GLAM/Newsletter/February 2023/Single

I Edit Wikipedia Online Campaign 2023

We kicked off the activities for 2023 with the I Edit Wikipedia Campaign. It lasted one month, January - February, and WoALUG invited the audience from Kosovo and Albania to edit, to add pictures and references to articles on Wikipedia.

We were focused on inviting and working with inexperienced and new contributors. Wanting to promote this campaign, we went on different TV Channels, radio stations, and online newspapers.

To help the new contributors edit Wikipedia, we offered 2 online training sessions. In the first session, we talked about Wikipedia and the main pillars of it and showed them how to edit an article. In the second training, we answered questions people had about the articles they had worked on previously.

Here are the satisfactory statistics and some pictures from this activity:

• 18 articles created
• 83 articles edited

Social media

• We have a public Telegram channel (language used mostly Albanian) if you want to join and discuss Wikimedia projects.

If you want to see more about our activities, you canː

• Like our Facebook page, follow us on Twitter or Instagram.

Public Domain Day Belgium 2023

On the 15th of February 2023 the University Library of Ghent, the Royal Library of Belgium, Wikimedia Belgium and meemoo - Flemish Institute for Archives organised Belgium's annual public domain day event. Of the 49 participants, 30 were also present for the public domain rights workshop prior to the celebration. This workshop is the starting point for helping cultural heritage institutions to identify their public domain collections. They are then invited to participate in the upcoming public domain Wiki-upload workshop on the 15th of march at meemoo.

At the Public Domain Day celebration, Bart Magnus (meemoo) showed how the Public Domain Tool allows you to semi-automatically determine the rights status of collections using Wikidata. Joris Colla en Fien Messens (ODIS / KADOC-KU Leuven) presented how they added 31.000 records about persons from their database to Wikidata, increasing the power of Wikidata as a knowledge and authority hub and thereby also increasing the efficacy of the Public Domain Tool.

Public Domain Day Belgium is an annually recurring event a platform for institutions to show their (incremental) progress in opening up their public domain collections and putting into practice an openGLAM policy. Wouter De Witte from the Passchendaele Memorial Museum 1917 participated in the 2022 Wiki upload workshop and presented his plans to upload collections in 2023. Koen Van Daele from the Agency for Built Heritage showed how he made available 6.220 architectural drawings on their portal. Like every year, the Royal Library uploaded work of artists that entered the public domain in 2023. He uploaded songs by Lodewijk Mortelmans, numismatic collections by Adelin Salle, Pirart René, Emile Vloors and etchings and drawings by Constant Permeke, Paul Cauchie, Albert Daenens, Leon Bartholomé, Hippolyte Daeye and Paul Collet. Activities on Wikimedia platforms are now an integral part of KBR's digital strategy. They mutually enrich their own authorities (ISNI) and data on Wikidata, follow up the use of already uploaded content using the GLAMwiki Dashboard tool and reuse their own uploaded content, illustrated by the hiking guides by Maurice Cosyn which they turned into a georeferenced map using the webappbuilder-tool.

We shifted to an international perspective with Douglas McCarthy's (Europeana) presentation on his OpenGLAM survey. Of his 1.481 recorded openGLAMs, 34 are Belgian. Brigitte Véniza (Creative Commons) & Emine Yildirim (KU Leuven) presented the publication Towards better sharing of cultural heritage, intended to support policy makers. With the 2019 EU copyright reform in the rear window, Brigite Vézina also looked forward to how copyright might be further reformed, presenting Communia new 20 recommendations for copyright reform. A central idea to these is the switch to the concept of usage rights, a conceptual departure which no longer places users and creators in opposition. Since makers are often also users (ie. documentary film makers) their interests are not necessarily opposed.

We moved from the theory to how the heritage sector might encourage (creative) reuse. Rein Debrulle (Ghent Center for Digital Humanities) presented how his experiences in finding high res maps as source material for the Gent Gemapt project and argued for more open data and transparent user guidelines. Saar Vandeweghe & Thijs Temmerman showed how their project Collections of Ghent doesn't only make 45.000 public domain objects available, but also created a Cultural Datalab to encourage (creative) reuse. They experimented with a range of formats from setting up a cocreation fund to fund small projects, to organising a hackathon, to organising GIF-making workshops.

