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Wikimedia Argentina

Agreement with the National Museum of Fine Arts

National Museum of Fine Arts

We sign a new agreement with the National Museum of Fine Arts and at the moment we upload 750 images and edit more than 342 articles have been improved and 46 articles have been edited.

New contest for secondary schools

Wikimedia Argentina and educ.ar launched the contest My Monuments!. The objective of the contest is that students and teachers of secondary schools participate in the collective construction of knowledge of their own towns with images and stories.

Meet Argentina through its nature reserves

The wikicontest "Meet Argentina through its nature reserves" aims to improve the existing articles and encourage the creation of new contents related to nature reserves of Argentina and photography part of the natural patrimony of Argentina and upload to Wikimedia Commons to illustrate the different articles.


A GLAMourous summer

By Céline Rabaud, Sophie Roset & Anne-Laure Prévost on behalf of our tremendous French GLAM community
Maison Jean Vilar where the edit-a-thon was hosted(by Marianne Casamance CC BY 3.0)

A festival of editing

For the second time, the Avignon Festival hosted an edit-a-thon during its 69th edition. In partnership with Wikimedia France, 2 week-ends were dedicated to working on pre-selected topics such as the locations of the Festival and its scenes for performance. On July 11-12th and 18-19th, 5 Wikipedians led the edit-a-thons at a local antennae of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Maison Jean Vilar. Articles such as Église des Célestins or La Fabrica were improved and others were created such as Festival d'Avignon 2015 and Lieux de représentation du Festival d’Avignon.


File:Logo Centre français du patrimoine culturel immatériel (CFPCI) - Maison des Cultures du Monde à Vitré.svg
Logo of the French center for ICH in Vitré


Getting intangible cultural heritage on Wikipedia

The French Ministry for culture and communication has a department dedicated to promoting intangible cultural heritage. Among other things, this department aims at creating an inventory of practices which up to now represents 300 items. Together with other organisations willing to contribute to the protection of intangible cultural heritage throughout France, Wikipedians from Rennes and Paris joined the local antennae of the ICH department in Vitré, Brittany, for a two days workshop on July 21-22. 9 staff members of the related organizations were trained by 5 Wikipedians on getting their head around editing Wikipedia first steps. A first workshop had been set in February thanks to the presence of an editor in Vitré.

Fancy new apps based on GLAMorous data

Coding da Vinci: the 10 weeks GLAM hackathon

Organized by Wikimedia Deutschland, OKF, Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek and DigiS

Berlin's State Secretary for Culture Tim Renner opening Coding da Vinci in April 2015
Coding da Vinci Coders working hard for their project
Happy winners and teams at the Coding da Vinci award ceremony in July 2015

Coding da Vinci is a slightly different GLAM hack-a-thon.

  1. It is run by 4 partners. Wikimedia Deutschland, Open Knowledge Foundation, Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek and DigiS. Already the partnership represents the linking of two worlds. On one side art & heritage institutions and on the other side developers and volunteers. At Coding da Vinci they both meet. They talk to and learn from each other.
  2. It includes a sprint. In 10 weeks out of more than 600,000 media files and 65 million metadata entries roundabout 100 coders, designers and art fans created 20 new projects.
  3. And third it has a fancy award ceremony.

It was a tough job to the jury to assign five prizes. Out of competition was Rolling Stone, a web app making stones talk. Most funny was considered the online game Nürnberger Lebkuchen based on old gingerbread recipes. The Most technical award was assigned to the combined hardware-software installation Kurbelkamera (crank camera) giving its user the chance to became a movie star in 100 year old movies and share the new film on the net. The app Midiola was awarded for Best design, giving sound to silent punch cards from mechanical pianos. And finally in the category most useful was the plant identifier app Floradex, using 175,000 entries of the herbarium of Berlin's Botanical garden, founded in 1819. It gained the prize from the audience Everybody's darling as well.

Wikimedia Deutschland funds Coding da Vinci because it encourages GLAM institutions to define datasets under a free license. Many of them do this for the first time. We are integrating all this data into Wikimedia Commons. Coding da Vinci shows the potentials of free licenses to creativity. GLAMs can see the offspring of their collection in a new surrounding. This is motivating GLAMs shaping access to their collections compatible to Wikimedia Projects.

