GLAM/Newsletter/February 2024/Single

This Month in GLAM – Volume XIV, Issue II, February 2024

Albania report • Australia report • Brazil report • France report • Italy report • Kosovo report • New Zealand report • Poland report • Spain report • Sweden report • UK report • USA report • Biodiversity Heritage Library report • Wikidata report • WMF GLAM report • Calendar

One village, One article in Albania and Kosovo

By Vyolltsa

One Village, One Article Campaign

29 editors embarked on a campaign developed by Wikimedians of Albanian Language User Group from January 15th until February 16, 2024

During this time, contributors put their efforts into creating encyclopedic articles about various villages in Albania and Kosovo.

On February 6th, an offline edit-a-thon was organized in both Kosovo and Albania, bringing people together to write about villages in our two countries. Special participants this time were activists from the Rural Youth Hub in Albania organization and efforts of the Roskovec Municipality in Albania for their initiatives aimed at integrating young people into rural society.

As we celebrate the success of this campaign, we also look forward to continuing our efforts to promote awareness and appreciation of the village heritage.

Some statistics from the overall campaign:

Editors: 29
Wikipedia: 56 articles edited/ created
Wikimedia Commons: 78 uploads
Wikidata: 1.9K total revisions

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 X formerly Twitter or Instagram.

On tour

By Pru Mitchell

Know My Name at Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery

Wikimedia Australia continues its partnership with the National Gallery of Australia National Gallery in 2024 and 2025, including support for the Know My Name Regional touring exhibition. The first stop on the 'Making Women Count' tour was Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery. Wikimedia Australia's Events and Programs Coordinator, Alice Woods facilitated an edit-a-thon in the Gallery on Saturday 10 February 2024 with a group of locals keen to contribute to this national gender equity campaign in art.

In a lovely coincidence, Jan Randles a Paralympic gold medallist and a member of the Australian Paralympic History Project was visiting the gallery, and connected with our newest cohort of editors.

Post from Wikimedia Australia

Alice Woods facilitating the Know My Name edit-a-thon at Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery.
A group photo of some Know My Name editors.
Jane German and Dunja Rmandic, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery organising team
Pru Mitchell and Paralympic athletics competitor Jan Randles at the Know my Name event at Mornington.

Alice Springs wartime heritage

Staff from the Alice Springs Public Library have successfully uploaded images from their Donald Dowling Collection to Wikimedia Commons. This collection, consisting of over 240 images, primarily relates to World War II in Alice Springs, Hermannsburg and Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory.

Read about the project.

Army camp in Alice Springs during World War II, photo taken from the top of ANZAC Hill (Untyeyetwelye/Atnelkentyarliweke)
March of Army personnel on Todd Street, Alice Springs, this is now the Todd Mall.
Truck and people
Henry Foote standing in front of a Camel.
Tony [Dowling] 1946, 3 years and 4 months
Wyndham mail plane [Crashed]

News from Rio de Janeiro

By Sandra Soster & Juliana Cunha

Every year, the lovers of Brazilian national music receive three or four gifts sent from the city of Rio de Janeiro: batches with hundreds of music sheets of Brazilian composers that are digitized, revised and shared by the Musica Brasilis project.

In January, Musica Brasilis shared more 1,777 music sheets by 163 composers from 14 Brazilian states. Among them are Alberto Nepomuceno from Ceará, Antonio Carlos Gomes from the state of São Paulo and Chiquinha Gonzaga from the state of Rio de Janeiro, whose waltz entitled "Lua branca" (White moon) was performed by many singers, including the great Bahian singer Maria Bethânia.

Since July 2020, when this partnership has begun, Musica Brasilis shared 4,229 files on-Wiki. See some of the composers of its collection are:

Aurélio Cavalcanti
Cacilda Borges Barbosa
Chiquinha Gonzaga
Luiza Leonardo Boccanera
Noel Rosa

See the Musica Brasilis' GLAM page and the uploaded media.

