GLAM/Newsletter/September 2015/Single
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Edit-a-thon & editing challenges
Edit-a-thon in Cultural Center of Spain
In coordination with Wikimedia Chile, Wikimedia Uruguay and Bolivia we held an edit-a-thon at the Cultural Center of Spain . The aim of this meeting was to collectively build part of the history of the Cultural Center of Spain and what was their contribution to the local culture of each country
Editing challenges
WMAR launched two contests edition in collaboration with the network Iberocoop. One of the challenges was to translate publishing biographies of personalities in the Spanish Wikipedia, the second contest was to categorize as many articles as the community can.
Wiki Loves Art; Publications; SOIMA 2015: Unlocking Sound and Image Heritage
Publications
On 2 September 2015 Wikimedia Belgium published six booklets (two booklets, each available in three languages) with the opening of SOIMA 2015. These two publications (in English) are:
The first edition of these booklets were reached out to the director of the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (KIK-IRPA) (wiki), which sponsored Wiki Loves Monuments in Belgium & Luxembourg in the past 4 years.
See for all the publications at Category:Wikimedia Belgium publications.
SOIMA 2015: Unlocking Sound and Image Heritage
On 2, 3 and 4 September, the conference SOIMA 2015: Unlocking Sound and Image Heritage was organised in Brussels. The conference was organized to take action and share knowledge, skills and resources to ensure the current transition from analogue to digital formats. Without taking action this image and sound heritage of the past century is at risk and will disappear. The conference brought together professionals and policy makers with an interest in sound and image preservation.
Wikimedia Belgium, together with Wikimedia France, Wikimedia Österreich, and Wikimedia Nederland, sponsored the conference. We think it is important to be present at this kind of conferences because in this way we as Wikimedia can reach out to cultural institutions around the world. They often do not know the possibilities of working together with Wikipedia and often does not know Wikimedia exists. To be at a conference we as Wikimedia can introduce ourselves, make our existence known, and create awareness that working with Wikipedia/Wikimedia is possible and a good way to educate people around the world about various subjects.
Every participant at the conference got a goodiebag with in it two booklets, about Creative Commons licenses (online version) and about how to work successfully together with Wikipedia (online version). We also had a Wikimedia booth at the conference to provide the participants with extra documentation and to answer questions.
We have had interesting sessions and talks and we think the conference was a good way to promote Wikipedia, the collaboration with Wikimedia, and to raise awareness for the value of free knowledge.
Links:
- Website of the conference
- Project page at WMBE wiki
- Photos of the conference
- Blog post in French: Regarder, écouter et partager ! à SOIMA 2015
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Wikimedia booth at SOIMA 2015 -
The opening of SOIMA 2015 took place here -
It is home to the Musical Instrument Museum. -
The main lectures were given in the Academy Palace. -
A classical building with a nice interior. -
The main room for the lectures. -
In the former Royal Stables the breaks and lunch were served, Wikimedia Belgium had a booth to promote the usage of Wikipedia and collaboration with Wikimedia. -
Coffee and lunch served.
Wiki Loves Art
In 2015-2016 we are organising Wiki Loves Art in Belgium. We noticed with previous meetings with cultural institutions that they do not know that Wikimedia Belgium exists, that they can work together with us with projects, and often hesitate in starting projects together while they are very interested. Therefore we designed a project that is safe for cultural institutions to join in and at the same time they get the opportunity to get to know us.
Wiki Loves Art is a photo contest in what volunteers take photos of objects that are made available to be photographed by a cultural institution, and upload them to Wikimedia Commons. This takes place in April 2016, but before the actual contest is happening, we will make a tour along cultural institutions to invite them to join in this project or to work together with us in another project.
At the opening of SOIMA 2015 on 2 September 2015 the project was publicly announced, and the project will grow in the coming months.
Wiki Loves Art already resulted in a first collaboration being pre-announced at the opening of the conference: a new collaboration between KIK-IRPA and Wikimedia Belgium. More developments will follow in coming months. See: https://twitter.com/Wikimedia_BE/status/639203850851893248
Clever September
Heading to Strasbourg
Together with a local Wikimedian, 3 staff members of Wikimédia France went to Strasbourg to start planning future actions. They met with about 20 people from various academic institutions spread across Alsace territory ranging from national libraries to engineering schools. 3 main topics were covered by workshops : semantic web (Wikidata, DBpedia) ; training ; contents dissemination. If enough concrete actions are identified, there could be a budget for a future Wikimedian in residence to facilitate the coordination of actions among this network of institutions...!