KulTour - a format for handy cooperations

The new format the German GLAM community has launched under the label KulTour is quite popular. Community members visit for some hours a museum together. They take photos and might enjoy a guided tour. The format is not new in it self, but having a name makes it apparently easier for volunteers and institutions alike to go for it. In July the Couven Museum in Aachen was visited by the local community. Geolina guided the group. WMDE helped by convincing the the director to allow CC BY SA licensing for the photos and gave free entry to the volunteers. Check out the results in a while for your articles on historical SPA culture.

Wiki Loves Monuments at Toscana Foto Festival and two new GLAM projects

Toscana Foto Festival

Massa Marittima, Tuscany
The cathedral

The 2015 edition of Toscana Foto Festival, one of the most important photographic events in Europe, occured in July in the beautiful city of Massa Marittima, Tuscany. Professional and amateur photographers are gathering every year for the Festival in order to attend workshops, conferences and exhibitions involving Italian and international authors.

This year, Wikimedia Italia participated with a two-day workshop on free sharing of images and Wiki Loves Monuments contest, illustrating what open content policies are and the complex situation of cultural heritage legislation in Italy.

The fotographer Franco Fontana, Toscana Foto Festival artistic director, agreed on being part of WLM jury, a very important sign of interest coming from artistic Italian scene. FIAF (Federazione Italiana Associazioni Fotografiche), ICOM Italia , Touring Club Italiano, Archeomatica, and APT Emilia-Romagna are partners of Wikimedia Italia for the 2015 edition of the contest.

Touring Club Italiano Archive, a new GLAM collaboration

On July 13th, tourism organization Touring Club Italiano (TCI), WW1 – dentro la Grande Guerra association, and Wikimedia Italia signed an agreement to promote and make available on Commons more than 3000 images from TCI historical image archive. The choice of images, consistent with WW1 – dentro la Grande Guerra activities, focused on World War 1 events and period, ranging from war pictures of Italian frontlines, posters, and images describing social transformations during war years.

Collaboration with TCI is one of the first GLAM archive collaboration for Wikimedia Italia, and is expected to be an important example for other institutions too, widening the range of collaborations of this kind.

The first set of images was uploaded in the context of Donne si fa storia, a joint project on women role in Italian history carried out by historical and local organizations.

Updates on the collaboration are going to be available in the next months on project page (in Italian). You can find images on Commons here.

  • Defence line
    Defence line
  • Pocol war cemetery, Cortina d'Ampezzo
    Pocol war cemetery, Cortina d'Ampezzo
  • WW1 in Trentino Alto Adige
    WW1 in Trentino Alto Adige
  • Poster - Tacete! Anche il vostro silenzio affretterà la Vittoria
    Poster - Tacete! Anche il vostro silenzio affretterà la Vittoria
  • Poster – PAX
    Poster – PAX
  • Women at work in postal office
    Women at work in postal office
  • Postal office
    Postal office

Collaboration with Museion in Bolzano

Museum für moderne Kunst, Bozen

Another agreement with Modern and Contemporary Art Museum Museion in Bolzano, main city of north Italy bilingual region Südtirol, started a new GLAM collaboration on art history. Museion, founded in 1985 to document local visual art and artists, has recently opened its collections to Italian and international artists too.

The collaboration is intended to improve articles in Italian and English Wikipedia about artists and works of art from museum's collections and exhibitions. An ongoing list of affected articles is available on Museion project page.


Radio broadcasts; historic atlases; GLAMetrics

Donation of radio broadcasts by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision

Radio Oranje (Radio Orange) was the radio program broadcasted by the Dutch government in exile in London during WWII. Almost 200 episodes are now in the public domain and Sound and Vision has made them available through Soundcloud and Wikimedia Commons. Towards the end of the war, when the south of the Netherland was liberated, Radio Herrijzend Nederland (Radio the Netherland Revived) started broadcasting from Eindhoven. They broadcast for nearly two years. 74 transmissions can now be found on Wikimedia Commons.