TWO NEW PARTNERS IN RIO DE JANEIRO

Museu da Umbanda is a virtual project from the city of São Gonçalo, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It is an institution that aims to disseminate the history of Umbanda, a Brazilian religion, as long as the first Umbanda center was announced in 1908, by the entity Caboclo das Sete Encruzilhadas, in that city.

Carnavalize is a project from Rio de Janeiro city that register images of Carnival parades in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, including images of the preparations and of people: highlights on the floats, players, members of the communities and workers behind the scenes building each plot and ensemble.

NEW UPLOAD FROM NEUROMAT

Situated inside the University of São Paulo, the Research, Innovation and Dissemination Center for Neuromathematics (CEPID Neuromat) was founded in 2013 and, since July 2014, it has put among its objectives the propagation of scientific knowledge by open educational resources, namely Wikimedia Foundation initiatives. Beside the synthesis of mathematical modelling and theoretical neuroscience, researchers at RIDC NeuroMat have uploaded images to Wikimedia Commons, added spoken articles about mathematics, created and improved pages about neuroscience, statistics and theory of probabilities.

Since August, CEPID Neuromat uploaded 453 new media. See below one of the 4,228 media shared along this partnership: a speech about "The brain as a computer", by Jorge Stolfi.

See the CEPID NeuroMat's GLAM page and the uploaded media.

NEW HUGE UPLOAD FROM INMA

Especially for people who love plants and for Biologists!

The Instituto Nacional da Mata Atlântica (INMA) made available its collection from the system Reflora and we uploaded 7,000 images that are part of the Museu de Biologia Mello Leitão (MBML) Herbarium collection.

INMA is our partner since 2022, when we held the Wiki Loves Espírito Santo. And now we are harvesting the fruits (leaves, flowers, roots and all other plant parts) of this partnership.

See the INMA's GLAM page and the uploaded media.

NEW UPLOAD FROM CMU

Antonio Luiz Dias de Andrade, better known as Janjão, was an architect who was very active in the field of historical heritage in the state of São Paulo, and was even the director of the regional unit of Instituto do Patrimônio Histórico e Artistico Nacional (IPHAN) between 1978 and 1994.

The collection made available on Wiki by Centro de Memória Unicamp (CMU) was donated by Janjão's son, historian Dr. Francisco de Carvalho Dias de Andrade, in 2010. It consists of 1,729 media files, mostly photographs of Brazilian locations. But it also includes some of the wonderful drawings for which Janjão is known among colleagues in the field.

How about helping to identify the Brazilian cities documented in this wonderful collection?

See the Centro de Memória UNICAMP's GLAM page and the uploaded media.

Open Content Observatory letter

By Xavier Cailleau WMFr

First letter from the Observatoire de l'open content in France

The Open Content Observatory published its first open content Newsletter in January. An opportunity to promote the open content policy to GLAMs and public authorities. Quarterly letters will be published each year to inform and encourage GLAMs to use free licenses and Wikimedia projects as part of their mission. The letter is available in French on the Wikimedia France website: https://www.wikimedia.fr/lettre-annuelle-de-lopen-content/

Antarctic Writing Month and GLAM call

By Marta Arosio

Antarctic Writing Month

Francisco, Wikipedian and professor at the University of Genoa, left on January 1st for the 39th Italian Expedition to Antarctica. Directly from the South Pole he organized the first (that soon became a writing month) on climate change, nature and other related phenomena observable from Antarctica. The writing month saw researchers improving and creating various voices directly from the South Pole, with several Wikipedians joining from home. Despite the limited connection and the fast pace of work, Italian and New Zealand researchers worked offline with the sources at their disposal to write the first entries of the contribution week.

At the end of February 2024 155 new entries were created or improved on Wikipedia in Italian and 3 in English; 50 people participated in the initiative.

GLAM call

Wikimedia Italia launched the fourth call for GLAM with a fund of 50k, that closed at the end of February. 62 projects from GLAMs all over Italy were presented and will be selected during March. The funds aim to sustain projects that produce or make contents available online with free licenses. To be admitted proposals must comply with the following requirements:

the activities must take place by 31 October 2024;
outreach activities must be foreseen;
the materials produced in the project and at least a selection of contents produced, owned or preserved by the institution must be made available online to the public in open access and if possible shared directly to the Wikimedia and/or OpenStreetMap platforms;
join the Empowering Italian GLAMs project.