Opening up (with) the Prussians!
GLAM on Tour at Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation Berlin-Brandenburg
GLAM on Tour got invited by the Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation Berlin-Brandenburg. Yes, really. Tough cookie? Right. But fortunately, after many attempts for cooperations with the Wikimedia movement, Schloss Caputh agreed on a first project - GLAM on Tour at Schloss Caputh. 10 Wikimedians, mainly Commons photographers, got the opportunity to take high quality pictures in the historic castle. Some of them took part in Wiki loves monuments. The results of this one saturday in September are more than presentable. Almost 80 excellent pictures were uploaded, new articles started and existing ones illustrated. See for yourself at the documentation page (which is obligatory in every GLAM on Tour station).
Discussion panel "ABC of Free Knowledge" on Open Access
On September 3, we discussed the state of Open Access publications with Lambert Heller, head of the Open Science Lab, Technische Universitätsbibliothek Hannover, Christina Riesenweber, OJS-de.net, Center for Digital Systems, Freie Universität Berlin, and Frédéric Dubois chief editor Internet Policy Review, Humboldt Institut für Internet und Gesellschaft. This was the 11th edition of WMDEs discussion panel series "ABC of Free Knowledge". Two of the main questions were, which model of open access publication is to become the standard and which one really deserves the description "open".
- See the full discussion on video (German)
Wiki Loves Monuments 2015 Italian edition and photographic archives
Wiki Loves Monuments 2015 Italian edition
A great amount of work was done this year by Wikimedia Italia staff and volunteers in contacting local authorities and obtaining permissions to freely take picture of monuments. Despite Italian lack of Freedom of Panorama, the 2015 edition of the contest is a big success. Here are some numbers:
- 947 photographers, the highest number in any participating country.
- 12,740 photographs.
- 5149 monuments.
- 392 institutions involved.
- 46 guided excursions with volunteers.
- Almost 500 participants in the excursions.
To reach this goal, a considerable degree of cooperation with public sector, organizations and professional associations was crucial: from Ministry to Municipalities, from Toscana Foto Festival to Touring Club Italia and WW1 (see below), from ICOM Italia to Federazione Italiana Associazioni Fotografiche (FIAF). Moreover, a dedicated Training Day was organized for new volunteers and photographers interested in the project in June, and two press conferences helped in spreading information about the contest.
Open Data Monuments in Emilia-Romagna
The first regional photographic archive in Italy was presented in Bologna, Emilia-Romagna. The archive, called Open Data Monuments: Emilia-Romagna in Creative Commons, is a joint effort of local administrative institutions, Italian Ministry of Culture, and Wikimedia Italia. Many of the pictures representing the entire territory, and Bologna and Ferrara especially, are in fact the result of past Wiki Loves Monuments editions in this region.
Pictures are all available for the download and promoted for citizens' free reuse, raising at the same time awareness of free licenses meaning and impact.
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Bologna - Fontana del Nettuno -
Bologna - Piazza Santo Stefano -
Bologna - San luca -
Ferrara - Museo Della Cattedrale -
Ferrara - Castello Estense -
Ferrara - Palazzo dei diamanti
Touring Club Archive and World War I
After the first announcement of a new GLAM-wiki project in cooperation with the Touring Club Italiano (TCI) and the WW1 – dentro la Grande Guerra association, a new set of images was uploaded on Commons, in the ongoing uploading process that will bring up to 3,000 images from the TCI historical image archive.
The project is described on Wikipedia in Italian and images are available on Archivio_Touring_La_Grande_Guerra.
The Touring Archive is one of the more interesting (possibly the main) photographic resources for Italian 20th century history. Built up and maintained by the oldest tourism organization in the country, dating back to 1894, it holds iconographic documentation about art, monuments, landscapes and historical events too. The collaboration with Wikimedia Italia is an important opportunity for the Archive to boost the digitization process of its material, and to highlight it for historians and researchers all over the world.