Donation of 3 historic atlases by National Library of the Netherlands

Sample image from Atlas Van der Hagen

This month the national library of the Netherlands (KB) donated over 3100 images from 3 historic atlases (period 1690-1750) to Wikimedia Commons. Each atlas has its own category

  • Category:Atlas van der Hagen (446 topographical drawings and prints from across the globe in various formats, beautifully colored and decorated with gold)
  • Category:Atlas Schoemaker (2579 topographical drawings, descriptions and prints of Dutch towns, villages and hamlets in the early 18th century)
  • Category:Atlas Beudeker (133 images devoted to the northern and southern Netherlands)

The three atlases were digitized in the late ‘90s and put online on the Memory of the Netherlands website. This has been the source of the current donations.

Including these 3 atlases the KB has now released 7 historic atlases, see this overview.

GLAMetrics of Dutch cultural institutions on Wikimedia projects

In 2014, the Dutch Open Culture Data network has started an exploratory research project on the (im-)possibilities of measuring the impact of open cultural data. The project was called GLAMetrics – metrics for gallery, library, archive and museum collections. An overview of the first preliminary results, written by Maarten Brinkerink, can be found on the OpenGLAM blog: http://openglam.org/2015/06/23/dutch-cultural-heritage-reaches-millions-every-month/

A few highlights, citing from the original blog post:

Around 7% of the total combined total of Dutch digital heritage objects on Wikipedia are currently being used on one or several Wikimedia project pages. Based on the assembled data we can pronounce a few preliminary statements for institutions that are considering opening up (part of) their collections via Wikimedia Commons.

  • Reuse differs among collections. For some collections we see that up to 50% is being reused, while others experience no reuse at all. Especially in the initial phases a reuse total of 7% appears to be a realistic expectation for digital heritage.
  • For these 7% of reused materials, for each digital object one can expect a reach of more than 2.100 views per month. On a yearly basis, this translates into 25.000 consultations per object.
  • The exact impact is influenced by the extent to which the institution stimulates reuse by communicating with the community and organising activities.
  • Based on the above, an institution can, with a donation of 1.000 objects, expect a monthly reach of up to 150.000 consultations of pages holding their materials.


Wiki Loves Earth, municipalities and concerts

Wiki Loves Earth

In May Wikimedia Spain, together with Wikimedia Portugal, organized for the first time the photographic contest Wiki Loves Earth, focused, in Spanish case, on natural areas catalogued as Site of Community Importance. There were more than 500 participants (397 in Spain) and they uploaded almost 7000 free images (5018 in Spain) of 484 different sites.

  • The winning picture
    The winning picture
  • The second prize
    The second prize
  • The third prize
    The third prize

None municipality without photo

One of the pictures of Imelda May

In June Wikimedia Spain launched a Wikiproyect in Spanish Wikipedia to get at least one free picture of every Spanish municipality. There are 8122 municipalities in Spain and more than 2200 didn´t have a picture in Commons, mostly small municipalities.

Photographic coverage of concerts

In June and July, Wikimedia Spain continued supporting the obtaining of free pictures of music artists and bands. In June we got pictures from Valladolid Latino Festival and 4very1 Festival and in July we got them from Imelda May, Lucky Dados and Festival Internacional de Benicàssim (FIB).


Hedemora; Mapillary

Hedemora

QRpedia at a threshing barn

The QRpedia part in Wikiproject Hedemora has reached a milestone. The local history museum Hedemora gammelgård (Hedemora old-time farmstead) was celebrating 100 years, and got funding from Wikimedia Sverige for QRpedia signs. Calle Eklund, project leader of Wikiproject Hedemora, and Jan Ainali, CEO of Wikimedia Sverige, introduced a set of 18 QRpedia signs for the buildings. The codes is complementing the existing text signs (in Swedish) and provide further reading for Swedish speakers. The codes are also useful for non-Swedish speakers, as they in many cases are providing information about the building types and some of the surroundings (e.g. the ridge on which the museum is situated). All signs are not yet up, but will be put in place before the summer's end.

Hedemora Municipality has now also ordered a set of QRpedia signs as a complement to the tourist information Kulturpromenad Hedemora which, like the Hedemora gammelgård signs, are all in Swedish. The plan is not only to give tourists more information, but also engage people with a first or second language other than Swedish to contribute to the Wikipedia articles about the town and surroundings.