One Village, One Article Campaign

By Ritamaliqi

One Village, One Article Campaign

29 editors embarked on a campaign developed by Wikimedians of Albanian Language User Group from January 15th until February 16, 2024

During this time, contributors put their efforts into creating encyclopedic articles about various villages in Albania and Kosovo.

On February 6th, an offline edit-a-thon was organized in both Kosovo and Albania, bringing people together to write about villages in our two countries. Special participants this time were activists from the Rural Youth Hub in Albania organization and efforts of the Roskovec Municipality in Albania for their initiatives aimed at integrating young people into rural society.

As we celebrate the success of this campaign, we also look forward to continuing our efforts to promote awareness and appreciation of the village heritage.

Some statistics from the overall campaign:

Editors: 29
Wikipedia: 56 articles edited/ created
Wikimedia Commons: 78 uploads
Wikidata: 1.9K total revisions

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 X formerly Twitter or Instagram.

WikiProject Te Papa Research Expeditions, wrapping up the Auckland / Tāmaki Makaurau local histories project, and the Aotearoa Wikipedian at Large

By Ambrosia10, Prosperosity & Giantflightlessbirds

WikiProject Te Papa Research Expeditions

Ambrosia10 has recently received funding from Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand to undertake a Wikidata WikiProject on research expeditions at New Zealand's National Museum Te Papa. The aim of the project is to trial the current research expeditions schema proposed by Wikidata WikiProject Research Expeditions by enriching Wikidata with data on research expeditions undertaken by Te Papa, its predecessors the Dominion Museum and the Colonial Museum and their staff.

Any issues with the schema raised during this project will be discussed with both interested staff at Te Papa as well as WikiProject Research Expedition participants and the wider Wikidata and Biodiversity community. These discussions will aim to improve the research expedition schema as well as elicit recommendations for best practice when implementing the same. The plan is to resolve as many issues as possible prior to the WikiProject Research Expeditions and the TDWG Research Expeditions working group publishing recommendations and/or a Biodiversity Information Standards TDWG data standard guiding other institutions when undertaking similar Wiki work.

Ambrosia10 intends to encourage Te Papa to make use of the research expedition QIDs created or enriched during the project in the institution's collection management system. The intention is to also train interested Te Papa staff to create or enrich Wikidata research expedition items, to undertake outreach both with Te Papa staff and other natural history institutions in New Zealand by presenting on the project and also to run a public facing workshop on Wikidata and research expeditions at or near the end date of the project.

For those wanting more information, the Te Papa Research Expeditions WikiProject page can be found here.

Wrapping up the Auckland Museum local histories project

February marks the end of Auckland War Memorial Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira's Alliance Fund Project Understanding our past:using Wikipedia as a tool to support local history in Tāmaki Makaurau. The full progress across this and past Auckland Museum projects can be seen here, and includes improved pages on:

Eight subregions of Auckland
11 regional centres of the Auckland Region
74 pages on suburbs

In addition, as a part of the project we hosted Four summer students who learnt how to edit Wikipedia pages, led an edit-a-thon, and created or improved 35 articles focusing on migrant communities, queer history, natural history, indigenous history, and community facilities such as parks, churches and Hindu temples. The students also wrote two DIFF blogs:

While there remain many suburbs and localities that still need to be improved, 66% (160,382) of students in the Auckland Region now have an improved Wikipedia page for their school's suburb, and 98% (237,971) of students in the Auckland Region now have a page for the wider geographic area where their school is located.

The final stages of the project involve improving the Auckland and History of Auckland pages, and reviewing what aspects of the project were most helpful/beneficial, and what could have been improved.

