GLAM/Newsletter/April 2020/Single

GLAMce at Museu Paulista: making things machine-readable

Continuing with our reports on GLAM initiatives in 2020, this month we will report about our initiative with the Museu Paulista (commonly known as Museu do Ipiranga), a main museum of the University of São Paulo.

As you may know, the "Museu Paulista" is a Brazilian history museum located near where Emperor Pedro I proclaimed the Brazilian independence on the banks of Ipiranga brook in the Southeast region of the city of São Paulo, then the "Caminho do Mar," or road to the seashore. It contains a huge collection of furniture, documents and historically relevant artwork, especially relating to the Brazilian Empire era.

So far, by April 2020, more than 23,000 files had been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, thanks to the partnership established between the UG Wiki Movement Brazil and the museum. They are the result of a partnership established back in 2017, which has since been reported in several media in Brazil, such as this report published in the NEXO journal or even this one, published a couple of months ago, in the "Revista Museu" (Museum Magazine).

However, all these thousands of media files will not be the focus of this report, even though we have beautiful cases to quote. We will leave that for some future report. Our focus here will be the special attention we are paying on structuring all of this information and much more besides it on Wikidata.

Over the years, Wikimedia movement has recognized the importance of having the "sum of human knowledge" also stored in a structured way, considering that machine-readable data must be structured data. Machine-readable data, or computer-readable data, is data in a format that can be processed by a computer.

Talking about our GLAM initiative with the Museu Paulista, structuring all the information allowed us to create a gigantic number of lists and connected information, presenting this to users of Wikimedia projects in several possible ways. Below, we have just a few examples of them.

One of the highlights of our activities as a "user group", which appears in this GLAM initiative is the attention to the issue of "accessibility". But before talk about it, let's take a look at what English Wikipedia tells us about the topic. There, accessibility refers to "the design of products, devices, services, or environments so as to be usable by people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design and practice of accessible development ensures both "direct access" and "indirect access" meaning compatibility with a person's assistive technology".

Thus, in dialogue with past activities of our education program, several audible versions were produced and properly indexed to each of the items of the museum's objects on Wikidata, all this with the help of Laramara, one of the main Brazilian organizations that target its efforts to help blind people and the ones with low vision.

See the example in the list below:

• Audible version paintings

In addition to gigantic lists of paintings and objects in the museum's collection, which has more than 100,000 specific items, the structured data we produce in this GLAM initiative allows access to this information at different levels, such as collections. Given the museum's superlative numbers, even a list of collections can bring hundreds of different items. This is still a work in progress and the list is being increased even in recent times.

See the example in the list below:

• Museu Paulista Collections

As stated in our Diversity Plan, "Brazil is a diverse country in economic, social, racial and ethnic terms. Therefore, for the Wiki Movimento Brasil User Group, the definition of inclusion is quite broad and tries to embark on all the possibilities that this term requires. Such is the case with the inclusion of people from different economic levels, social classes, colors and ethnicity, as well as people with motor or intellectual disabilities, different ages, educational levels, gender identity or sexual orientation.

In this context, we must recognize that many of the works present in the Museu Paulista end up portraying the colonizers with prominence, especially the controversial figures of the Bandeirantes. By structuring the collection carefully and in detail, this allows us, for example, to produce a list of paintings that show marginalized groups in the country's history, such as indigenous people and black people. See the example in the list below:

• Paintings that depict indigenous and black people

The GLAM initiative with the Museu Paulista is certainly one of the biggest and main GLAM projects that we are conducting here in Brazil. Thus, we will certainly bring more reports about it in the future, talking about many other aspects of this huge GLAM. In the meantime, you can always keep up to date on this initiative through its official page on Wikipedia in Portuguese.