Mapillary

Mapillary interface with the Share with Wikimedia-button

Mapillary, the company who is creating a service for crowdsourcing street level photos, has built a feature to share images directly from their interface to Wikimedia Commons.

All images on Mapillary are CC BY-SA and can be transferred to Commons and used to illustrate articles. When using the Share with Wikimedia-feature to share an image to Commons it automatically adds attribution to the Mapillary user. Implementation of categories and descriptions could use some improvement, but as there are nearly 30M images in their database it's a great resource for finding images of places that need illustrations.

Already shared images can be found in the Images from Mapillary on Commons.


Royal Society of Chemistry; Thinktank; Oxford

Royal Society of Chemistry

Andy Mabbett's residency at the Royal Society of Chemistry is ongoing.

An editathon was held at the society's London HQ, Burlington House. For details of the articles created and improved, and pictures taken, see the event page.

A Wikiquote comeptition was held - results to be announced shortly.

List of artworks in the collection of the Royal Society of Chemistry has been considerably expanded.

See the project diary and the blog (aimed at non-Wikipedians) for other news.

Thinktank

Andy Mabbett's work as Wikimedian in Residence at Thinktank Museum in Birmingham was all-but-concluded (he'll be speaking in that capacity at an event, to be decided, later this year).

For more details, see the Thinktank project diary.

Oxford

The images uploaded from the Bodleian Libraries cover a wide variety of global themes from the 11th to the 19th centuries. Themes include Hindu gods, Pharaohs of Egypt, Buddhism, old maps of the world, Islamic astrology, Japanese and Indian folk tales, and the palace of Minos in Crete. A gallery page on Commons gives an overview of the different themes.

The Bodleian WIR, Martin Poulter, has given workshops for staff from the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (Vatican Library), Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford Museum of the History of Science, Oxford Museum of Natural History and Ashmolean Museum. He also spoke at a staff conference attended by librarians from across Oxford University. Seven editathons are planned so far, plus an "open knowledge ambassador" course for University of Oxford staff which will take place in early 2016.


GLAM in Philadelphia

GLAM Café Philadelphia

By Mary Mark Ockerbloom

right Samuel Paley Library

Philadelphia's GLAM Café continues to meet on a monthly basis. Activities include Wikipedia editing, planning for ThatCamp Philly, and a variety of informal talks and presentations. All are welcome, whether to socialize, strategize, or work on a project.

The July meeting was held in Temple University's new Digital Scholarship Center just days after it opened! Attendees saw some of the center's tech toys, which include Oculus Rift and a new 3D scanner. The next two meetings will also be held there, on Tuesday, August 11 and September 8, 5:00-8:00 PM, the Samuel Paley Library, Temple University, 1210 Polett Walk, Philadelphia, PA. In September, help Temple to celebrate all types of games by working on an article about your favorite game. (You can even bring it along to share with others!)

On Tuesday, October 13, the Cafe will return to the Chemical Heritage Foundation, 315 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, where it will meet in October, November and December. We hope you will help us to celebrate Ada Lovelace Day on October 13, 2015 by editing articles about women in history and science! Please contact Mary Mark Ockerbloom if you are interested in helping to organize this event.


Share what you know about Photo Events

Na Golem Krchin, image uploaded as part of Wiki Loves Earth Algeria 2014.
Cerova, Ulica, 04, image uploaded for Wiki Expedition Serbia.

As a new issue of Wiki Loves Monuments is about to begin, the Learning and Evaluation team at Wikimedia Foundation would like to capture program leaders’ best advice and strategies for planning Wiki Loves photo contests, and other photography events like Wiki Expeditions.

Help us build the new program toolkit!

We are gathering ideas, advice and resources for people to plan, run and evaluate Wiki Loves photo contests and other photo events for a program toolkit to be released in early September.

There are several ways you can help:

  • Contribute to learning patterns by sharing advice and lessons you have learned organizing and evaluating photo events.
  • Post links to mailing list threads, talk page discussions, best practices, tools, blog posts, videos or other resources you think are helpful for planning Wiki Loves contests or photo events.
  • Ask and answer questions such as: how to publicize events, motivate participants, increase images in use, adapt Wiki Loves to suit your local context.
  • Join discussions about how to set goals and evaluate photo contests and events
  • Find other program leaders with similar experiences.