Problems encountered during the project

Many areas do not have up-to-date sources for history, most evident in greenfield areas (newly established suburbs on the city limits), and areas where demographics have significantly changed over time, such as Howick and Papatoetoe, where large Chinese, Pasifika, Indian and urban Māori communities are not represented.
Many local history books are imperfect, especially when discussing the distant past. Many Auckland Region books entirely ignore pre-1840 history (a time period that covers indigenous histories and early interactions with Europeans, such as whalers). This does not necessarily mean that the books are invalid, just that they need to be supplemented with other perspectives. Some of the best sources (e.g. West: The History of Waitakere (2009)) incorporates multiple indigenous voices, and better sources such as Mt Albert Then and Now: a History of Mt Albert, Morningside, Kingsland, St Lukes, Sandringham and Owairaka (2016) incorporate well-researched histories (but without a direct indigenous voice).
- Many sources that discuss indigenous histories stop at colonisation, and don't discuss what happened to indigenous groups in the 20th century onwards.
- Many local history books are imperfect when discussing European/modern histories. Many of these focus on preserving stories from the early colonial era, or early 20th century, and completely disregard any events that happened in the last 40 years).
- Many Auckland history books tell history from a single perspective: the story of the Auckland city centre as it expands.
Some indigenous iwi and hapū of the Tāmaki Makaurau area (e.g. Ngāti Te Ata Waiohua, Te Ahiwaru, Ngāti Kahu) have not gone through the Waitangi Tribunal process, meaning that there are no well-researched historic reports for these groups that can inform pre-colonial histories.
Suburb borders are vague in Auckland. While some areas are well-defined, others are not (especially wider geographic subregions - pages such as West Auckland and South Auckland continue to have edit wars about what areas are included).
History articles, by nature, are imperfect. There is no clear end-point where all aspects of a place have been comprehensively discussed. This does not mean that these articles shouldn't be made, just that these pages can never satisfyingly be completed; only incrementally improved in the future.

Recommendations for local history pages

Ensure that indigenous history is represented, at the very least the names of indigenous groups, reasons why people settled here, and if the area has been colonised, how this happened.
- Ideally, indigenous history should be sourced from indigenous authors (and if there are multiple groups from the area, ensure that all groups are represented if possible)
- Ideally, indigenous history should be sourced from willingly given recent documents (works such as court case proceedings or ancient works by ethnographers are not ideal; works not involving any indigenous voices/perspectives at all should be discouraged)
- Legends/stories are important. Even if these are clearly supernatural or cannot be confirmed, these help to develop a picture of how people of the past understood the area.
Describe what the land was like before human occupation and urbanisation. What kind of plants and animals thrived here? Did the area look different during the Last Glacial Maximum?
Describe why people moved to the area in modern times (e.g. why colonial settlers moved there, why major population booms happened).
What happened in the area during major historical milestones (in Aotearoa New Zealand, common major points include the arrival of trains, industrialisation/development of sheep and dairy farming, WWI, the Great Depression, WWII, suburbanisation/development of motorways, migration, and globalisation)
Consider what your sources are missing. Are there any major groups in the area today (e.g. ethnic communities, religious groups) who are not discussed in local history documents? Are there ways to incorporate information about these groups into the page?
Even if print sources cannot be incorporated into a Wikipedia page easily, these can be listed as additional sources on pages.

Aotearoa Wikipedian at Large

The Aotearoa Wikipedian at Large project has entered its second month, and Mike Dickison is now based at the Christchurch Art Gallery. Last month at Cass he photographed its small railway station, immortalised in an iconic painting by New Zealand artist Rita Angus. The Christchurch Art Gallery owns the painting Cass, which is out of copyright in New Zealand but not the USA. Mike improved the article about Cass, using print resources and catalogues in the gallery archives, and asked Flickr photographers who had uploaded shots of the station at different times in its history to change their image licence to a Commons-compatible one.

While doing this, he noted that at least 16 different New Zealand institutions held works by Rita Angus, but their websites used a variety of copyright and licensing statements: some like Christchurch Art Gallery stated correctly that Rita Angus works were out of copyright, others gave various restrictions to reuse, and still others claimed Angus's copyrights were held by the Rita Angus Trust and the works could only be reproduced with their permission. A blog post comparing and contrasting this array of statements is forthcoming.