Given the origins of the archive (in many cases, gathered from private donations during decades of Italian history), some of the images show a lack of basic metadata such as exact date and place. To address this issue, an Italian contemporary history project on Wikipedia has been involved in looking for more information and better categorization on Commons. Obviously, every researcher in the world is welcome in this effort!
Bringing Wikipedia closer to animal lovers
Skopje Zoo
This month Shared Knowledge completed its Skopje Zoo Project (Macedonian: ВикиПроект „Зоо Скопје“) aiming to place QRpedia and other QR-code plaques about the animals in Skopje Zoo, through which visitors will be able to access the Wikipedia articles of each animal in various languages. A total of 85 different plaques were made and mounted, covering all the species at the zoo. Many articles were written and improved on the Macedonian Wikipedia, and now the codes refer to comprehensive well-written articles, giving a wealth of information about the zoo's residents.
It was decided that the plaques and the codes themselves should be in three language versions: Macedonian, Albanian and general QRpedia (marked with "Your language" below the code). Macedonian and Albanian are both official languages of the City of Skopje, but they need separate codes, since a large proportion of the Macedonian and Albanian population use an English interface on their phones, meaning that codes will not be shown in native languages if only QRpedia is used.
Subsequently, the project saw a spin-off activity consultations and negotiations with the academic authorities at the South-East European University of Tetovo, in order to organise the creation of Albanian-language articles as sq.wiki has very few articles about the animals as yet. This will be included in students' coursework: articles will be reviewed and marks will be given by their professor as part of it. This is to begin this autumn, with the start of the new term.
Who's afraid of Jacob van Ruisdael? Various gifts from Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Leiden
Who's afraid of Jacob van Ruisdael?
Generating lists for Wikipedia with Wikidata
Since June it is possible to create lists for use on Wikipedia in table form using simple queries on Wikidata. By carefully curating the data, sort options can be added to make these lists more in line with existing lists on Wikipedia. In September (see the Signpost announcement) the first such dynamically updatable list was published on the English Wikipedia, the List of paintings by Jacob van Ruisdael. By adding native language titles to each Wikidata painting item, it becomes possible to copy the list to another language Wikipedia. With some quick translation, the list was thus generated on the German, French, Dutch, Spanish and Catalan Wikipedias. The list was deleted in disgust by German Wikipedians however, who felt the quality of the title translations was below their minimum quality level and no one was interested enough to provide German title improvements. Other language projects seem to feel the benefit of browsing the Ruisdael paintings overcomes any title mistakes, and have kept the option intact. Wikipedians from the Russian, Finnish, and Danish Wikipedias have "userfied" the list by adding it to their user space. Due to the process of adding paintings to Wikidata, the list has increased in length by a third since the original publication, but is currently still at less than half of Ruisdael's recorded oeuvre. Feedback has prompted Magnus to make improvements as well, such as an update feature from the Wikipedia list row directly without forcing unwilling Wikipedians to edit Wikidata in the as-yet-unfamiliar Wikidata editing interface. He has also responded to all of the feedback about list length (what happens when all 700 Ruisdael paintings are added to Wikidata - do we really want to show them all?) and onwiki discussions about notability or title management with truly Dynamic Wikidata Lists, which are not stored on Wikipedia at all, but hosted on Tool Labs. For example, many Ruisdael paintings depict waterfalls, so a dynamic list query asking for "waterfall" in the Wikidata "depicts" property creates a list of over a hundred items that have this and of course many Ruisdael paintings are shown as well as many others.
- How does the Wikipedia list work?
The list uses the Listeria listmaking tool built by Magnus Manske (See his blog post about it here). The tool generates a list based on the input query options. Each time the update option is selected, the list will update with the latest results of the query, but this will only happen on the project that selected the option. Since Jacob van Ruisdael was a very prolific painter, the current list is far from complete and as a total of 700 paintings are attributed to him, the process of completing the list may take a long time. When a Ruisdael painting is added to Wikidata, whether through a GLAM data donation or a user action, the next time the list is updated that painting will be included in the list.