We are experimenting with new ways to connect program leaders and share knowledge across the movement. Your feedback will be incorporated in the new program toolkit, to be released in early September.

Join the conversation! Go to the Photo Events Toolkit Talk Page and ask questions, find answers, share what you know and learn together.
Contribute now!

Happy Editing!


Wikimania: Citations and video

Wikimania

In contrast to last year, open access did not receive much attention this year, except for one panel session. There were several sessions and hackathon activities around citations, however, which are relevant to open access. These include the Citathon and a session on DOI usage. In addition to that, a series of video-related sessions highlighted a new infrastructure for handling videos — the Schnittserver — that opens new possibilities for reusing uploads by the Open Access Media Importer.

Recent uploads: virtual dreams, chimp rhythmicity and cowbells

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 20,200. 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.



Books & Bytes

By Ocaasi

We're happy to announce some new partnerships, branches, coordinators, Visiting Scholar institutions, and news from the American Library Association Annual meeting in San Francisco. The Wikipedia Library is expanding into new languages and projects, and looks forward to helping more Wikimedians gain access to the resources they need to do their work.

New accounts

Publisher donations continue apace, with a new theme: non-English resources. Out of the last 8 partners, over a third of them were French. Expect to see much more of that as global branches take off.

English resources
  • Taylor & Francis — academic publisher of journals. The pilot includes two subject collections: Arts & Humanities and Biological, Environment & Earth Sciences. (30 accounts each)
  • World Bank eLibrary — digital platform containing all books, working papers, and journal articles published by the World Bank from the 1990s to the present. (100 accounts)
  • AAAS — general interest science publisher of the journal Science among other sources (50 accounts)

French resources

  • Érudit (en Français) — Érudit is a French-Canadian scholarly aggregator, primarily in the humanities and social sciences, and contains sources in both English and French. Signups on both English and French Wikipedia (50 accounts).
  • Cairn.info (en Français) — Cairn.info is a Switzerland-based online web portal of scholarly materials in the humanities and social sciences. Most sources are in French, but some also in English. Signups on both English and French Wikipedia (100 accounts).
  • L'Harmattan — French-language publisher across a wide range of non-fiction and fiction, with a strong selection of francophone African materials (1000 accounts).

New global branches

We are very excited to announce four more global Wikipedia Library branches:

New volunteer coordinators

TWL is pleased to welcome two new coordinators:

  • NegMawon is a librarian and new account coordinator. She wants "to help other librarians realize that Wikipedia is an ally - not an enemy".
  • Rberchie is a Wikimedian from Ghana with an interest in GLAMs. He will be working on developing new partnerships.

We always need volunteers to help coordinate account distribution or help with other tasks. This role takes only 1–2 hours of work a week, and brings with it the satisfaction of connecting writers and researchers with the resources they need (and the occasional barnstar from happy recipients!). If you have benefited from a TWL account or are interested in helping out, sign up here.

New Wikipedia Library Bookshelf

Having curated useful outreach documents over the past four years, we thought it was finally time to upload them to commons and make a proper bookshelf. You can find it at Meta:The Wikipedia Library/Bookshelf; it includes:

  • 8 Reasons Librarians Should Get Involved with Wikipedia: Librarian Onesheet for outreach with librarians, including a description of best practices. For localizing, see [1]
    8 Reasons Librarians Should Get Involved with Wikipedia: Librarian Onesheet for outreach with librarians, including a description of best practices. For localizing, see [1]
  • Donation Partnership Case Studies: Case studies from partnerships with Newspapers.com and HighBeam for development of outreach with partners. For localizing, see [2]
    Donation Partnership Case Studies: Case studies from partnerships with Newspapers.com and HighBeam for development of outreach with partners. For localizing, see [2]
  • 8 Reasons to Start a Wikipedia Library Branch in Your Language: Onesheet for developing a Wikipedia Library branch for your Wikipedia language community. Localization of content can be made from copies of: [3]
    8 Reasons to Start a Wikipedia Library Branch in Your Language: Onesheet for developing a Wikipedia Library branch for your Wikipedia language community. Localization of content can be made from copies of: [3]
  • Cultural Professionals Interns Course and Training: Wikipedia Interns Onesheet for recruiting information. For localizing, see [4]
    Cultural Professionals Interns Course and Training: Wikipedia Interns Onesheet for recruiting information. For localizing, see [4]
  • Wikipedia Visiting Scholars Overview: Persuasive information about the program where editors gain full library access at a university and improve articles on its collections or areas of research. For localizing, see [5]
    Wikipedia Visiting Scholars Overview: Persuasive information about the program where editors gain full library access at a university and improve articles on its collections or areas of research. For localizing, see [5]