Wikimedia Belgium's president Geert Van Pamel ended the day with the awards for the Wiki Loves Heritage photography contest and a new call for projects for its Wikimedia in Residence program.

Slides are available here.

GLAM-Wiki initiatives in Brazil spark academic investigation

GLAM-Wiki partnerships with Wiki Movimento Brasil (WMB) bring more information about Brazil into Wikimedia platforms and also spark academic investigation. In the last two years, we saw an increasing number of publications about these initiative in Brazil. Let's take a look at some of them:

• Analysis of a small university collection with thousands of views by Mauricio Candido da Silva (2022 | pt-br)

This paper presents the processes related to the digitalization of the collections of the Museum of Veterinary Anatomy at FMVZ at Universidade de São Paulo, and their upload to Wikipedia platform. It also analyzes the influence of being one of ten most accessed GLAM-Wiki projects in the world on the Museum's communication plan: redefining audience in an expanded virtual environment.

• Leaking lands: Museum documentation without digitisation, by Ofri Cnaani (2022 | en)

This paper presents the Brazil’s National Museum Wiki-project. After a fire destroyed the National Museum, Wiki Movimento Brasil and Wikimedia editors organized a bottom-up strategy to recover digital artifacts of the destroyed collection, setting a global campaign.

• The Technical Infrastructure of Cultural Initiatives on Wikimedia: Three Case Studies From Brazil, by Éder Porto Alves, Solange Ferraz De Lima, Michael William Peel, João Alexandre Peschanski and Paul R. Burley (2022 | en)

This paper reflects on the sociotechnical infrastructure of three WMB's initiatives: the photo contest Wiki Loves Monuments, the National Museum Cross-Wiki Project and the Museu Paulista GLAM-Wiki partnership. It analyses their organization and workflow in the wiki collaborative environment; and it presents strategies for preservation and dissemination.

• Libraries and the online ecossystem for open knowledge: An experience with Wikimedia projects, by Lilian Viana and Marina Macambyra (2022 | pt-br)

This paper presents how libraries may contribute to the online ecossystem of open knlowledge by creating their own Wikipedia articles when working also with Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata. It concludes that the wiki-environment is a possibility for free and wider communication of the academic-scientific knowledge.

• Wikidata as a metadata concentrator: A partnership for the dissemination of Brazilian records, by Rosana S. G. Lanzelotte and Nivia Zumpano (2022 | pt-br)

Big part of the sheet music of Brazilian works are still in the manuscript format and located in hard access GLAM institution, with no online catalogs. And the editorial market of printed sheet music declines all over the world; so the online format is the solution. In this context, Wikidata is a great place for concentrating metadata. This paper presents the experience of Musica Brasilis project with this platform.

• University library and the process of developing new informational knowledge: An experience with Wikipedia, by Lilian Viana, Ivete Pieruccini and Stela do Nascimento Madruga (2021 | pt-br)

This paper presents a case study about the use of Wikipedia in the classroom by universitary library as an educational device. The result indicates that Wikipedia can contribute with the apropriation and the production of information by the students in the scientific-academic culture. What involves the proccesses of research, reading, writing, and creative-autonomous production.

• Varieties of collaborative digital dissemination processes: Description and analysis of GLAM-Wiki initiatives in Brazil, by João Alexandre Peschanski (2021 | pt-br)

This paper presents the contexts, processes and impacts of three GLAM-Wiki initiatives from WMB: Museu de Anatomia Veterinária, Museu Paulista, and National Archive. Between 2016 and 2019, almost 35,000 images were uploaded by these partners to the Wikimedia Commons media repository. In 2019, these contents reached almost 50 million views per month.