Browsing paintings with Wikidata
Though Wikimedia Commons has many, many more, Wikidata has over 100,000 painting items and volunteers continue to add more every day. The Wikidata project "Sum of all Paintings" has the ambition to create a Wikidata item for all notable paintings, which includes all of the catalogued paintings by Ruisdael, or Rembrandt, or Van Gogh, or any other painter, Dutch or otherwise, on Wikipedia. Multichill has uploaded entire painting collections in Wikidata from museum websites that include the metadata of their painting collections. He is always on the lookout for more collections, but will only start an upload if he is able to include a basic set of key facts for each painting. Challenges when dealing with top collections are the large number of Wikidata items already on Wikidata - when it comes to Wikidata items, we don't want to have any doubles or triples the way we may have multiple images of certain paintings on Commons. Together, project members work on how to properly identify and reference paintings in the Wikidata database. A schema of Wikidata properties has been made that easily map to common painting data fields. Key facts for Wikidata painting items besides the problematic title field, are collection, accession number, date of creation, creator, and location. Volunteers add images to Wikidata items from Commons. If you navigate to a Wikidata item about a painter, you can select the "Reasonator" option in the left-hand menu and browse the paintings on Wikidata. Another prolific painter, Rembrandt, only has a few hundred paintings on Wikidata as yet. All of this is still under construction. Slowly more and more properties are added to Wikidata, such as the recent addition of units. For example, this Wikidata edit shows how the painting's item of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring now has its measurements added since 10 September.
Various gifts from Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Leiden
Eight million biological images
In the past few years, Naturalis made large strides in digitising its museum collections, comprising about 37 million objects. Eight million images were produced this way, ranging from herbarium sheets (five million images) to extensive mollusc and preserved bird collections to historical artworks. Not all of these images are of encyclopedic value, as some serve primarily to manage the collections. Naturalis presents its images with further biological information to experts and the public at large on websites such as http://bioportal.naturalis.nl/ and now also on Wikimedia Commons. As a spin-off of the digitisation project, Naturalis employed a Wikipedian in Residence both to make selected image sets available to Wikimedia Commons and to warm its personnel to the novel approach to outreach Wikimedia projects offer. After five months a preliminary outcome is the donation of 34000+ images to Commons in the eight categories below. Further uploads are ongoing.
Kawahara Collection (892 water colours of Japanese flora and fauna, 1823-1829)
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Choerodon azurio (Jordan and Snyder) - Kawahara Keiga -
Istiophorus platypterus (Shaw and Nodder) - Kawahara Keiga -
Parasquilla haani - Kawahara Keiga -
Balistes conspicillum Bloch and Schneider - Kawahara Keiga -
Tachypleus tridentatus - Kawahara Keiga -
Vitis spp. - Canavalia gladiata - Zea mays - Citrullus lanatus - Kawahara Keiga -
Ranina ranina - Kawahara Keiga
Plant type specimens (1698 herbarium sheets)
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Freycinetia kinabaluana B.C.Stone - Pandanaceae -
Rheum tibeticum Maxim. ex Hook.f. Thell. - Polygonaceae -
Fucus distichus L. subsp. edentatus (Bach.Pyl.) Powell - Fucaceae -
Codium cylindricum Holmes - Chlorophyceae -
Praravinia mindanaensis (Merr.) Bremek. - Rubiaceae
Oudemans Collection (1151 coloured microscopic drawings of mites)
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Neoparasitus oudemansi (Oudemans) - Mites -
Amblyomma marmoreum (C. L. Koch) - Mites -
Erythraeus phalangioides (de Geer) - Mites -
Leptus memorum (C. L. Koch) - Mites -
Pelops pheonotus - Mites
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Psittirostra psittacea (Gmelin, 1789) - Ou, Hawaiian honeycreeper
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Chaunoproctus ferreorostris (Vigors, 1829) - Bonin grosbeak
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Campephilus imperialis (Gould, 1832) - Imperial woodpecker, nearly extinct
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Ara tricolor - extinct parrot
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Conuropsis carolinensis carolinensis (Linnaeus, 1758) - extinct parakeet
See also Gallery of mollusc specimens at Naturalis from the Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie
See also Gallery of mollusc specimens at Naturalis from the Zoölogisch Museum Amsterdam
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Fissurella picta (Gmelin, 1791) -
Lorica volvox (Reeve, 1847) -
Cryptochiton stelleri (von Middendorff, 1847) -
Lambis truncata truncata (Lightfoot, 1786) -
Haliotis iris Gmelin, 1791
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Niltava sumatrana Salvadori, 1879 -
Eurylaimus javanicus harterti van Oort, 1909 -
Chloropsis sonnerati zosterops Vigors & Horsfield, 1830 -
Passer montanus montanus (Linnaeus, 1758) -
Pachycare flavogrisea subaurantia Rothschild & Hartert, 1911
Various images (11)
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Andrias japonicus - Japanese giant salamander -
Pteropus vampyrus - Bat -
Solanum lycopersicum var. lycopersicum - oldest preserved tomato in Europe -
Japanese wallnut Juglans ailantifolia Carrière var. cordiformis (Makino) Rehder, herbarium sheet from the Siebold Collection, 1823-1829? -
Raphus cucculatus - Dodo, exhibit in the museum
Images from the National Liberation Museum 1944-1945
The National Liberation Museum 1944-1945 in Groesbeek is dedicated to the history of the liberation of the Netherlands at the end of the Second World War. Their collection includes over 56,000 objects and sources which document not only the liberating and occupying armies, but also all aspects of daily life in the Netherlands. The collection mainly covers the period 1944-1945, but also the preceding inter-war period and the period of reconstruction following WW2. To increase the visibility of this collection, the museum has started a small project to make high-quality photos of objects in their collection, and upload them to Commons. A small foretaste of what's in their collection can already be seen here. Keep an eye on this page, as more images will be added soon. Are you working on topics related to the WW2, and are you in need of a photo of an object that might be in the collection of the museum? Go to the project page, and leave a note with your wish on the talk page, and if possible the object will be included in the photography schedule!
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82nd Airborne Division patch, 1944, worn on the shoulder sleeve of the uniform -
Ammunition box 25 Pounder, 4 shells. Text reads: '4 shell 25 PR HE MK ID DD/L 7517 FZD 119 B MI 8 Cr/C 1006' Found by civilians in the Netherlands 1944-1945 -
Cardboard box Ready to Eat Cereal with milk and sugar added, 10 ounces. General Mills Inc. Minneapolis, Minnesota 1940s
Wiki Loves Monuments; Wiki Takes Ayora; Glaming Madrid; Wikimedia Connection; Creative Commons Valladolid Film Festival
Wiki Loves Monuments
This September Wikimedia Spain organized the 5th edition of Wiki Loves Monuments in Spain. This year there was one partner, Mensa España, and the contest focused on monuments and municipalities without pictures on Wikimedia Commons, so in addition to the first three places prizes, there are two special ones: for the participant with images from more monuments without a picture and for the participant with images from more municipalities without a picture.
More than 7,000 photos were uploaded to Wikimedia Commons in September by 186 participants. People were also able to participate uploading photos to Flickr using free licenses; the Flickr group for Wiki Loves Monuments Spain 2015 had almost 3,000 images, and 61 members. In total, they provided more than 10,000 photos for this contest in Spain.
On September 19, the Free Software Office of University of Granada organized a gymkhana Wiki Loves Monuments for taking images and uploading them to Wikimedia Commons as part of the contest.
Wiki Takes Ayora
The weekend of September 19 and 20 the City of Ayora and Wikimedia Spain developed Wiki Takes Ayora, an initiative for searching urban elements (buildings, structures, monuments) in the municipality of Ayora, southwest of the province of Valencia, during one day, to take pictures and upload them to Wikimedia Commons. The day also included an Edit-a-thon for editing articles related to Ayora. The results of the event were a total of 432 images from Ayora.
Glaming Madrid
On September 7, Glaming Madrid project started. The goal of this project is to develop a new collaboration with several top GLAM institutions of Spain, a unique opportunity in the country to create a long-term GLAM collaboration with museums. These ones are the Museum of Romanticism, the Museo del Traje (Costume Museum) and the National Archaeological Museum. These institutions hold great historical collections: one of them has a very heterogeneous collection of objects from the XIX century, including paintings, furniture and tableware; another one has objects related to clothing, sketches and a section of ethnography. And the last one, a collection of archaeological artefacts from Spanish Prehistory to the Modern Era.