Spotlight: 5 New Visiting Scholars Now Open (and a new WVS partner!)

The Wikipedia Library is pleased to announce five new Wikipedia Visiting Scholars positions as part of an expansion of the program with U.S. and Canadian universities and research organizations. Visiting Scholars are remote, unpaid Wikipedia editors, affiliated with top research libraries, who receive full access to the partner's library e-resources to expand topics of interest to the institution that also need development on Wikipedia. This marks the second successful round of schools participating in the program.

These new positions are going to be coordinated and managed by the Wikipedia Library's movement partner, the Wiki Education Foundation. Wiki Ed will process applications, connect to schools, and drive the growth of the program in North America. The Wiki Education Foundation is in an excellent position to help expand the program because of their extensive existing connections to universities and desire to support Wikipedia's best content creators.

We invite Wikipedia editors who specialize in content creation and would like access to a full research library, to apply for these new unpaid, remote affiliate positions at the following research libraries:

McMaster
  • McMaster University is a public university in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. The library is looking for Wikipedians whose interests connect with the holdings of their Division of Research Collections and Archives. This division holds many valuable and unique resources, with emphases in areas such as peace and war (with a particular emphasis on the Holocaust and resistance), Bertrand Russell, Canadian literature and popular culture.
DePaul
  • DePaul University is a private university in Chicago, Illinois. The library is looking for Wikipedians who can focus on Chicago history, Catholic social justice studies, and Vincentian Studies (including French history during the Napoleonic Era).
National Museum of African Art
  • The Smithsonian Institution, established in 1846 "for the increase and diffusion of knowledge," is a group of museums and research centers administered by the Government of the United States. The Warren M. Robbins Library of the National Museum of African Art is looking for a Wikipedian in Residence that can focus on modern African art and artists.
PITT
  • The University of Pittsburgh (aka PITT) is a research university in western Pennsylvania. This Visiting Scholar will work with PITT's Archives Service Center, Special Collections and Center for American Music to focus on: Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania history including Urban renewal in Pittsburgh; Childhood in Industrial Era of Pittsburgh; Music composers of Pittsburgh; Pittsburgh theater or Significant literary figures from Pittsburgh; Colonial American history; historic American songs; or Philosophy of Science.
UW
  • The University of Washington (UW), commonly referred to as Washington or informally UDub, is a public research university in Seattle, Washington, United States. This Visiting Scholar Position will work with UW's Special Collections and focus on Labor and Working Classes in the Pacific Northwest, all aspects of Pacific Northwest History and Literature, and Pacific Northwest Architecture.

Full application information is available at the Wiki Ed signup page.

The Wiki Education Foundation also invites editors to apply for a Visiting Scholar placement pool: the pool will help grow the Visiting Scholar program by creating a list of willing and interested candidates to offer new partner libraries. With a set of pre-qualified Wikipedians in hand, the Wiki Education Foundation can work to find libraries that match your interests.

Access to a research library as part of one of these visiting scholar positions creates considerable opportunities for Wikipedia editors, giving them access to services and tools including multiple paywalled databases, integrated search and discovery tools, research collections and recommendations from specialist librarians, and expert consultation. In return editors get to begin a conversation with the library that creates opportunities for greater understanding and communication between universities and the Wikipedia community.