WikiGap 2020 in Czech Republic; International event; support for Wikimedia community; edit-a-thon run with the US embassy and the Swedish Embassy

On March 9th 2020, Wikimedia Czech Republic had partnered up with Swedish Embassy and US Embassy to Prague to run an event called WikiGap 2020. It was the third time when the initiative was organized by the local chapter in Czechia and it is connected to the International Women’s Day celebrations. What had started in 2017 as an edit-a-thon developed by Swedes together with three other Wiki communities, now continues to grow and spread around the globe increasingly gaining more supporters. The idea behind WikiGap is to eliminate a gender gap on Wikipedia and WMCZ finds this issue one of the crucial matters when it comes to Wikimedia’s projects development. Numbers speak for themselves: only 1 out of 10 editors on Wikipedia globally is a woman. Consequently, topics, which are of interest of the female part of the users represent the minority of subjects. Luckily thanks to (WikiGap 2020) in Czechia those differences are being reduced, even more, because this year the event was held in two locations, in Prague and Brno. Thanks to the engagement of both, team of organizers and lecturers, 46 articles were created and 55 were edited. All of that was possible because of 55 editors participating in the event. The Czech Republic became one of the 42 (WikiGap/2020/Events) events organized worldwide

Most of the content covered new topics, in the majority the information contained bios of significant Czech women, nevertheless few of them concerned foreign figures, such as (Agatha Christie), (Sara Stridsbergová) or (Jacqueline „Jackie“ Cochran). There were also some, which covered important matters, namely (ProFem – centrum pro oběti domácího a sexuálního násilí) proFem - a center for victims of domestic and sexual violence and (Hnutí za aktivní mateřství), which stands for an active maternity movement.

WikiGap was supported by the (Velvyslanectví Spojených států amerických v Praze) (the USA Embassy to Prague) and (Švédské velvyslanectví v Praze) (the Swedish Embassy to Prague) and (Česká ženská lobby) (Czech Women's Lobby) however, two more representatives participated; from Canadian and Irish consulates. Thanks to the event WMCR established new partnerships with various organizations and individuals, for instance, Faculty of Sociology at Masaryk University in Brno, Gender Nora or Nesehnutí (social and environmental NGO). What wasn’t planned in the beginning, but was definitely an enriching benefit, was a collaboration with “Kapky na kameni” (book about 50 outstanding women in Czech history) book authors, who decided to support WikiGap 2020 in Brno with their presence.

An unexpected outcome of the event was a nomination to Wikimedia Commons Featured Videos for the short promo film from WikiGap 2020 made by one of WMCR members, which we strongly recommend to watch (English subtitles included).

Photo documentation was covered in both cities, Prague and Brno and displays the best spirit of the event!

Association des Archivistes Francais; Palladia, a museum collection portal based on Wikimedia resources

We postponed the training courses to members of AAF about Wikimedia project due to the Covid19 crisis. However, AAF and WMFr wanted to adapt to the situation and propose a serie of online training or talks on Twitch inspired on good ideas from community

Shonagon, creator of the search engine for visual artworks Crotos has developed on the same model a specific interface dedicated to the archaeological collections of the musée Saint-Raymond in Toulouse. By reusing data and images produced by the museum team and the community of wikimedians, Palladia provides a multilingual access to nearly 1000 items and, thanks to the links on Wikidata, to all the online resources relating to the collections(3D models, digital catalog, other databases). Among the many features of the interface: interactive map for discovery places, exploration through depicted elements, slideshow on results, list of exhibitions...

Wikisource Competition 2020

Wikimedia Indonesia announced Wikisource Competition 2020 for any Wikimedia community member in Indonesia. This is the second Wikisource contest held by Wikimedia Indonesia; the first was in 2012, and the winners were invited to watch Truth in Numbers? Everything, according to Wikipedia film in Jakarta. The current contest takes similar context with the previous, in this case, the Top 2 winners will be awarded to go to WikiNusantara 2020 conference in Padang, West Sumatra.

As of May 6, 2020, 16 participants have proofread seven books in Indonesian and English language, which took place on Indonesian and English Wikisource. One of the books has already transcluded into one page: Letters of a Javanese princess, a book contains the collection of Kartini's letters.

Some other books that are currently proofreading are:

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  Seri Pahlawan, Abdul Moeis (1980)
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  Garuda Perdamaian (1957)
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  Sorga Ka Toedjoe novelisation (1940)
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  Kami Perkenalkan (1954)
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  Himpunan Peraturan Tata Tertib Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat Republik Indonesia (1984)
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  An introduction to Indonesian linguistics: Being four essays (1916)

The contest will end on May 15, 2020. The winners will be announced on May 18, 2020.

