yogyakarata. This project is a partnership with Pusat Pengkajian Islam dan Masyarakat (a research institute based in Jakarta), Wikimedia Indonesia, and the community-led WikiLontar project.
After initial efficacy testing by IIIT Hyderabad, Transkribus has been integrated into Wikimedia OCR and currently supports 13 Wikisources with the existing public models available on Transkribus. The languages currently supported include German, English, Spanish, Finnish, French, Italian, Polish, Russian, Swedish, and Yiddish. We're now testing Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) models for the Balinese and Javanese languages. Two Wikisource Technical Fellows at the Foundation are working on a guide to enable Wikisource communities to create their own handwriting recognition models.
You can find more details and monthly updates on Meta-Wiki.
DPLA and Structured Data Across Wikimedia 2022 report
At the end of May, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) published the final report for their 2022-2023 grant from the Structured Data Across Wikimedia project. The final results are now available on the meta page Grants:DPLA 2022 Structured Data Across Wikimedia project.
Highlights from the report:
- DPLA was asked to update 1 million images from the institution with subject, creator, or other reconciled entities. They were able not only to achieve, but more than triple, this goal, by adding 3,618,323 subject statements. This was important to allow more files to appear in search results on Commons.
- DPLA launched the DepictAssist tool and will continue to develop and maintain it.
- In terms of outreach, not only was DPLA present in several conferences, such as Wikimania, the Wikimedia & Libraries conference, LD4, and the American Library Association, but the institution also created a Wikimedia Working Group, composed of several GLAM professionals (including Wikimedians in Residence) from many institutions, who are helping to maintain DPLA's Wikimedia work, but also to supplement the GLAM Wiki ecosystem and the North America Wikimedia community.
- There was also a lot of work done in terms of documentation, by making DPLA's digital asset pipeline fully documented on their GitHub account.
There's still work to be done with the SDC-powered image citations, including documentation, as DPLA would like to develop this feature with the community in a more thoughtful manner.
Building on the success of the past three years of collaboration, DPLA was able to secure a multi-year grant from the Sloan Foundation to continue their Wikimedia engagement.
Celebrating other contributors to the Biodiversity Heritage Library whitepaper
Last newsletter, our team added a section describing the whitepaper about the Wikimedia projects published by the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). In the report, we addressed how the publication provided concrete use cases and recommendations for strategic investments in Wikimedia projects and mentioned how it was one of the most comprehensive analyses of the Wikimedia projects from a cultural heritage perspective.
This month, we would like to celebrate how this publication was made possible in a truly Wikimedia way: With the help of several interested institutions and very engaged and enthusiastic Wikimedians!
To achieve the level of information on the publication, the author, JJ Dearborn, BHL's Data Manager, interviewed members of many institutions, such as the Chicago Field Museum, Internet Archive, Harvard University, University of Glasgow, The Nature Conservancy, Wikimedia Foundation, Micelio, and several independent Wikimedians: Siobhan Leachman, Andy Mabbett, and Andra Waagmeester.
In order to guarantee the quality and trustworthiness of the content, the whitepaper was reviewed by many Biodiversity Heritage Library members, but also experts from the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives, WikiBlueprint, University of Glasgow, Museums Victoria, New York Botanical Garden, and Wikimedia Foundation.
Read the whitepaper, or access BHL's pages on Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons.
Wikimedia presence at the 7th African Library Summit
The 7th African Library Summit organized by the AfLIA, focuses on the 'Future of learning, libraries, and sustainable development in Africa,' and it brought together library leadership, professionals, government officials from across the continent, and a thriving community of old and new Wikibrarins! (Librarians who contribute to Wikimedia Projects).
Wikidata Pre-Conference Workshop
The summit started with a pre-conference Wikidata Workshop by Alice Kibombo, Ugandan librarian and prolific African wikipedian, and Wikidata's Community Communications Manager, Mohammed Sadat. The room was packed with 38 librarian/editors and filled with enthusiasm despite the multiple challenges, including a proxy block (which normally affects countries in Africa) and connectivity issues. But as always in Wiki-gatherings, creativity and solidarity came to the rescue. Dagbani Wikimedians User Group's Executive Director, Sadik Shahadu, helped to create accounts from smaller language Wikipedias (which did the trick for some!) and even shared his own phone data to users with no connectivity. Silvia Gutiérrez, Senior Program Officer for Libraries (WMF) was also there to escalate the problem to the Wikimedia Community Discord channel and together with Senior Strategist Alex Stinson (also from WMF) is working on a document to mitigate this issue.
AfLIA’s + Wikimedia Booth
AfLIA and the Wikimedia Culture and Heritage team set up a booth at the 7th African Library Summit to raise awareness about Wikimedia Projects. The booth served as an information hub where attendees could learn about various initiatives, including Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikidata. Participants engaged in interactive discussions, gained insights into project workflows, and explored opportunities for collaboration. Our favorite thing was the #1Pic1WikiThought activity, in which we took a picture of our lovely visitors with the AfLIA+Wikimedia frame and added their thoughts about WikiProjects to a collaborative flipchart. Librarian Nwabundo Nwando, for instance, from the National Library of Nigeria portrayed next to her idea about adding videos of Nigerian festivals to Commons!
The booth was also an excellent opportunity to deepen AfLIA + Wikimedia partnerships. For instance, Alim Garga, President of the Cameroon Library Association (ABADCAM) is ready to strengthen French workshops within his community and shared with us a wonderful quote, he said: «When I saw the slogan 'giving more people, more access, to more knowledge' I knew our libraries had to be part of Wikimedia»
Presentations on Wikimedia Projects
Last but not least, during the summit, various attendees presented successful Wikimedia Projects campaigns conducted in Nigeria and Ghana (see panel 6 in the Conference Program at [1]). These presentations highlighted the edit-a-thons organized by Art+Feminism in collaboration with Libraries, with a particular focus on local languages. Additionally, they addressed the perception of Wikipedia in Municipal Libraries, Academic Libraries, and Universities in Nigeria. The power of Wikidata for Authority File Control and its Linked Data Features for University Repositories were also discussed. To emphasize the advantages of this last project, Silvia Gutiérrez showcased a SPARQL query that enables insights into the most common topics within a massive collection of digital documents: https://w.wiki/6ogZ
June's GLAM events
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