Another Christchurch Art Gallery project was on the 2023 exhibition Ink on Paper, which showcased the work of 49 New Zealand printmakers active in the 1910s to the 1950s. Some of these works are out of copyright in the USA, and the gallery has agreed to supply high-quality images to add to Wikimedia Commons. Others are out of copyright in New Zealand, but can still be featured on Wikipedia articles using the Fair Use provisions in US copyright law. Some time was spent cleaning up the Wikidata on the 49 artists, but 15 had no Wikipedia article—so Mike has organised an edit-a-thon to create these (and improve the others) in May in the Art Gallery library, where Wikipedians will be able to make use of the extensive files of press clippings and exhibition catalogues. As well as this edit-a-thon there is now a series of monthly Christchurch Wikimedia meetups.

To enable easier citation in Wikidata, Mike created the item Q118224886 for the Ink on Paper catalogue (now out of print, but which the art gallery has made available as a free PDF on its website). He then tried creating a Wikidata item for the exhibition itself: Ink on Paper (Q124733840) is now, surprisingly, the best-documented museum exhibit in Wikidata, with 17 properties. Although over 1000 exhibits from MoMA have been added to Wikidata, they're less thoroughly specified. Mike has written a short guide to creating an exhibit item in Wikidata and updated the Cradle template. Over the next couple of months he will be giving presentations to both gallery staff and the general public on Art and Wikipedia, and making the case for an art institution uploading its exhibition history to Wikidata to help researchers and enable creative data visualisations.

WikiMatejko editing action; The eighth European GLAM Wiki coordinators meet up

By Kamila Neuman

The final stage of the WikiMatejko editing action

The WikiMatejko editing action, as part of the GLAM-Wiki collaboration between Wikimedia Poland and National Museum in Krakow, continues for another month. The action engages novices and experienced editors of Wikimedia projects in order to enrich Wikipedia and other sister projects with high-quality content, illustrations and data related to the painter Jan Matejko, his life and work.

In the second stage of the WikiMatejko editing action, which began with a series of training sessions in January 2024, the participants of WikiMatejko focus on creating and developing translations, Wikidata and Open Educational Resources based on content from Wikimedia projects.

The project is an excellent opportunity to seek connections between GLAM-Wiki and Education, so the work on Open Educational Resources is moderated jointly by WMPL staff members Kamila Neuman - Open Culture Manager and Wioletta Matusiak - Open Education and Development Manager.

Another meeting on Open Educational Resources, Wikidata and translation was held in February to provide ongoing support to the action participants and to plan the next steps in creating educational materials based on content from Wikimedia projects. The action participants presented their ideas at the meeting, and potential educational tools possible for creating Open Educational Resources were discussed together.

For Saturday, March 23, we have planned a meeting summarizing the WikiMatejko live edition action at the Cloth Hall of the MNK in Krakow, during which we will summarize the actions and effects of the action and experience the art of Jan Matejko in the Gallery of Polish Art XIX. The event will also be an opportunity for informal talks and a joint celebration of several months of work by Wikimedia volunteers.

Invitation to join WikiMatejko and translate articles to other languages

We continue translating articles to English in order to encourage the international community to translate them into other languages.

If you would like to join the project and translate the articles into other languages please visit a subpage of the project in English, which you can find here. It will feature articles translated into English, and we invite you to translate them into other foreign languages.

We will be pleased if you join the international part of Wikimatejko in this way.

Go ahead and join the project and keep an eye on the page for more articles to be translated, which will appear until mid-March.

If you would like to learn more about WikiMatejko and other GLAM-Wiki activities please contact with Kamila Neuman, Open Culture Manager at Wikimedia Poland.

The eighth European GLAM Wiki coordinators meet up

The eighth meeting of European GLAM Wiki coordinators was held again in February. In the first part of the meeting, the coordinators had the opportunity to listen to a presentation by Sebastian ter Burg, a specialist from the Europeana Foundation, who talked about the Europeana training platform and its potential for developing skills and competencies in the area of digital cultural heritage.