Hunt Museum image donation; Livesteaming and video demonstrations

In the past month Wikimedia Community Ireland and the Hunt Museum have been working on a batch of images uploaded to Wikimedia Commons featuring the archaeological collections from the Museum. These images are part of the Europaena Archaeology project, and have all been issued under a CC-0/Public Domain licence. Rebecca has led virtual workshops with the staff to improve the image information.

Rebecca continued her series of livestreams on editing Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata on Twitch, Youtube and Facebook.

Archivio Ricordi, webinars and videos

Ricordi archive and Wikimedia Italia started a new cooperation with the help of Marco Chemello as wikipedian in residence for three months. The project revolves around the sharing on Wikidata of databases about musicians and places and the upload on Wikimedia Commons and Wikisource of 100.000+ pages of musical newspapers that Ricordi published from 1842 to 1965.

In order to work with the COVID-19 health situation Wikimedia Italia boosted its activity online, creating several instructional videos on the project basis called "wikibussole" (wiki compass) and on some more advanced operations and webinars on weekly basis (here the registrations). Some of these are made specifically for GLAMs.

One Village, One Article for each village in Albania and Kosovo

Throughout March, Wikimedians of Albanian Language User Group got busy organizing our next themed online campaign – One Village, One Article, which lasted during the whole month.

The name of the campaign came from the idea to invite experienced and new Wikipedians to help each village in Albania and Kosovo have its article on sq Wikipedia. However, we found that the majority of these villages already had an article but there was plenty of room to improve them. Therefore, our expectations for the outcomes were to have as many articles on these villages improved and expanded by adding infoboxes, maps, files from Commons, missing information, statistics, etc.

Besides promoting it on our social media and channels used between our community, we also reached out to several online pages used for communication between villagers, asking them to help us spread the campaign to their channels and pages – some were more cooperative than others and helped us recruiting interested participants.

Photo collections Afrika-Studiecentrum Leiden; meetup and media donations for Wiki goes Caribbean; first online WikiFriday

In recent months, various collections kindly donated by Dutch Africanists to the Afrika-Studiecentrum Leiden have been uploaded onto Wikimedia Commons in the category Collections of the African Studies Centre (Leiden).

In 1961-1962 a group of Dutch students made an extensive road trip from Egypt and Sudan to the south to Uganda, and by way of Tchad, Cameroon and Nigeria finishing in Senegal. A first sample of the photographs by Leiden University medical professor L.A. van Es, then one of these students:

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  Ramesses II. Small Temple of Hathor and Nefertari, now inundated Abu Simbel, 1961
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  An Egyptian sailing boatman on the Nile, 1961
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  Tomb of the Mahdi (Mohamed Ahmed), mosque, Omdurman, Sudan, 1961
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  Two Sudanese students conversing with a Dutch student, Omdurman, Sudan, 1961
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  Guards, Presidential Palace, Khartoum, Sudan, 1961
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  A cyclist, Khartoum, Sudan, 1961
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  Dutch students, Khartoum university, Sudan, 1961
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  Girls at a primary school, Khartoum, Sudan, 1961
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  A boy is swaying to the rhythm of music in a primary school, Khartoum, Sudan, 1961
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  Palm trees at an irrigation canal of the Gezira Scheme, Sudan, 1961
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  Nalubaale dam on the White Nile (Owen Falls) near Kampala, Uganda, 1961
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  Young men at a bicycle shop, Kampala, Uganda, 1961
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  Outpatient clinic of the Mulago hospital, Kampala, Uganda, 1961

April 2020 was an eventful month for the Wiki goes Caribbean project.

On April 25, the project's first online project meetup took place. By moving this meeting online in response to the Corona crisis, it has now also become possible for participants based in the Dutch Caribbean to take part. No less than 19 people gathered on April 25. The meeting included a short presentation by Peter Scholing from Bibliotheca Nacional Aruba, an introduction to describing images with the ISA Tool, a Wikipedia introduction, and some discussions about technical and social support for the small, but steadily-growing, Papiamentu/o-language Wikipedia. A report in Dutch is available online.

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  Participants of the first online Wiki goes Caribbean meetup
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  Describing images about the Dutch Caribbean with the ISA Tool

The Biblioteca Nacional Aruba contributed approximately 100 images to Wikimedia Commons: a set of early 20th-Century photographs of Curaçao by the photo studio Soublette et fils. All files can be viewed in the Wikimedia Commons category Biblioteca Nacional Aruba upload 2020-04.

