GLAM/Newsletter/September 2021/Contents/Content Partnerships Hub report

This Month in GLAM – Volume XI, Issue IX, September 2021

Content Partnerships Hub report

Working towards a thematic hub on content partnerships

Wikimedia Sverige wants to cooperate with the worldwide Community around content partnerships. We think that the best possible way of doing this is through the creation of a thematic hub, and WMSE is currently focusing on identifying the needs of the Movement in this area. There are a lot of needs that can be fulfilled, and a lot of knowledge that can be shared when it comes to content partnerships. Our hope is that the movement can use a hub to tie those knots together. Read more about our thoughts on the Meta Portal page!

The hub will focus on a helpdesk where you can ask for help about anything from batch uploads to the process of partnership agreements, needs assessment, capacity building, international partnerships, software development and strategic data uploads.

This work aims to strengthen the entire Movement, as we will learn from each other how to work with partners to make more knowledge available on our platforms. In this section of the newsletter, you will be able to follow our work and progress.

Needs assessment interviews

We have started to do interviews with Chapters and User groups to discuss needs and what possible support could look like in some of the work of the Content Partnerships Hub. It has been very rewarding and interesting conversations. We are grateful for the generous attitude we meet from colleagues around the world. There is a great interest in working more together internationally and helping each other where there are similar issues that need to be resolved. The discussions are gradually reported on Needs assessment interviews.

The discussions have been based on some questions around partnerships and we want as many as possible to give their views on how the area can be developed. If you have time for a conversation, feel free to send an email to tore.danielssonwikimedia.se

SDC for Wiki Loves Monuments

One of the areas the Hub team has been involved in are strategic uploads of data, including Structured Data on Commons.

Over September and early October, we worked with photos from the Wiki Loves Monuments competitions around the world. We added data on what the photos depict and which edition of the competition they participated in. You can read more about our workflow in Wikimedia Sverige's White Paper on SDC, which was published earlier this year after our pilot uploads.

This fall so far, we have updated over 188,000 photos with 498,000 new statements. See an example here.

The countries we've worked with include Australia, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Finland, Malta and Serbia. The workflow of adding the statements looks like this:

The contents of the Wiki Loves Monuments template are converted to participant in statements.
The contents of the Heritage site in Israel template are converted to depicts and location of creation statements after locating the monument on Wikidata.

Why are we doing this? Structured Data on Commons makes it possible to learn more about the photos uploaded by WLM participants. The data we've been adding is a complement to the data that have been added by other community members, such as Multichill, who has been converting the information about the authors of the photos and their geographical coordinates into structured data statements. With all these puzzle pieces together, you can use the Wikimedia Commons Query Service to find all the photos that participated in Wiki Loves Monuments in a certain country, and plot them on a map if they have coordinates.

Here's such a query for WLM in Malta, with the photos color-coded by the year of the competition.

Wiki Loves Monuments on Wikidata

In order to tag photos on Commons with the WLM edition they participated in, we first need to create Wikidata items for the editions!

This had not been done in a systematic way before, so it was something we had to include in our workflow. And here's the result – the Wikidata items of the WLM editions in several countries. The list will be updated automatically when new items are created.

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