Training.europeana.eu is a platform through which one can learn about a wide variety of topics related to digital cultural heritage. The ever-expanding offering ranges from basic introductions to in-depth information for experts. It offers valuable courses in the area of copyright law, among others, for cultural heritage professionals, users of digital cultural heritage, policy makers, specialists in other data spaces and many other stakeholders.

Meanwhile, Susanna Ånäs of AvoinGLAM summarized the completed Wiki Love Living Heritage campaign.

Wiki Loves Living Heritage is a participatory community initiative that invites heritage practitioners, Wikimedia volunteers and cultural institutions around the world to document and celebrate intangible cultural heritage. Its goal is to combine awareness-raising and documentation efforts-online and in the field-to improve the preservation of intangible heritage around the world. Project website: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Loves_Living_Heritage

The meeting of European GLAM-Wiki coordinators has also traditionally been an opportunity to exchange knowledge and experience in the GLAM-Wiki area.

The online meetings of European GLAM-Wiki coordinators were initiated after the September 2022 coordinators' meeting in Prague, organized by Liam Wyatt as part of a series of live meetings. Their purpose is to share knowledge and experiences on an ongoing basis and to build a network to support coordinators in their work in the GLAM-Wiki area. To date, a total of eight online meetings have been held. The team initiating the online meetings and organizing the events includes: Kamila Neuman of Wikimedia Poland, Michelle van Lanschot of Wikimedia Netherlands, and Giovanna Fontenelle of the Wikimedia Foundation.

SMALL GLAM SLAM Pilot 1 Rapid Grant

By Olea

SMALL GLAM SLAM Pilot 1 Rapid Grant

The proposal SMALL GLAM SLAM Pilot 1 has earned a rapid grant from the Wikimedia Foundation. The proposal, by the Spanish NGO LaOficina Producciones Culturales has a main goal to reduce entry barriers for very small GLAM organizations when adopting an IT solution and museology methods. LaOficina identifies as very small GLAM organizations those with staff lesser than 10, formalized or not, public, private or third sector. To achieve this goal LaOficina will develop an pilot project setting up the digital archive for their new documentation center. Among the expected outputs are recommendations for affordable high quality hardware, an opensource software stack based on Linux and Wikibase, a Wikibase preload of selected GLAM metadata ontologies/vocabularies/schemas and the beginning of a future library of GLAM practices.

You will be able to follow the project advancements through the Phabricator tag verysmallglam. To know more about the project please read the original proposal and it's discussion page.

Working life museums

By Axel Pettersson

Working life museums

The cooperation between Wikimedia Sweden and the Council of Working Life Museums continues. In February we hosted a course in editing Wikipedia and adding photos following the pattern of previous courses. Representatives from ten different museums joined in to learn how to update and create articles, with extra caution on conflict of interest and how to add more in their area of expertise than about them selves.

National Trust, Leeds 2023, and Khalili Foundation

By Lajmmoore & MartinPoulter

National Trust

The National Trust's pilot Wikimedia programme has come to an end. This was a new approach for the organisation, and the first time they openly licensed images (take a look). They include popular objects and some images of heritage conservation in practice. The pilot also introduced volunteers to editing and developed some guidance for staff. If you have comments on the pilot, or its potential, please add them to the talk page.

Thanks are due to the wider team at the NT for making the pilot possible and to all the Wikimedians working in GLAM who provide inspirational models and projects that I've drawn on.

LEEDS 2023

In 2023 Leeds ran a year of cultural activities, under the banner Leeds 2023. The year included huge numbers of performances, art interventions and public art work. As part of their legacy strategy, with funding from Wikimedia UK, they re-negotiated copyright permissions to release over 100 high resolution images of the year to Wikimedia Commons. The images are here. Many of these photographs contribute to knowledge equity, including artists from around the world and reflecting LEEDS 2023's commitment to representation.

Khalili Foundation

This month I have worked on a report on the Wikimedia representation of the UNESCO Memory of the World inscriptions, identifying areas that we can improve with UNESCO's co-operation. One finding was that the Commons categorisation of images is rather mixed up, and does not give us an accurate picture of how many images on Commons are of MotW inscriptions. This is one thing that I will need to work on as the Khalili Foundation works with UNESCO to open up knowledge about Memory of the World.