Wiki Moviment Brasil is organizing a book about Wikimedia in Brazil. The idea of this book comes from the intention of celebrating the work and gathering stories about the trajectory of the people who have been protagonists in the development of Wikimedia in Brazil. It is a work that intends to be a collection of chapters authored by professors, researchers, professionals, Wikimedians and other enthusiasts of the Wikimedia Movement. The organisation of this book is also part of the tenth anniversary celebrations of Wiki Movimento Brasil.

This call is for practical and theoretical papers written by:

• Educators and researchers using Wikimedia platforms for educational and scientific purposes;
• GLAM institutions that use Wikimedia platforms as a space for disseminating collections and metadata, among others;
• Institutions, social organizations and collectives that contribute to filling knowledge gaps on Wikimedia platforms;
• Wiki partners involved with Wikimedia projects and activities; and
• Wikimedians in general and others interested in the subject.

See more about it here.

As announced in our last report, Wiki Movimento Brasil (WMB) and the Secretary of State for Culture of Espírito Santo (SeCult-ES) began the project "Open Midiateca: Licensing and analysis of collections of Midiateca Capixaba", in collaboration with InternetLab.

During the first week of February, our team visited some of the GLAM institutions that are part of Midiateca Capixaba and interviewed their director as an initial activity for understanding their collections and answering questions about open licensing:

• Conselho Estadual de Cultura (CEC)
• Biblioteca Pública do Espírito Santo
• Fundo de Cultura do Estado do Espírito Santo
• Museu de Arte do Espírito Santo Dionísio Del Santo
• Palácio Anchieta
• Galeria Homero Massena
• Museu do Colono
• Arquivo Público do Estado do Espírito Santo
• Rádio Espírito Santo
• TV Educativa do Espírito Santo
• Orquestra Sinfônica do Estado do Espírito Santo

The information collected during the visit now guides the construction of an open licensing guide for the daily use of all the State GLAM institutions. The final goal is making all the state collections available at online platforms (especially Midiateca Capixaba and Wikimedia projects).

In 2017, a successful partnership between WMB and Museu Paulista began, with the participation of Solange Ferraz de Lima. At a time when this great national institution was closed for renovations, the online environment was an even more promising space to fulfill the mission of preserving and disseminating the precious treasures under its care.

At the end of 2022, after improving its facilities, Museu Paulista was reopened to the public in a major event. And in February 2023, the institution's dissemination strategy reaches another high point: the MP's Tainacan platform was launched and now hundreds of thousands of images and metadata are available online and will also be migrated to wikimedia platforms.

The migration to Wiki started with 30,000+ identifiers added to Wikidata!

National Institute of Atlantic Forest - 38,109 metadata about plants collected from Reflora added to Wikidata

Museu Paulista - 32,324 metadata about artworks collected from the MP's Tainacan platform added to Wikidata

Public Archives of the State of São Paulo - 149 new media files uploaded to Commons

Environment Lab - 1,441 photos of buildings from the listed historical center of Goiás-GO uploaded to Commons

Activities during first two months of 2023

During the first two months of 2023, we directed our (Open) GLAM focus towards collaboration projects with cultural institutions and universities. Our most recent (and ongoing) project is in collaboration with the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb, more specifically their department of Information and Communication Sciences.

The aim is to inform students of the importance of Wikimedia and instruct how to be a part of it - making quality entries and helping the cause. Now working on first steps (as we are preparing our initial session/lecture on the 10th of March), there is a larger opportunity of communicating and teaching students the importance of Wikimedia and giving them insight into several of Wiki projects and tools which they haven't yet had contact with (especially Wikidata, Commons, Wikispore). The major goal would be to spread the Wiki word around to build a pool of informed and skilled people who could potentially join us in future projects.

We had presented, demo-ed (with Yamen Bousrih, from WWH UG) and planned with the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, on outreach and education with their upcoming exhibitions like ‘Visible’ (Croatian: Vidljive) and Kožarić collection. We would be primarily focusing on less visible female contemporary artists. We are looking to help build good entries and advance the visibility of their works of art, publications and the artists themselves.

We are still working on ways to improve entries of the Human Rights Film Festival mentioned in previous reports, as well as help and translate Wikispore.org ripe with easier use and navigation for novice editors from Croatia and SH language communities.