Alex Stinson, The Wikipedia Library

American Library Association Annual Conference

Presentation by The Wikipedia Library at ALA Annual Conference 2015

The Wikipedia Library team attended the American Library Association Annual Conference in the Moscone Center in San Francisco in late June. The weekend kicked off with a well-attended editathon held at the Wikimedia Foundation office. Several librarians got their start with editing, and new articles on topics related to librarianship were added.

This was the first year that TWL had a booth at the conference, and with approximately 25,000 people in attendance it provided extensive opportunities for networking with both librarians and publishers. We spoke to many great people in the library and information trade, gained valuable insights from librarians on how they advise their patrons about Wikipedia, and offered advice on how library staff can work with Wikipedia to both improve its content, and engage their users. One recurring theme that came up while talking to librarians was that there is a slow but steady acceptance and building respect for Wikipedia in the library world as the project matures. While a minority told us they discourage their patrons from using Wikipedia for research, far more told us, some in conspiratorial stage whispers, that they "love Wikipedia", and use it themselves in their work. They were happy to learn more about the internal processes and policies, and some even admitted to being editors themselves!

Publishers we talked to included Nature, Wiley, Al Manhal, Springer, Emerald Publishing, Jamalon, National Geographic, e-libro, Numerique Premium, LexisNexis, and Open Edition. We are following up to explore partnerships with several of these and plan on announcing some new donations shortly. We also met with organizations like PLoS, the U.S. Government Printing Office, the United Nation, Library of Congress, Humble Bundle, Internet Archive, Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, the Embassy of Spain, the Prison Education Department of California, Library Thing, International Librarians Network, the Association for Library and Information Science Education, eGranary Digital Library and the Library Information Technology Association.

Jake and Alex also gave a well-attended presentation about the potential for Wikipedia and TWL to extend the reach of libraries and offer opportunities to librarians and library students. See their slides here.

Wikimania

In addition to a presence at the Community Engagement Table, TWL participated in several presentations at Wikimania in Mexico:

Engaging Wikipedia's Natural Ally: How to unlock and amplify the access, knowledge, skills and resources of University and Research Libraries

Presentation and discussion hosted by Alex Stinson: The presentation will focus on experimental Wikipedia Library programs and tools growing out of these conversations that are focused on university and other research libraries. The discussion will seek to answer: How effective are our reference materials for our readers? Can readers really leverage higher quality scholarly references to help further their research?

Going Global: Creating and growing a Wikipedia Library Branch in your own language.

Presentation hosted by Patrick Earley and Jake Orlowitz: This presentation will show how the Wikipedia Library works on English Wikipedia and explore the knowledge and tools available for building new branches. It will showcase, among other findings, a discovery survey for existing resources, projects, and relationships related to research and the libraries on your wiki, and a community discussion framework to learn what your community wants and needs most from its branch.

Free as in Free: Strategies for Advancing Open Access on Wikipedia

Panel with Jake Orlowitz: Wikipedia is the greatest open knowledge work ever created, but it's often built upon references that are closed to all but a few. It's a core policy of Wikipedia that content must be verifiable—backed up by a reliable source—but that doesn't mean easily verifiable. Particularly for references citing scientific and scholarly work, Wikipedia users often hit publisher paywalls as they click through to read a source. Wikipedia is the 8th largest referrer of traffic to scholarly research (as measured by DOI clickthroughs), meaning every day Wikipedia points an innumerable number of users to articles they cannot access or verify. Achieving the mission of sharing knowledge means advancing towards broader open access to it. This presentation will cover a variety of projects and initiatives that push us closer to that goal and put the efforts within the Wikimedia community in the context of the larger Open Access movement.

Engaging with Community Engagement

Panel hosted by Luis Villa: Come meet some of the key members of this new team and ask them questions about the new group and where it is headed.

GLAM Learning Circle

Panel hosted by Jaime Anstee and María Cruz: A follow-up to learning circles facilitated at GLAM Wiki Conference in the Hague and next step in the learning journey to capture best practices and lessons learned in GLAM-wiki partnering.

If you are attending Wikimania, and want to talk to the TWL team about a library project, please look for us at the Foundation Community Engagement booth, or give us a ping! Alex, Patrick, and Jake are attending.