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  A street in Willemstad, Curaçao
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  Probably lacework from Curaçao
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  Klipstraat in Otrobanda, Willemstad, Curaçao
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  A straw hat maker with her husband and child
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  A workspace

The Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen contributed more than 600 images to Wikimedia Commons; mainly anonymous old photographs of the Dutch Caribbean region and Suriname. All files can be viewed in the Wikimedia Commons category Fotografisch materiaal voor Wiki goes Caribbean uit het Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen.

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  Children in Suriname
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  Children in front of a house in Saba. Cassave cakes drying on the roof
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  Aerial photo of Great Bay, Philipsburg, Sint Maarten
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  Water tower, Sint Nicolaasbaai, Aruba
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  Market at Waaigat, Willemstad, Curaçao
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  Passengers in Dr. Albert Plesman Airport (Hato)

Atria, Institute on gender equality and women's history, IHLIA, the heritage organisation that collects and makes accessible information in the field of the LGBT community and Wikimedia Nederland have joined forces to organise online WikiFridays.

Prior to the corona crisis Atria and IHLIA each held their own WikiVrijdag in their library in Amsterdam. In order to lighten the workload of the volunteers who guide new editors during these WikiFridays (online meetings cost more energy, we have noticed), the meetings were merged.

The first meeting was on April 24th. A total of 17 participants were present. We started with an introduction about Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. After the introduction there was room to ask questions about editing Wikimedia projects. Although the internet connection was not always perfect, participants were enthusiastic about this initiative.

The next Wiki Friday is planned for May 14th.

Skrivstuga (edit-a-thon) online – Wikipedia in libraries

Due to the coronavirus disease, we have tested running online edit-a-thons instead of physical edit-a-thons. The first online writing workshop was conducted on April 29 and there were about ten people joining in the Zoom room. What we quickly noticed is that it is difficult to write while being expected to be social in the video meeting. So after an overall longer conversation, we divided the day's hours into reunions every full hour. In this way, the discussions were more about what you did and what problems you face.

We had literature as a theme and used an earlier project page, Project literature, which we updated for the writing day with new wishes for articles. Author biographies are relatively easy to begin with and often follow a structure where the bibliography is at the centre. For instance, we started with the poet Alva Möllerström in Wikidata and the biography for the author Ulf Broberg in Wikipedia. Both articles were completed later in the evening in the Swedish Wikipedia.

More women on Wikipedia

Wikimedia Schweiz and «Frauen für Wikipedia» held a workshop. it was covered in blick

Japanese silk and Spanish iron

The Khalili Foundation partnership has shared 22 more images, including three scans of Japanese textile artwork taken with the Google Art Camera. The images look like paintings at first glance, but the high resolution (more than 100 megapixels) photography shows that they are built up by individual stitches of silk.

Images and references from the Khalili Foundation have been used to create new articles on the Spanish metalworker Plácido Zuloaga, on the Japanese porcelain artist Yabu Meizan (in draft), and on a garniture that was exhibited in Chicago in 1893 (in draft). The same information has been used to improve a range of related articles. I have also started a List of collections of Japanese art, which doesn't pretend to be comprehensive, but is a start.

The Khalili Collections are sharing content with Google Arts and Culture at the same time as with Wikimedia, and this project is an illustration of the different interfaces and functionality offered by Google and Wikimedia. Compare a Google online exhibit with a Commons gallery. Google has a much cleaner and pleasant interface, but Wikimedia provides more links back to the institution's catalogue, has more data fields about each item, and allows users to contribute, for instance by annotating large images.

Earth Day

Wikimedians of the Caribbean held a workshop, Wiki Cari Earth Week

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• deleted page Dr. Carissa F. Etienne.jpg
  deleted page Dr. Carissa F. Etienne.jpg
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Boston University Libraries and Phoebe Ayers, held a workshop. BU Earth Day 50

• File:Sylvia Earle 2013 (cropped).jpg
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Wikimedia DC held a workshop on Zoom, Learn to Edit Wikipedia - Social Distancing Edition - April 17.