The project, leaded by a wikipedian in residence, includes Wikipedia training sessions where participants learn to edit, create and improve articles of the relevant artefacts in the museums and related topics, talks about Wikipedia and the sister projects of the Wikimedia movement, content donations such as images or documents from each institution, and recordings of several concerts of classical music, which are held regularly in one of the museums. In September was held the first training session in one of the museums and is scheduled a full calendar of training sessions, talks and edit-a-thons for the coming months.
Wikimedia Connection
On September 25, 26 and 27, Wikimedia Spain celebrated its third Wikimedia Conference. It was organized together with the graphic design studio Gráfica Liebre and took place at Colegio Mayor Universitario Isabel de España, in Madrid. During the event there were several talks related to GLAM, like Gráfica Liebre and their collaboration with WikiArS, the participation of the Museo del Traje in one of the Europeana Fashion edit-a-thons or one about intellectual property and free licenses. Finally we enjoyed two guided visits, to the Museum of Romanticism and to the National Archaeological Museum.
Creative Commons Valladolid Film Festival
Wikimedia Spain participated in the Creative Commons Valladolid Film Festival (ccVAD), celebrated between September 18 and September 27.
The ccVAD features cinema d'auteur, documentaries, cartoons and experimental films, all of them under a Creative Commons license and using the Internet as a key tool for production, distribution and financing the films.
Wikimedia Spain participated in a conference about free culture and hacktivism in the University of Valladolid with several entities involved in free culture activities in Valladolid.
Books, exhibitions, maritime connections and monuments
Four more days at the largest book fair in Northern Europe
As we've reported before, the literary world in Sweden has a massive book extravaganza in the city of Gothenburg during the month of September. This is the 10th year in a row that Wikimedians have attended, with the explicit focus of taking pictures for Wikipedia and talking to people about Wikipedia and its sister projects. We even had a couple of photographers accredited as journalists.
The result was, as usual, a flurry of photographs (around 200 at time of writing this, but expected to increase a bit more) and videos (more than 20 interviews). Also, hundreds of meetings with the book reading public, politicians, journalists, authors, comic book artists, and of course other Wikipedians. More lessons learned can be found at the previous report, but a very important point is that local and national Wikipedians can meet, discuss strategies, talk shop and spread information in an easy-going and fun way. This year, more than a dozen Wikipedians volunteered to come to the Book Fair, took turns handing out materials (and candy) and answering questions about everything under the sun. Wikipedians, it turns out, know so much more than just how Wikipedia works. Twice, the group also met socially, after the Fair closed for the day. The dinners were excellent times to further discuss Wikipedia related questions.
When it comes to GLAM, the Gothenburg Book Fair is one of the biggest campaigns Wikimedia Sverige launches each year. All the major libraries go there, as well as the National Archives and other GLAM related institutions. This means that we can meet them outside the office environment, which makes it easier to start a social connection with the staff at the institutions. Letting them know we are friendly and engaged, makes it easier for GLAMs to contact us in various small ways, which can then turn into collaboration. It pays off to have distinct t-shirts. Our t-shirts this year had a larger text than usual: "You can make Wikipedia better" on the front and "Curious about Wikipedia?" on the back. They were distinct enough that Sweden's largest evening paper took a picture of two Wikipedians and tweeted about it (with the caption "Of course we agree with these activists"). We will report further on the results as the cooperations unfold.
We hope to back for our eleventh year, next year.
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Hungarian-Swedish author Emőke Lipcsey at the Gothenburg Book Fair, with Wikipedian Per A.J. Andersson. -
A panorama from one of the Wikipedia dinners. -
Video presentation of Emilia Töyrä in Swedish. Presentations in five more languages available here.
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Alice Bah Kuhnke, minister of culture and democracy. -
View of the book fair.
