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Notes from meeting with Wikimedia Belgium.
Date: 2021-09-27

Participants of this meeting:
Geert van Pamel, WMBE
Tore Danielsson, WMSE
Axel Pettersson, WMSE


Do you work with content partnerships today?
Collaboration with multiple museums and institutions: Belgian National library, municipal and city libraries, University of Gent, Antwerp, Brussels, Leuven, and colleges, fashion museums, industrie museums, local heritage organisations, and more.

Every event, campaign, and project has a Project page with subpages on the Wikipedia namespace (multiple languages are supported and interlinked via Wikidata sitelinks), uploading lists of existing or potential Wikipedia pages via OpenRefine to Wikidata, adding statements, linking the items to the wikidata project (using the maintained by WikiProject property), link to the campaign tool via a blue button on the project Wikipedia page so that participants can subscribe and easily be coached; having automated ListeriaBot subpage(s) based on a specific Wikidata Query so that participants can choose between red (write a new article) and blue links (amend existing pages).

Wikimedia Belgium is using mainly the nl/fr/en languages, and sometimes also de/es/it. We are populating all western Wikidata labels using a generic Pywikibot script.

Documentation, tools, and presentations:

Wikidata-oriented project management - Overview of how WMBE conducts collaborative content projects: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:Geertivp/training/Wikidata/Wiki_projects

I will give a presentation about this on WikiConNL on the 13th of November 2021 https://nl.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiconNL_2021

Example ListeriaBot page https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikiproject/Gendergap/Ontwerp/Belgi%C3%AB/Wiki_Women_Design/Matrimony_Days/ListeriaBot/Query

Automatic Pywikibot label and sitelink management https://github.com/geertivp/Pywikibot/blob/main/copy_label.py (input is a list of Q-numbers)

Example: https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q108674281&type=revision&diff=1504286835&oldid=1502661037


Running several edit-a-thons about various topics, possibly within the canvas of a yearlong campaign. Often about Women in Red, or possibly linked to a Photo campaign, e.g. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Campaign:wmbe-wwd https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Campaign:wmbe-wlpz

Run online-events and physical events, or mixed. Possibly all participants are at the same museum but in different rooms (Corona constraint: via a live video conferencing session, but all participants are distributed over the museum and have physical access to the collection archive). Mix of staff and external volunteers participating. Participants are coached by the museum staff and WMBE volunteers.

Students that effectively write a page receive a free booklet “Schrijven voor Wikipedia” https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q57985371

Working with approx 5 partners today, ten more potential partners in the future.

Edit-a-thon training for university students using Google meet (90 participants in December 2020). Individual coaching via personal desktop sharing.

Example of a yearlong campaign in collaboration with the Flemish government: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikiproject/Gendergap/Ontwerp/België/Wiki_Women_Design

What is your normal work process in collaborations with partners?
Collaborations exist for adding material and running edit-a-thons. Starting with a meeting between the organisation and WMBE to discover and evaluate what collections and subjects (themes) could be shared, what data could be added to Wikidata, what media files could be released to Wikimedia Commons, and what edit-a-thons could be conducted (one-time sessions, repeatedly as an integrated campaign or e.g. like consecutive Wiki Café sessions).

Subjects during those meetings:

Making the museum aware of the advantages to use LoD Indicating that volunteers can help museums to describe their collections Prove that volunteers are an added value Freedom of Panorama in Belgium allows volunteers to take pictures inside the museum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_panorama Reviewing the copyright statement of the collection and choosing a compatible Creative Commons license to use during the upload to Wikidata (CC0), Wikimedia Commons (CC BY or CC BY-SA) and Wikipedia (CC BY-SA). Creating a collection data model (Work in progress with the Plantentuin museum Meise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meise_Botanic_Garden)

What are your desired content partnerships in the future?
Cultural heritage, museum collections, regional topics, photo taking campaigns.

Example current activities: Wiki Loves Heritage https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Heritage, https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikiproject/Erfgoed/Vlaanderen/Pajottenland-Zennevallei/Wiki_Loves_PZ.

Are you having a work plan for new partners and collaborations? Partners pay for meeting spaces, food and drinks, WMBE provides their volunteer time and participation. Mostly volunteer time goes into projects.

Flemish gov paid for staff during a project. To apply for, and obtain the government grant the partner needed WMBE to declare its project support. WMBE could only participate volunteer time. Staff at the partner organisation could allocate their working hours as part of their normal work.

Usually only working with the Wikipedia, Commons and Wikidata platforms. Might be good to work more and extend with Wikisource and other projects. Currently the Wikidata, OpenRefine, Wikidata Query, LysteriaBot, FIST, and Pywikibot tools are used as external and internal tools to upload content.

What are your needs for a successful work with partners?
We require more project volunteers, project managers, technical and content specialists, (pro bono) legal advice, technical training consultants, LoD specialists, programmers, tools developers, tools integrators, data modelling assistants.

More funding. Would like to offer resources to small partners who cannot fund that themselves. Both meeting rooms, food and drinks. Would also like to be able to offer (paying for) web space, servers and tech support.

Trying to bring in more people to work, but hard to find others who can participate with sufficient time and skills.

Need for training, technical, legal and project management support.

Most volunteers can write articles, but do not have the technical skills to set up or manage the project.

What does the best support look like for a successful partnership?
We are closely collaborating with a Flemish governmental institution https://meemoo.be that works on public domain, digitizing analog collections, register and link collection inventories with Wikidata and other LoD databases. They are supporting and training museums to set up such a project.

The best thing would be if partners could do more work themselves, and WMBE would only provide training, coaching and referral to other organisations and institutions. We would like that different museums use and share the same techniques and data models and support each other in doing so, e.g. data model for museum collections.

Would like to do more advocacy and less hands-on activities. Several museums have the same problems and questions; others have already solved problems, and could help other institutions if they talked to each other.

Example of reusing CC BY-SA licensed material from an university archive on Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Archive-ugent-be-DADDCF00-909F-11E6-9600-8735D53445F2_DS-111.jpg University of Gent collection

Souce: https://lib.ugent.be/viewer/archive.ugent.be%3ADADDCF00-909F-11E6-9600-8735D53445F2#?c=&m=&s=&cv=51&xywh=-26%2C369%2C7295%2C4499

Used at Wikipedia page: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marguerite_Van_Biesbroeck

Improved documentation would help GLAM cooperations. Finding out how others work and in what ways they are doing projects. Seeing and understanding the links between uploads, pages created, project pages where the results are documented.

Wikimedia Belgium YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCA7vik_cnFiuHZb1oY3yFlg

Other questions or suggestions for people who would be interested in discussing these issues? Better and more project and user oriented documentation of OpenRefine.

More integrated course material of OpenRefine.

Support for defining and creating new properties in Wikidata: example: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Property_proposal/uses_natural_resource (about the inflow of a process; different from made from that is used for a product).