WMF updates

Quarterly review

TWL completed its fourth quarter for the 2014–2015 fiscal year and published our quarterly report:

Wikipedia Library QR Slides – Q4 2014–15

Annual retrospective

As the fiscal year closes, it's a good time to look back at what we accomplished:

Over this fiscal year we:

  • Grew from 14 partners to 40 partners
  • Added 4 non-English partners
  • Added major partners including Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, Project Muse, and Newspapers.com
  • Distributed 1593 accounts to users including 634 new TWL recipients
  • Increased links to our partners by 31,755 (avg +20%)
  • Grew from 4 to 8 global branches
  • Created and deployed global setup guide
  • Created and expanded global project menu
  • Presented at 11 conferences
  • Formed 5 new visiting scholars and transitioned to Wiki Ed in US/CAN
  • Started partnerships brunch, drafted WMF partnerships outlines, and scoped GLAM-Wiki role
  • Managed annual planning, budget, quarterly review, and core workflows

This is wholly due to our amazing team of four organizers and over 20 volunteer coordinators.


Wikidata this month

By Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing) & Spinster

GLAM news

  • On 29 July, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in in New York released metatdata about its entire collection of more than 125,000 works onto GitHub using Creative Commons Zero (CC0). The very next day, a "MoMA artwork id" property, P2014, was created on Wikidata, all the Wikidata items about MoMA objects had a value for that property, and the rest were in the Mix'n'Match tool ready for checking and import.
  • Which zoo has polar bears? Wikidata attempts to answer the question here. Work in progress.
  • Wikidata's WikiProject Visual arts now has an extensive overview of art movements: their typical metadata structure, remarks, and a long to do list. Help improve art movements on Wikidata!
  • A list of non-Wikimedia sites using Wikidata for authority control has been started
  • A list of GLAM-related Wikidata pages is at d:Wikidata:GLAM

For full Wikidata news, see the weekly status updates.


Wiki Loves Monuments

Logo Wiki Loves Monuments
Logo Wiki Loves Monuments

In 2010 started Wiki Loves Monuments in the Netherlands as photo contest, as successor to Wiki Loves Art in the Netherlands, with the goal to let people participate in making our cultural heritage visible for the public. This was a success and a year later we did it again in 18 European countries at the same time. In 2012 we went global with the contest held in 35 countries.

The 2011 edition was 168,208 entries and more than 5000 people participating, recognized as the largest photography competition in the world by the Guinness World Records. In 2012 this record was broken with the 2012 edition of Wiki Loves Monuments and with 353,768 entries it is now recognized as the largest photography competition in the world by Guinness World Records.

Wikipedia has as goal to collect the knowledge of mankind, but also due language difficulties it is hard to collect all the knowledge from countries with much people who do not know a lingua franca language. Smaller languages have it more difficult in projects like Wiki Loves Monuments, but also with other outreach projects. The worldwide Wikimedia movement should reach out to the smaller languages in our world, both to the users active there as to GLAM institutions. In this way we are better able to document the heritage of the whole world. Every country, language and culture has a history with monuments, buildings and objects that tell something about their origin, history and who they are. It tells is where we came from.

Winners 2014

The ten winning photos earlier that day at Wikimania 2015
Info about Wiki Loves Monuments at Wikimania 2015

At Wikimania 2015 in Mexico City the international awards ceremony of Wiki Loves Monuments 2014 was held on 17 July. There the winners of the contest received their prizes for their winning photos.

In the days before and after, the photos formed an exhibition for the attendees of the conference.

See for the winners of Wiki Loves Monuments 2014 at: Wiki Loves Monuments 2014 winners.

Wiki Loves Monuments 2015

The preparations of the 2015 edition of Wiki Loves Monuments have started, locally and international. With the contest we try to have cumulatively more photos available of the world's cultural heritage.

In September 2014 Wiki Loves Monuments was organised in Nepal for the second time to capture the cultural heritage of this country. In April 2015 an earthquake struck Nepal and many cultural heritage monuments were destroyed. Thanks to organisers and photographers of Wiki Loves Monuments, many of these monuments still survive in our collective memory on Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. See the list of monuments in Nepal on Wikipedia or the photos of cultural heritage monuments on Commons. Let's make more monuments visible for the world wide public and save the monuments visually for future generations.

See also


August's GLAM events

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