Sure We Can, and Wikimedia NYC held a workshop, at SureWeCan

Digital Public Library of America held a webinar, "Intro to Wikimedia: Increased Discoverability and Use". video archived here

PennMuseum held a workshop on zoom, Penn Museum Virtual Wikithon for Women's History Month. There was a dashboard. There was coverage in The Daily Pennsylvanian. [1]

Seven Million People Can't Be Wrong

• Denny Vrandecic, founder of Wikidata, published a proposal that suggests some extensions to Wikidata, and also a wholly new project, Wikilambda.
• schema.org announced an extension to allow for special announcements with regards to COVID-19. The way to identify the topic as per the example? By using the Wikidata Q-Identifier, Q81068910: Structured data for special announcements
• ZFOURGE UDS 19909 (Q90000000) - our ninety-millionth item, about a galaxy - was created on 10 April.
• For the first time, a Wikipedia list article populated entirely from Wikidata, and built using Listeria, has been granted "featured" status, on the Portuguese Wikipedia (video on YouTube).
• Comment on QID Emoji proposal until April 20th
• Wikidata now includes more than seven million people (it has doubled since July 2017), also: project chat discussion
• The Nobel Prize Committee has redesigned its website so that Wikipedia can link to it easier using the Wikidata Property Nobel Laureate API ID (P8024) (more information)
• Mohammed Sadat joined the Wikidata team as community communications manager for Wikidata and Wikibase - Welome, Mohammed!

• ScienceGuide's The COVID-19 pandemic stresses the societal importance of open science mentions WikiProject COVID-19
• SPARC*Europe mentions the WikiProject COVID-19 in Overnight, COVID-19 heightens the need for Open Science post
• Wikidata and Wikibase office hour, April 7: Notes of the discussion
• A protocol for adding knowledge to Wikidata, a case report (new preprint about virus info (strains, genes, proteins), ShEx, and SPARQL)
• Multilingual enrichment of disease biomedical ontologies ("We look at the coverage of two biomedical ontologies focusing on diseases with respect to Wikidata for 9 European languages")
• Wikidata and the bibliography of life in the time of coronavirus
• Wikidata topic at the virtual biohackathon. Mid-term updates final presentations (Wikidata report starts at 1:17:40)
• Open data and COVID-19: Wikipedia as an informational resource during the pandemic (Wikidata being also mentioned as a source for the research)
• Wiki Workshop 2020 Report
• Videos:
  • Live SPARQL queries in English by WikidataFacts
  • Live SPARQL queries in French by Vigneron
  • Editing Wikidata and creating a property proposal: YouTube, Facebook, Periscope
  • Commons image uploading and Wikidata: YouTube
  • A call to action directed at the audience of the Weekly Debrief to edit Wikidata YouTube
  • The Map of Libraries on Wikidata (in Spanish) YouTube
  • Editing food items and querying glaciers: YouTube and Facebook
  • Propose new identifiers on Wikidata (in Italian) YouTube
  • Interactions between VIAF and Wikidata (in Italian) YouTube

• ShExStatements to generate Shape Expressions from CSV (more details)
• Wikidata Complete uses machine learning algorithms to read Wikipedia, identify facts and import them into Wikidata after manual check (blog post)
• COVID19 Dashboard is a Wikidata-powered one-stop information/visualization service for COVID19-related topics such as COVID19's outbreak map, deaths, symptoms, taxonomy, and publications.
• Anagram generator based on Wikidata names
• You can now use Listeria to generate basic charts (pie, area, line, bar) with d:Template:Graph:Chart, see d:Template:Wikidata list#Charts

• Feedback is invited on
  • ideas of improvements for the Query Service interface
  • automated finding of references, first batch
• First step of blank node deprecation in WDQS & Wikibase RDF model: introducing the new function wikibase:isSomeValue()
• LexData – a python library to edit Lexicographical data – has been released in a major new version.
• The ImageHeader gadget, which had been broken since February, was fixed.
• Wikidata Lexeme Forms now supports Hebrew nouns

For all other Wikidata news, new properties, etc, see: 4

• d:Wikidata:Status updates/2020 04 06
• d:Wikidata:Status updates/2020 04 13
• d:Wikidata:Status updates/2020 04 20
• d:Wikidata:Status updates/2020 04 27

May's GLAM events