GLAM/Newsletter/February 2023/Contents/WMF GLAM report
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Gender, language, and living heritage events in collaboration with affiliates
Launch of Wikisource Loves Manuscripts
On the occasion of International Mother Language Day in February, Wikimedia’s volunteer community in Indonesia launched Wikisource Loves Manuscripts to digitize and transcribe more than 20,000 pages of Indonesian manuscripts. The launch took place at the National Library of Indonesia and was hosted by Pusat Pengkajian Islam dan Masyarakat (PPIM), a prominent manuscript research institute and a lead partner for the project. The public event was attended by 80 participants which included librarians, academics, international institutions, project partners, and the Indonesian Wikimedia and Wikisource volunteer communities.
The Wikisource Loves Manuscripts project is supported by Wikimedia Foundation to improve digital access to the reliable and locally relevant sources that are crucial for Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects, as well as the wider internet.
We have partnered with READ-COOP to integrate Transkribus, an AI-driven handwriting recognition tool, to assist in the digitization process. This will enable volunteers to train Optical Character Recognition (OCR) models to recognize manuscripts accurately using their own transcriptions and corrections - making it easier to digitize manuscripts at scale. Rather than having to manually transcribe every manuscript, volunteers can just check and correct the machine transcriptions. While there are many other OCR services available, they don’t serve underrepresented languages like Balinese.
If you are part of Wikimedia communities that are interested in digitizing manuscripts and developing handwriting recognition models, we invite you to participate as learning partners in the project. You can sign up on the dedicated project page and our team will reach out to you soon to discuss your involvement. We look forward to collaborating with you on this exciting initiative.
Gender and culture related event to test image suggestions on Wikipedia
The Culture and Heritage team helped to organize an event with Wikimedia Portugal and Wiki Editoras Lx (a Portuguese group that works with gender and empowerment of female users) to test the Image Suggestion feature, developed by the Structured Data Across Wikimedia team, on Wikipedia in Portuguese. The topic of the event was Women in Culture and 19 editors participated. The presentations were by Sofia Matias (WMPT and WELx), Giovanna Fontenelle (Culture and Heritage, WMF), and Flávia Doria (SDAW and WELx).
The event itself happened on a Saturday, February 11, but hundreds of image suggestions related to women were sent on February 10 and 17. Participants used the notifications and added hundreds of images to articles.
WMPT and WELx were able to engage some newcomers as well, who created new articles. The results were tracked on an Outreach Dashboard event.
There were several posts publicizing the event in Telegram groups, mailing lists, and on social media. Art+Feminism helped with the Outreach, as the event was part of the A+F campaign.
Wiki Loves Living Heritage launch event
The Wiki Loves Living Heritage campaign is starting soon with a lot of exciting activities! On Friday, March 17, the launch event for the campaign is happening from 13:00 to 14:30 UTC. To register and to learn more about the event, check the event's page.
During the event, Satdeep Gill (Culture and Heritage, WMF) is sharing some opening words together with Tim Curtis (Secretary of the UNESCO 2003 Convention), Leena Marsio and Jorijn Neyrinck (European Network of Focal Points in the UNESCO 2003), and Sergei Bazarya (Council of Europe).
The goal of the campaign is to celebrate Living Heritage globally together with the 20th anniversary of the UNESCO 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage.
The Culture and Heritage team is supporting the main organizers, AvoinGLAM and the European Network of Focal Points for the UNESCO 2003 Convention (ENFP), to organize an ethical sharing seminar in April.
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