We symbolically took part in #1Lib1RefCEE but hope to do more in late Spring.

If you're interested in our work, please get in touch at: GLAM@mi2.hr and https://w.wiki/uQT or follow via #GLAMwikiCROATIA #GLAMwikiHR on: FB +Insta. +T and Mastodon.Social ! <3

Launching of Wikisource Loves Manuscripts; Bincang GLAM continues; 2nd Digital Clippings from Youtube

The Seminar, Discussion and Release of Wikisource Loves Manuscripts (ID) is a collaboration between the Wikimedia Foundation and PPIM UIN Jakarta. The theme raised is the theme "Digitalization of Manuscripts to Strengthen Research Infrastructure and Community Engagement". Also invited to this event were academics, philologists, students, BRIN, National Library of Indonesia and all parties related to manuscripts in Indonesia.

Read more about the project initiatives in Meta: Wikisource Loves Manuscripts.

During February, we hosted 4 live sessions of "GLAM Talk", with the following topics: How to upload media to Wikimedia Commons (2 February), the WikiKaleidoskop 2.0 photography competition in Commons (9 February), Licenses in Wikimedia Commons: Creative Commons and Public Domain (16 February), and lastly Structured Data in Wikimedia Commons and ISA Tool (23 February)

Following the success of the previous event, we held a second Digital Clippings workshop and challenge. This time each participants are asked to clip important images from free videos provided by Indonesian news agency, Antara via their Youtube channel, AntaraTV. While it isn't necessary to upload those freely licensed videos to Commons, we can still take still images from them to increase the number of pictures related to Indonesia, particularly public figures that have yet to have images of them in Commons, and still pictures of recent events held in Indonesia, like F1 Powerboat World Championshiph or F1H2O in Lake Toba, North Sumatra.

During the 1 week challenge, 5 Wikimedians were able to upload more than 350 images from hundreds of videos. This way, those images are now freely available to illustrate articles about Indonesian people, events, and other articles related to Indonesia. We hope that through this event, more Wikimedians understand that Wikimedia Commons are able to use Youtube as one of its sources, as long as the videos are licensed with Creative Commons and from reputable sources.

New project and collaboration in February

On Wednesday, February 15, Wikimedia Italia and Soroptimist International of Italy, signed in Milan a protocol that brings the two associations together to spread free knowledge in Italy and document the work and achievements of women in various fields. Soroptimist International brings together women engaged in responsible roles in the world of work and promotes the advancement of the status of women, creating opportunities to enhance the potential of women. Through this collaboration, collaborative projects can be enriched with more information, data and stories about women. The collaboration stems from a project related to the Soroptimist Club of Florence: Soroptimist volunteers, in collaboration with Wikipedians and Wikipedians, have long been dedicated to writing entries of historical figures of women who have played an important role in Italian history and culture.

The Wikipedia project page here: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progetto:Soroptimist

A group of volunteers organized in cooperation with the city of Bellagio and Villa Melzi Museum, a day with edithaton, photowalk and disclosure session about Wikimedia project. The event had an overall positive overall: several entries about the area were created and improved in Wikipedia using sources made available by the library, items were added to Wikidata, assets not yet on Openstreetmap were traced and monuments were photographed to be uploaded (in September) for the Wiki Loves Monuments contest. For sure the event led to improved networking in the area, laying the groundwork for future collaborations.

Three new proposals supported by the first call for volunteer projects 2023 have been approved by Wikimedia Italia. The following are the projects, two of them related to GLAM:

• Accessibility of Roman law texts in Wikisource: the project involves a series of actions to revive in the Wikimedian community the issue of visual accessibility, identified as a fundamental watershed for consolidating the right to knowledge. It ideally fits in the wake of actions previously initiated by other volunteers, which will be surveyed, to give continuity and systematicity to the results achieved. The accessibility issues of Wikisource will be analyzed to facilitate the reading experience of people with absolute blindness or low vision who use speech synthesizers or report on Braille displays the text shown on the screen. Outreach initiatives targeting the library and publishing world on the one hand and the Wikimedian community on the other will be promoted.
• BikingImprover: a gamification-based mapathon tool for urban cycling: the objective of the project is to consolidate the BikingImprover web application (webapp), currently developed at the proof-of-concept level, to provide an effective and alternative tool, based on a gamification approach, for organizing mapathon events focused on the theme of urban cycling, suitable for collecting data such as dedicated cycling lanes and cycling-related points of interest (drinking water sources, etc.).
• Wikipedia for the enhancement of archaeological heritage: it is intended to implement or improve the Wikipedia pages of several controlled-access archaeological areas of the ABAP Superintendency of Verona, Rovigo and Vicenza, and performing, after a few months, the verification of access data to see if an increase in visitors can be found. To this end, guided tours of the areas and 2 edithatons will be organized, one in Verona and one in Vicenza, involving about 15 participants each time. A number of site visits will also be organized, to carry out photographic campaigns.

I Edit Wikipedia Online Campaign 2023

We kicked off the activities for 2023 with the I Edit Wikipedia Campaign. It lasted one month, January - February, and WoALUG invited the audience from Kosovo and Albania to edit, to add pictures and references to articles on Wikipedia.

We were focused on inviting and working with inexperienced and new contributors. Wanting to promote this campaign, we went on different TV Channels, radio stations, and online newspapers.

To help the new contributors edit Wikipedia, we offered 2 online training sessions. In the first session, we talked about Wikipedia and the main pillars of it and showed them how to edit an article. In the second training, we answered questions people had about the articles they had worked on previously.

Here are the satisfactory statistics and some pictures from this activity:

• 18 articles created
• 83 articles edited

Social media

• We have a public Telegram channel (language used mostly Albanian) if you want to join and discuss Wikimedia projects.

If you want to see more about our activities, you canː

• Like our Facebook page, follow us on Twitter or Instagram.

Wikidata and the Biodiversity Heritage Library, Wellington WikiCon 2023 and Auckland Museum local suburb project funding

A member of Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand, Ambrosia10 (Siobhan Leachman), is collaborating with the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) and assisting on a volunteer basis to improve BHL’s engagement with various Wiki projects. One of BHL’s recent initiatives made use of Wikidata and the Wikidata Query Service to assist in BHL’s round tripping of persistent identifiers relating to authors and creators in its catalogue. As part of this work, initiated as a result of requests by Ambrosia10 and Pigsonthewing, BHL added an author record sidebar exposing BHL’s author data and including hyperlinks to other authoritative knowledge bases. Many of these hyperlinks have been sourced from Wikidata and include any appropriate Wikidata Qids for creators in the BHL catalogue. JJ Dearborn, BHL’s data manager, and Ambrosia10 recently published a blog BHL is Round Tripping Persistent Identifiers with the Wikidata Query Service on this initiative. This blog provides more information on the motivation behind this initiative as well as how BHL undertook this work.

The first WikiCon held in Wellington will take place 11–12 March 2023, at Our Lady’s Home of Compassion in Island Bay. The conference is designed for experienced Wikipedians as well as new people curious about the community. Conference sessions cover what gadgets people can add to make editing easier by Ambrosia10, what makes a good New Zealand suburb article from Prosperosity, why there are so few photographs in New Zealand articles Giantflightlessbirds and keynotes about Pasifika coverage in Wikipedia by Kowhaiarewhana and The Thesis Wikidata Project by DrThneed. In addition there is a group session about GLAM organisations and Wikipedia including Te Papa (the National Museum of New Zealand led by Einebillion.

Conference information: Wellington WikiCon 2023 The conference is organised by Lisa Maule and Sofia Roberts.

