User:SandraF (WMF)/CIDOC 2018 workshop

Welcome to an introduction to the Wikimedia ecosystem for museums!

This page provides a (non-comprehensive) list of links, pointers and resources for this topic. It was compiled in September 2018, for a full-day workshop at the CIDOC 2018 conference, Heraklion, Sunday 30 September 2018, and can be repurposed and re-used by anyone.

Workshop introduction

Since almost a decade, museums and other cultural institutions around the world (GLAMs – Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) have been working together with volunteers from the Wikimedia movement (Wikipedia and its sister projects). Such GLAM-Wiki collaboration projects offer a way to reach broad audiences and to make collections available for enrichment and re-use. Wikipedia, the non-profit, free encyclopedia, is the most well-known platform of the Wikimedia ecosystem. But there is also a lot of potential in sharing museum collections via Wikipedia’s sister projects: the free media repository Wikimedia Commons, and via the free, multilingual knowledge base Wikidata.

The Wikimedia ecosystem

Wikimedia projects: more than Wikipedia

The family of Wikimedia projects

Vision of the Wikimedia Foundation

Free knowledge and copyright

The spectrum of Creative Commons licenses and copyright statuses (from public domain to copyrighted). Wikimedia projects only accept and present content with the licenses in the topmost green section (including public domain content), consistent with the Definition of Free Cultural Works.

The Wikimedia community

Statistics about the size of the Wikimedia community and its activity on Wikimedia projects: https://stats.wikimedia.org

Wikimedia movement affiliates

Wikimedia chapters as of 2017. Besides chapters, the Wikimedia movement also has a thematic organization and many user groups – see the overview at Wikimedia Movement Affiliates.

Museum-related and GLAM-Wiki activities on Wikimedia projects

• Portal for GLAM-Wiki: https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM
• GLAM-Wiki newsletter: https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Newsletter
• GLAM mailing list: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/glam

Museums as Wikimedia community members - accounts and Conflict of Interest (COI)

Tips (see also the GLAM conflict of interest guide):

• As a GLAM staff member, you must edit Wikimedia projects under a personal account – do not use an institutional account that is shared with others.
• Conflict of Interest policy on Wikimedia projects. You must disclose that you are a paid employee of a cultural institution; you can do that by writing a short introduction or bio on your user page. Example of a nice user page of a GLAM staff member

• Working with Wikimedia projects means being an active part of the Wikimedia community, learning about, and respecting its policies – just like academic publishing has its social habits and policies as well. Interact with other community members, and don't be afraid to ask questions!

Museums and Wikipedia

The five pillars of Wikipedia

First step: find your museum (and its collections) on Wikipedia

• Let's look at the anatomy of that page, and the community activity around it. Its structure, its talk page, its history.
• In how many languages does your museum have an article?
• Are there also Wikipedia articles about items from your collections?

Is it OK to edit information about your museum on Wikipedia?

Tactics for activities on Wikipedia

• Get in touch with your local chapter or user group to build a connection with your local Wikimedia communities
• Edit-a-thons
• Behind the scenes activities
• Interns working on Wikimedia assignments
• Education projects together with your local universities
• Wikimedian in Residence

Examples of museums (and cultural organizations) active on Wikipedia

• Metropolitan Museum of Art - organizes campaigns and activities of its own and in collaboration with Wikimedia community initiatives (e.g. Asian History Month). Has a Wikipedian in Residence.
• Europeana works with the Wikimedia community through a variety of campaigns and activities and by connecting its data to Wikidata. A Wikimedia ambassador is employed by Europeana.
• UNESCO also employs a Wikimedian in Residence who organizes a variety of cultural activities on Wikimedia projects and who promotes the use of open data and free licenses at UNESCO.

Measuring impact

• Pageviews tool
  • Example: page views for various artworks from Groeningemuseum (Bruges) on Dutch-language Wikipedia

Structured data and Linked Open Data for GLAMs in the Wikimedia ecosystem

General workflow for data and media partnerships on Wikimedia projects (mainly Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons). The workflow is explained in detail here, with links to resources and tools.

Museums and Wikidata

The basics of Wikidata: Wikidata in one page

Find your museum on Wikidata!