More exhibitions on Wikipedia
The Swedish Exhibition Agency celebrates 50 years this fall, and their main focus for the celebrations will be to get more info on exhibitions up on Wikipedia. One day every week until x-mas an edit-a-thon will be hosted at a new museum around Sweden, starting October 14 at Gotlands museum in Visby. Staff from the Swedish Exhibition Agency has started to learn to edit and contribute with material from previous exhibitions, and they have also started to clear rights for old digitized posters to be able to upload material to Commons and use it to illustrate articles.
More maritime material
The previously reported cooperation between Wikimedia Sweden and the National Maritime Museum ended with a workshop September 11. The total number of uploaded images were 592 and on Wikidata more then 630 items were enhanced with over 3000 statements/sources. At the workshop 25 staff members from the three museums got an introduction to the Wikimedia projects and the use of the images and data they contributed with. They also got some training in adding images and sources to articles, categorizing and improving descriptions on Commons and adding properties and statements on Wikidata.
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Examining archaeological findings at Birka outside Stockholm. -
Unknown paddle steamer on the Congo River -
Model of the ship M/S Estonia -
Skull from the Vasa museum
WLM
The total number of images uploaded in this years Wiki Loves Monuments in Sweden were 2851 from 109 different uploaders. The jury has started looking at images and have some hard work ahead to decide on winners in all categories.
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Tug boat Tingvalla in Karlstad -
Schooner Albanus from Åland in Hjälmare kanal
Wake me up, when September ends...
Scotland
September was a particularly busy month for Sara Thomas's residency at Museums Galleries Scotland. 21 new users were trained to use Wikipedia, and 8 new users were trained to use WikiCommons. 12 new articles were created, 12 improved, and 211 photographs were uploaded in Commons:category:Glasgow Museums GLAMWiki image and Commons:category:Images from Braemar Castle.
Wiki events were held at the Glasgow School of Art Archives, Stirling Smith Museum, Kelvingrove Art Gallery & Museum, Kelvin Hall, Riverside Museum, Braemar Castle and the University of Edinburgh.
A Working with Wiki event was held at the beginning of the month for Scotland's Recognised Collections, from which a number of leads for further work in Scotland has emerged. Glasgow Museums held their first Backstage Pass event, allowing a group of local wikipedians access to some of the lesser-well-known areas of three museums in the city's west end. As the first event of its kind during the residency (and perhaps in Scotland), it provided a good template for future work.
The 9th Edinburgh Scot-wiki meetup was held at the end of the month, and it was great to see everyone!
Royal Society of Chemistry
Andy Mabbett's year-long residency at the Royal Society of Chemistry came to an end mid-month.
One of his final activities was to conclude the Wikiquote competition he ran there, to generate new chemistry-related quotes for that project. The winners were announced on the Chemistry World blog. They, and the other entries, will be added to Wikiquote in due course.
Andy's write-up of the residency, My year as Wikimedian in Residence, was published online, and in print in the Society's RSC News.
See the project diary for other news.
Andy remains Wikipedian in Residence at ORCID.
Edit-a-thon in Seattle
September Seattle Wikipedia APA edit-a-thon
On Thursday, September 17, 2015, as part of the Wikipedia APA coordinated by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, staff and volunteers from the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience and Seattle area members from the Cascadia Wikimedians User Group hosted an edit-a-thon at the Wing Luke Museum in the Seattle Chinatown-International District. We created at least six articles and edited at least one additional article at this edit-a-thon:
- Created articles
- Edited articles
Homo naledi; Wikigate; Open Access Week
Homo naledi
In contrast to most discoveries of fossil remains of early humans, the description of Homo naledi was published in an open-access journal (eLife), and it triggered a flurry of activity across Wikimedia sites that has led to articles in 38 Wikipedia languages so far, richly illustrated with media from the original publication (that included 3D models, for which there is not yet a home on Wikimedia platforms) and its geological companion article.
Wikigate
In response to a press release, in which representatives of the Wikipedia Library were quoted as being enthusiastic about partnering with Elsevier in providing some Wikipedians with access to otherwise paywalled content, a discussion arose on Twitter, blogs and several media outlets as to the net value of this partnership for our community.
Wikipedia Science Conference
Access to scientific publications and their underlying data, code and methodology was a major theme at the Wikipedia Science Conference held at the Wellcome Trust in London on September 2-3, which received attention from both scientists and major media. It was accompanied by two hackathons, one of which was dedicated to integrating data between Wikidata and scholarly databases like PubMed Central Europe.