Late last year staff at Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial applied for Wikipedia Alliance Funding to enhance local Auckland suburb pages for use as local history resources in the classroom for the new Aotearoa Histories Curriculum, building on our earlier successful Research Fund project Wikipedia and the Aotearoa New Zealand History Curriculum. The new curriculum, which starts this year, is the first time that there has been compulsory study of New Zealand history in primary, intermediate and secondary schools (years 1-10, ages 5-15). This is a huge opportunity for GLAM organisations to expand their audience of school-aged students and their teachers, as it has a strong local history aspect. Alongside understanding the big ideas of Aotearoa New Zealand history and developing critical thinking skills students are expected to understand and engage with their local contexts. However, in the research that we earlier undertook teachers told us that they are struggling to find suitable local history resources and we believe Wikipedia, particularly enhanced local suburb pages, can fill this gap, providing detailed historical narratives of local places that are well referenced, illustrated with rich imagery and point to further resources.

The funding we received will pay for our Wikipedian in Residence to continue his work enhancing local suburb pages and towards the end of this year sponsor a cohort of Wikipedia interns to join the Museum’s summer student programme, where we aim to introduce a diverse group of students to Wikipedia editing. We will also be running monthly meetups and edit-a-thons at the Museum for the local community and organising a series of workshops for GLAM professionals and other interested parties.

In January and February 2023 we've managed to get our West Auckland article improved to GA status, improved four suburb articles (Mount Roskill, Wesley, Waikowhai and Lynfield) and improved/created fifteen articles on natural features such as Whangateau Harbour and French Bay / Otitori Bay, major streets in Auckland (including Khyber Pass Road and Customs Street), and major local landmarks including Hoani Waititi Marae and St Andrew's First Presbyterian Church.

This stage of the project has focused on unlocking content on local history found in print books available through Auckland Libraries. Once these works have been processed, we'll start focusing on more of the major subregions of Auckland, beginning with South Auckland.

The European GLAM Coordinators online meet-up; GLAM-Wiki workshop at the Wawel Royal Castle State Art Collection; Wikimedians-in-residence online meet up

On 7th of February the second online meet-up of European GLAM Coordinators took place. The main topic of the meeting was measuring the results of GLAM-Wiki partnerships. During the meet-up Sandra Fauconnier presented a summary of recent content partnerships tools survey made by Wikimedia Sweden Content Partnerships Hub. Stuart Prior from Wikimedia UK and Sandra Becker from Wikimedia Switzerland demonstrated tools to measure GLAM-Wiki partnerships (GLAM COW toolkit and Cassandra tool). The focal point of the agenda was exchange of experience on measuring metrics in European chapters and sharing what we are the issues that are vital for our work as GLAM coordinators.

The online meeting was organised and failitated by Michelle van Lanschot, Giovanna Fontenelle and Kamila Neuman. All European GLAM coordinators are welcomed to join to organising team and bring new topics to the agenda of the next meeting, which is planned on 4th of April.

• 
  GLAM-Wiki workshop at the Wawel Royal Castle State Art Collection
• 
  Wawel Royal Castle
• 
  GLAM-Wiki workshop at the Wawel Royal Castle State Art Collection

Museum’s professionals at the Wawel Royal Castle State Art Collection had another opportunity to improve their wiki skills by learning basic editing of Wikipedia. The GLAM-Wiki workshop was led by Kamila Neuman – Open Culture Manager in Wikimedia Poland and Wikipedian EwkaC on the 20th of February in Krakow.

The programme of the workshop was redesigned with the intent of giving only a very short theoretical introduction to the general principles of Wikipedia, so we could focus on the practical issues of editing – i.e. how to edit existing articles, create new ones, and insert a reference, add pictures. This new formula made a workshop more dynamic and enabled the participants to have first editing experience during the event with a possibility to ask questions and solve problems ad hoc by experienced Wikipedians.

The goal was to equip the museum’s professionals with skills of editing Wikipedia so they could continue to develop the series of articles connected with the Crown Treasury. The Wawel Royal Castle State Art Collection, where the museum is located, for centuries had been the residence of the kings of Poland and the symbol of Polish statehood.

The aim of the monthly meetings of Polish Wikimedians-in-residence is to create a space for sharing knowledge and experience and discuss issues that are essential in cooperation with GLAM institutions. During the second meeting we kept continue our discussion on metrics and the ways we can measure the results of GLAM partnerships.