I have also been looking a how material from Wikimedia could be used to augment the Interfaith Explorers educational site (supported by the Khalili Foundation), and have written a proposal for sharing with the site's maintainers.

Georgina Brooke, one of the contacts from my University of Oxford days, has been in touch. She runs Cultural Content, a blog aimed at cultural heritage professionals. I have written a guest article for her that explains the Khalili Collections Wikimedia project and how I was able to write an article about the Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam exhibition and get it to Featured Article status. We have agreed that this article can be published with a free licence.

On English Wikipedia, I have put Empire of the Sultans up for Featured Article candidacy. Already a couple of dozen improvements have been suggested and implemented. The main suggestion is that the article needs to explain more context about Islamic art and Ottoman art, drawn from academic sources rather than sources specifically about the exhibition. So this is taking some time and there will have to be input from other reviewers before it is ready. Using Wikipedia to look for sources, I found big problems with the Aniconism in Islam and Muslim world articles, where citations had been incomplete for years. So I spent some time fixing those problems.

To further the possibility of running cultural diversity editathons, I have arranged a meeting with a historian of art at the University of Bristol in mid-April. There has also, with help from Wikimedia UK, been an approach to the Institute for Arab and Islamic studies at the University of Exeter.

We have some new translations. Two volunteers on Indonesian Wikipedia have translated the Khalili Collection of Islamic Art article and the Empire of the Sultans article: both very long, richly illustrated articles. The Talismanic shirt article has been partially translated into Indonesian and into Malay, including an image shared from the Khalili Collections.

There were no new image uploads and no new Featured Image awards this month. GLAMorgan reports 7,154,543 image views in February. The number is so high because of a surge in interest in Alexander the Great, whose article has two images from two different Khalili Collections, and also in Achaemenid Empire which has one Khalili Collections image.

Hacking Night; Seattle Meetups; Denver Huddle; Wikipedia Day LA; San Diego/February 2024; Supreme Court visit

By Slowking4

Hacking Night

Wikimedia NYC held a meetup, Hacking Night February 2024

Seattle Meetups

Cascadia Wikimedians User Group, held a meetups, Commons categorization edit-a-thon, and meetup at Distant Worlds Coffeehouse.

Denver Huddle

Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales Branch Library, and Wikimedia US Mountain West held a meetup, Meetup/Denver

Wikipedia Day LA 2024

West Hollywood Library, and Wikimedians of Los Angeles held a meetup, Los Angeles/February 2024.

San Diego/February 2024

San Diego Public Library and San Diego Wikimedians held their 108th meetup, San Diego/February 2024

Supreme Court visit

Wikimedia Foundation Legal/Policy group, and Wikimedia DC held a meetup, Supreme Court visit for NetChoice vs Paxton.

BHL-Wiki Working Group February Monthly Highlights

By Ambrosia10

The BHL-Wiki working group meets once a month to discuss all things related to the Biodiversity Heritage Library and the Wikiverse. In our most recent February meeting we had several discussions which will be summarised below. If you are interested in joining upcoming meetings the agenda document and zoom link can be found here.

Wikibase discussions

Jen Cwiok, Digital Systems Librarian from American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), has recently joined the BHL-Wiki group and shared news that the AMNH and Carnegie Hall approached the Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO) to deploy a shared Wikibase for interested New York City institutions. Currently, AMNH and Carnegie Hall are the first adopters of the Wikibase. Background: AMNH has done a lot of work in standardizing their entities and creating contextual records for them and is hopeful Wikibase will provide the technical infrastructure to publish this data as Linked Open Data.

Jackie Shieh and Suzanne Pilsk shared a project update for the new Smithsonian Wikibase installation that will be used for entity management across the institution. Currently the team at Smithsonian is migrating data, reviewing data quality standards, identifying clean-up tasks, and solidifying property usage. They are working with an outside vendor for the deployment and install of extensions and plugins like the Quickstatements extension (for bulk data loads) and OpenRefine integration.