• Does it have a Wikidata item?
• Explore and learn about the structure of a Wikidata item (see general info about Wikidata's approach to data structuring)
• Can you improve a Wikidata item? Tip: look at well-known / notable similar items to see how they are modelled

Querying Wikidata

• Wikidata's SPARQL query engine
• User manual
• SPARQL example query: museums in Belgium - on a map - timeline
• Turn SPARQL queries into lists on Wikipedia with Template:Wikidata list (only to be used in subpages of one's own user page!) (example)

Examples of museum (and GLAM) partnerships on Wikidata

• Flemish museums used Wikidata for Linked Open Data publication of their data
• Europeana Art History Challenge, a Europe-wide campaign to improve information on Wikipedia and Wikidata about prominent European artworks
• National Library of Wales, where a Wikidata Visiting Scholar created Linked Open Data for a collection of prints
• See Data donation for more information about the data partnership process

Examples of community-driven GLAM and museum initiatives on Wikidata

• WikiProject Sum of all Paintings

Where is data from Wikidata re-used? Which services link to Wikidata?

• Some Wikipedia languages (example: infoboxes on French Wikipedia, ArticlePlaceholder on smaller-language Wikipedias, a Wikidata-driven list article on Catalan Wikipedia)
• VIAF (example)
• Quora (example)
• OpenStreetMap
• A few custom Wikidata-driven interfaces for cultural heritage:
  • Crotos - an interface to art and culture-related information on Wikidata. See also the Cosmos interface and the IIIF cropper
  • Manuscript Explorer - custom interface for browsing manuscripts on Wikidata
  • WikiDP - Wikidata for Digital Preservation - interface for editing and browsing Wikidata specifically in the field of digital preservation (search for Netscape Navigator to find a good example)

Tools for interacting with (and editing) Wikidata

• Reasonator, for browsing Wikidata items with a more lively and rich layout (example: Smithsonian Institution)
• Wikidata Graph Builder, for exploring trees in Wikidata (example: museum and its subclasses)
• SQID, for browsing properties and classes
• Terminator, for translation of labels and descriptions (example: museums in Taiwan)
• GraFa, faceted browsing of Wikidata's triples
• Mix'n'match, for matching external datasets with Wikidata
• QuickStatements, for bulk editing Wikidata
• OpenRefine 3.0 and later supports bulk editing Wikidata and Wikidata reconciliation
• Wikipedia and Wikidata Tools for Google spreadsheets
• WikiShootMe, shows a map with Wikidata items in a specified area, and allows adding images to those items that don't have an image yet
• Wikidata Guessr Game (addictive!)

Extensive list of external tools: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Tools

Measuring activity and impact

• SPARQL-rc (SPARQL Recent Changes), a tool to investigate edits to a set of Wikidata (example: edits to museums in Taiwan in the past month)

Museums and Wikimedia Commons

Find your museum on Wikimedia Commons.

• Does it have its own Commons category?
• Does it have an Institution template?
• Upload a file related to your collections, or improve the metadata for an existing file

From 2019: Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons

• Files on Commons described with data (entities) from Wikidata in addition to strings in Wikitext
• Multilinguality of Wikidata's entities can then be used in full
• Improved and more refined APIs
  • Back-and-forth feedback ('roundtripping') of changes in metadata becomes possible

Examples of museum partnerships on Wikimedia Commons

• Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, a long-term collaboration
• Carpatian Ethnography, collaboration between Wikimedia Poland and the National Ethnographic Museum
• More case studies here and here

Examples of community-driven GLAM and museum initiatives on Wikimedia Commons

• Wiki Loves Art (started in 2009 - 2017 campaign in Belgium)

Batch uploading to Wikimedia Commons

Wikimedia Commons' guide to batch uploading

Tools:

• Many larger-scale uploads to Commons are done with bots written by Wikimedia community members.
• Pattypan - mainly for smaller-scale uploads; stand-alone software that takes Excel sheets as input. Can be used by people without bot-writing or programming skills and for collections without extensive XML export facilities or APIs
• GLAMWiki Toolset - XML-based uploads, especially suitable for large batches (tens to hundreds of thousands of files). Is not actively maintained anymore and will not support structured data on Commons.

Measuring impact

• GLAMorous, usage on Wikimedia projects of files in a specific Commons category (example: Images from the Groeningemuseum)
• GLAMorgan, page views on Wikimedia projects of files in a specific Commons category (example: Images from the Groeningemuseum in August 2018)
• BaGLAMa, the GLAMorgan data plotted over time (example: Media contributed by Textielmuseum)

Reading materials

• Why you should be paying attention to Wikidata and GLAM, Wikimedia blog, August 2016
• Wikimedia and The Met: A shared digital vision, blog of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, April 2018