Open Access Week ante portas
The last full week of October each year is Open Access Week, a period of open-access-related activities all around the globe. This includes a range of edit-a-thons on the topic, e.g. one at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm and a global virtual one.
Recent uploads: brain default mode networks, inner ear mechanics, octopus behaviour
The following represents a selection of the files that have been uploaded this month from open-access sources. Most of these came from PubMed Central through the Open Access Media Importer, whose uploads now total about 20,500. If you can think of wiki pages where these files (or other files from the same source articles) could be useful, please put them in there or let us know.
Wikidata this month
Tech developments
- As mentioned last month, a major step forward with the introduction of measurements for properties (for example for the height and width of paintings). Here's an example.
- RDF: Wikidata and its dumps are now described according to the DCAT-AP standard. You can add your language by translating the general and the Wikidata specific messages
- Wikidata now has an official SPARQL endpoint (announcement) so you can query the data. There's a community page, including a subpage for interesting or illustrative queries, and a board for suggestions and discussions.
- Want to work with the data in Wikidata? There is a new release of the Wikidata Toolkit for you.
- Wikibooks now has access to the data on Wikidata
- Meta, MediaWiki, Wikispecies and Wikibooks will get (more) access to Wikidata soon
- English Wikipedia and a few more got arbitrary access
- Magnus wrote a user script to let you edit Listeria-powered lists on Wikipedia directly
- New tool by Magnus to create a Commons creator page from a Wikidata item
- You can now find the Wikibase ontology at http://wikiba.se/ontology
GLAM news
- A new noticeboard has been created to help with classification issues: d:Wikidata:Classification noticeboard
- A collaboration between a group of Flemish museums and art collections and Wikidata
- Wikidata timeline is another tool that makes timelines using Wikidata's data (examples: American Sitcoms, Wars, Meryl Streep)
- Mix n Match is now available for mobile, has an improved automatic matching algorithm, speed improvements and new catalogs were added, including: Fellows of the Royal Society, the National Gallery of Victoria, World Heritage Sites, CulturaItalia, Open Library authors and AcademiaNet's excellent female authors
- The Wikidata Game has got a new mode: Books without author.
- Cool new tool by Magnus for dynamic list generation
- The Museum of Modern Art website now includes Wikidata IDs (example)
- Musicpedia has been released in beta and is using data from Wikidata
- New tool by Magnus to update or create Wikidata items based on DOI, PubMed ID or PubMed Central ID
New GLAM-related properties
- CITES Species+ ID
- National Gallery of Victoria artist identifier
- Artsy artist
- length
- height
- width
- aspect ratio
- mass
- Fellow of the Royal Society id
- Mémoire des hommes
- AcademiaNet
- BLDAM object ID
- Library of Congress JukeBox ID
- Bildindex der Kunst und Architektur ID
- short author name
- image legend
- BC Geographical Names ID
- Banque de noms de lieux du Québec id
- Kunstindex Danmark artwork
- power output (got a steam engine in your museum?)
For full Wikidata news, see the weekly status updates.
October's GLAM events
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| Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Saturday | Sunday |
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29 |
30 |
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
| 5 Women and Economics, (Seattle)
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6 |
7 |
8 |
9 | 10 |
11 MedinaPedia training at Médina de Tunis Dar Lasram
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| 12 Women and Astronomy, (Seattle)
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13 Wikipedia training session at Museo del Traje (Madrid)
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14 Wikipedia training session at National Archaeological Museum (Madrid)
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15 |
16 |
17 Glaming Madrid edit-a-thon
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18 |
| 19 | 20 Open Access Week; How to do Guerilla GLAM (webinar by Subhashish Panigrahi for GLAM institution staff across New Zealand)
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21 Open Access Week
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22 Open Access Week
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23 Open Access Week
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24 Open Access Week
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25 Open Access Week
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| 26 Women and Technology, (Seattle)
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27 |
28 Wikipedia training session at Museo del Traje (Madrid)
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29 Wikipedia training session at national library and national archives of the Netherlands, The Hague
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30 |
31 | 1 |