100 000 Bildminnen; Report from The Association of Swedish Museums; Wikipedia for all of Sweden; ArkDes edit-a-thons

The project 100 000 Bildminnen, which we wrote about last month, is going strong. Another big upload was done in February, which included two interesting topics: SAAB, which is a company in Linköping that manufactures military airplanes, and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences at Ultuna.

The Nordic Museum published a press release, highlighting both the importance of the project – it's a unique initiative, bringing thousands of previously unpublished photographs by well-known photographs to public attention – and the role the Wikimedia platforms have in disseminating cultural heritage. Wikimedia Sverige is working closely with the museum to help them select photos we hope will catch the attention of the community. We will be also organizing campaigns and edit-a-thons to encourage both old and new Wikimedians to organize the photos, improve their data and use them in Wikipedia articles.

The Association of Swedish Museums have released their annual report, with numbers of everything happening in 2022. The best number in the report is that nine out of ten physical visitors are back from before the pandemic hit, but more relevant in this context is that the 36 museums who counted views of uploaded material to Wikimedia Commons reported a total of 183 million views.

Making your voice heard and having access to free and credible information is an important part of our democracy. Most people know that many people read Wikipedia every day - but how do we get more people to write on Wikipedia? These are the questions that are the focus of the project Wikipedia for all of Sweden!

For four weeks, mostly in February, we have been in four counties in Sweden with many good meetings as a result. There have been meetings with people and organisations who would like to see a longer collaboration on Wikimedia's platforms. We go through Wikipedia in depth and explain how organisations can use Wikimedia's platforms and what free knowledge means. A goal of the project is to lay the groundwork for more of the readers of Wikipedia to also become a writing part of the community.

The project continues until 2024, so there will be many more meetings.

The edit-a-thons about women in architecture and design continued in February with an event on February 7, with two more events set for March 14 and April 18.

In Memoriam Jo Pugh / Cultural Diversity

We mourn the passing, on 11 February, of Jo Pugh, User:Mr_impossible, a great Wikimedian, a fantastic ally to those in the GLAM-Wiki movement, and an occasional contributor to this newsletter.

This month I have:

• Expanded the Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam article and submitted it for Featured Article review. I have initiated discussions about stylistic ways to write about Hajj (Is it capitalised? Does it take an article?) to establish a standard. English Wikipedia is currently very inconsistent on this.
• Worked with Signpost editors to publish a summary of the Waqas and Poulter visual arts paper which prompted a lot of discussion.
• Written a new draft about an Iranian painting.
• Put an article through DYK review (which was rejected).
• Done other follow-up from last month's editathons, mainly tidying up articles created by trainees. The University of Oxford's Khalili Research Centre posted a write-up of the Oxford editathon by a doctoral student.
• Written text for the Khalili Foundation site about the Wikimedia partnership.
• Reviewed international GLAM institutions to approach as part of the World Festival of Cultural Diversity.
• Met online with Arabic Wikipedia contributors, in which we discussed about partnerships with GLAMs and the use of Khalili Collections images.

There are no new image uploads or translations this month.

Black History Month and More

On February 1, Kelly Doyle Kim, Andrew Lih, and Mia Cariello from the Smithsonian Institution's American Women's History Initiative helped lead the third iteration of the Wiki Focus:Black Women in Food and Drink History edit-a-thon.

They worked with the American Food History Project at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History to co-host the event focused on documenting and expanding the stories of African American women's contributions to the United States culinary and beverage history.

Some articles that were created at this event included Alisa Bowens-Maercado, Tiffanie Barriere, Kim Bartmann and the draft for Vanessa Braxton. Additional outcomes of the event can be seen at the event's dashboard!