WikiProject Te Papa research expeditions pilot project

Siobhan Leachman has confirmed that the WikiProject Te Papa Research Expeditions Pilot is now in-progress at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. She will be spending 3 days per week there building out the project for the next 12 weeks. This project is likely to make extensive use of the Biodiversity Heritage Library when researching various research expeditions and will also use BHL to provide citations to support Wikidata statements.

Roundtripping of Wikidata Qids

The BHL-Wiki working group reviewed the SPARQL data exports for Wikidata Q IDs associated with BHL Titles and have decided to move forward with BHL-TECH to bring the clean set of 63,358 Wikidata Q IDs into the BHL catalogue.

BHL-Wiki Meta-Wiki presence

Work is ongoing to create a meta-wiki presence for the various Biodiversity Heritage Library Wiki collaborations to assist with coordinating efforts.

Working with catalogues: a Wikidata volunteer’s perspective

By Alan Ang

Many knowledge institutions use external identifiers to link their catalogues with Wikidata. Not many people are aware of the effort volunteers put into maintaining Wikidata’s data quality. In this interview, user:Epìdosis shares some insights from his eleven years of editing and reconciling libraries’ catalogues on Wikidata in his interview with Wikimedia Deutschland.

Updates on OpenRefine training and Wikisource Loves manuscripts

By Giovanna Fontenelle (WMF) & Sailesh Patnaik (WMF)

OpenRefine beta testing and new Meta portal

In February 2024, the Culture and Heritage team continued its collaboration with OpenRefine to develop training with the goal of engaging and preparing the Wikimedia community to make use of the tool, especially its Wikimedia Commons functionalities. This undertaking is part of the OpenRefine-Wikimedia Commons training and sustainability grant (2023-2024).

Right now, there's an ongoing Train-the-trainer course taking place to prepare Wikimedians to use the tool in an advanced way and to even offer training themselves afterward.

On another hand, there's also a WikiLearn course developed by Sandra Fauconnier to prepare newcomers and people who want to learn how to use the new functionalities of OpenRefine on Wikimedia Commons. For this course, our team spent January and February coordinating the beta testing of the course with several volunteers. Now, the changes from the feedback are being applied and soon we will be coordinating the translation of the course to Spanish, Portuguese, and French. Stay tuned!

Finally, as part of our efforts to support OpenRefine, we also revamped their presence on Meta Wiki.

Don't forget to check the OpenRefine's contributions to the Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons report of this newsletter!

Final activities of the Wikisource Loves Manuscripts learning network

The final session of the WiLMa learning network was a meeting with The British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme (EAP). EAP is working with a network of regional hubs to co-create and deliver a series of online and onsite training opportunities for institutions, researchers, archivists, librarians, and anyone interested in protecting archival material at risk.

They shared training resources and grant opportunities:

Capture book offers practical advice on planning and executing successful digitization projects with minimal resources.
Training videos about conservation and digital preservation are available on YouTube with subtitles in English, French, Spanish, Ukrainian, and Urdu.
Grant opportunities

As we’ve concluded our last learning session, our focus now shifts to celebrating our achievements, sharing our learnings, and discussing the next steps for the cohort. We have already discussed potential projects in 1:1 sessions with nine cohort members.

Help Wikimedistas de Uruguay give GLAM Wiki a new face

An illustration with the letters forming 'GLAM' overlaid on a background of framed pictures, museum objects, and book shelves — GLAM logo developed for the global conference in 2023

As an outcome of the GLAM Wiki Conference, Wikimedistas de Uruguay is facilitating a community process to redesign the public presence of GLAM Wiki on Meta. They are calling for volunteers to join a working group to revamp these pages in advance of Wikimania Poland. The application form will be open until 24 March (end of your day anywhere in the world). The Culture & Heritage team will provide responsive support to the working group.

March's GLAM events

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Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday	Sunday
26	27	28	29	1	2	3
4	5	6	7 Celebrating International Public Domain Day in Europe, Brussels (Belgium)	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15	16	17
18	19	20	21	22	23	24
25	26	27	28 Éditathon aux Archives de Lyon sur les portraits de personnalités (9h-12h et 14h-17h)	29	30	31