• 
  Photo of Tiffanie Barriere, master mixologist and the event's guest speaker

On February 9, Howard County Library System and Wikimedia DC, held a meetup, A Celebration of Black Authors and Artists. There was a dashboard

On February 15, Wikimedia NYC held a meetup, WikiWednesday Salon February 2023

Philadelphia wikimedians held a workshop, Philadelphia/WikiSalon

• 
  Rock and Anchor by Morris Blackburn at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

On February 22, Kelly Doyle Kim, Andrew Lih, and Mia Cariello from the Smithsonian Institution's American Women's History Initiative worked with the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center (APAC), Densho, and Wikimedia DC to host the virtual event WikiAPA Edit-a-thon: Leaving a Legacy with Densho. Densho is a nonprofit entity whose mission is to, “to preserve and share history of the WWII incarceration of Japanese Americans."

The event was in honor of the anniversary of the Day of Remembrance and to address the underrepresentation of Japanese and Japanese American women on Wikipedia and Wikidata, especially those who were incarcerated during World War II and were active in speaking out and writing about their experiences.

Several articles were created during this event, including Guyo Tajiri, Mary Mon Toy, and Chiye Mori. More outcomes from the workshop can be found in the event's dashboard.

• 
  Six members of Pacific Asian American Women Writers West

On February 24, Pratt Institute and Black Lunch Table, held a workshop, Black Lunch Table/Meetup Pratt 2023.

On February 27, San Diego Central Library and San Diego User Group, held a meetup, San Diego February 2023.

Wiki Loves Living Heritage launches 17 March 1pm UTC

Year 2023 celebrates Living Heritage globally with the 20th anniversary of the UNESCO 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. Wiki Loves Living Heritage invites heritage communities, Wikimedia volunteers, safeguarding organizations and Intangible Cultural Heritage focal points around the world to document and share Living Heritage together.

Wiki Loves Living Heritage will be reporting on its activities in a dedicated section of This Month in GLAM in 2023.

Launch event

Join the launch event on 17 March 13–14.30 UTC to learn & get excited about the project!

The project will be opened by Tim Curtis (UNESCO), Satdeep Gill (Wikimedia Foundation), Leena Marsio (Finnish Heritage Agency) and Jorijn Neyrinck (Workshop Intangible Heritage Flanders) representing the ENFP European Network of Focal Points in the UNESCO 2003 Convention and Sergey Bazarya (Council of Europe).

It will be presented through examples of Wikimedia activities bringing intangible cultural heritage online and briefly introducing the different ways of contributing to the project. There will be time for questions and answers.

The project website displays intangible cultural heritage elements from around the world. In addition to the elements inscribed by UNESCO, items inventoried nationally or selected manually are displayed in pages listing them with images and links. The listings can serve as launchpads for media uploads or collections of items for editathons or translation campaigns. All information can be translated to all Wikimedia languages. It is possible to create a language-independent page for each heritage element, that can be used to collect information and resources for every language Wikipedia.

The website's main page will function as a publication and a window to events taking place around the world. It is a space for writings and reports, galleries and videos. Materials will be archived and made translatable. The project focuses especially on ethical considerations around documenting living heritage. The Ethical sharing webinar in April will take a closer look at the topic.

We are inviting affiliates and volunteers to join the activities

• Start organizing: Team up with the local heritage communities and UNESCO intangible cultural heritage coordinators and create bigger or smaller activities together. Find your local contacts here.
• Share widely: Use the Wiki Loves Living Heritage site and all the social media channels of the project and the partners to share your activities online. The campaign highlights living heritage around the world throughout 2023.
• Contribute to Wikimedia projects: Make living heritage more visible on Wikimedia projects by adding data to Wikidata, photographing and adding media to Wikimedia Commons and editing Wikipedia articles. We are looking for people to help import the national inventories of living heritage to make the local heritage elements visible in the project.
• Inspire and be inspired: Help others contribute to Wikimedia projects by sharing your learnings and models with other affiliates, communities and heritage coordinators.

• Watch the videos on the YouTube channel or join the regular planning meetings!
• Subscribe to the Wiki Loves Living Heritage newsletter
• Wiki Loves Living Heritage
• Follow Wiki Loves Living Heritage on Twitter • Facebook • Instagram • YouTube
• wikiloveslivingheritagegmail.com

Gender, language, and living heritage events in collaboration with affiliates

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.

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.

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.

March's GLAM events