Content Partnerships Hub/Needs assessment/Research results/Wikimedia Eesti

Notes from meeting with Wikimedia Eesti.

Date:

• 2021-09-10

Participants:

• Tore Danielsson, WMSE
• Axel Pettersson, WMSE
• Ivo Kruusamägi, WMEE
• Kerdo Kristjan Tamm, WMEE

Do you work with content partnerships today?

There are plenty of partnerships, some old, some new. Not all are releasing a lot of content, or are active now. We would like to work more with large uploads and content releases, but there are also a lot of ideas that we would like to bring to life.

Our biggest image donation so far is from the Estonian Museum of Natural History that involves ca 6300 images.

What is your normal work process in collaborations with partners?

Starting points for projects are different. Some organizations are rather willing to work with us and some don't like releasing their content under open licenses. We try to show that by working with us the organization can increase their visibility. Sharing their content is in line with their mission and we can help.

Some museums are small and do not have almost no materials [at now] that can be released, but there we could use volunteers to help in digitizing materials. We have prepared a project that should involve trips to the museums, including workshops to the local activists to show how to use Wikipedia.

Which are your partners and collaborations just now?

Not that easy to answer, as we have plenty of old contacts to whom we are not working with right now, but would resume when time and resources are there. Sometimes there can be breaks.

Asking for funding can be problematic as organizations don’t have a lot of funds to use for projects. Large organizations often don’t see the need for working with Wikipedia, and smaller ones don’t have resources to work with us. Lot revolves around volunteers... or university students, and sometimes it is there and sometimes not.

What are your desired content partnerships in the future?

It might be nice to finally get some more active cooperation going with the biggest museums - like the Estonian National Museum, that has a lot of materials about Finno-Ugric peoples, as this topic is pretty important to us.

We are also working to bring Estonian paintings and other artworks into the Sum of All Paintings. So we are trying to set up cooperations that allow us to publish the repros of paintings in full size. October is going to be the Wikipedia Art Month. We will also involve the education sector into it, like the art schools. The young history of Estonia limits what can be released due to copyright and therefore we are actively looking ways to get past those limitations by getting the permissions from the living artists (one example).

We are also developing our virtual exhibitions section and trying to present it to the museums as one of the places where they can achieve their past exhibitions so that this information would still be available.

Are you having a work plan for new partners and collaborations?

One plan is to approach more libraries. So far we have gotten data on the location of all the libraries in Estonia, but there is more that could be collected: for instance images. And when working with libraries it would be less on content and more with teaching people to use and edit Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.

We have a long history of working with universities. Involving more students into GLAM activities is one area where we are trying to move forward. For instance in 2020 a student team assembled a virtual exhibition about the Estonian-Polish relations. It is already common for them to write articles, but there is so much more that could be done. But we are not running edit-a-thons, as we have little faith in them.

As more materials find their way to the Wikimedia projects, more thoughts have to be put into how to show everything. Not all paintings/photos can be used in articles. This is also a reason why we are looking into virtual exhibitions.

We hope to see more transnational projects. This is also why we proposed that Nordic Art project. There exist historical ties between countries that could be used. Like between Estonia and Sweden there exist many topics where it makes sense to work together to get a better coverage as some parts of the knowledge are in one country and other parts in the other country. This is also something where to involve university students or where it could already be a big thing, when some materials could just be translated.

What are your needs for a successful work with partners?

There are no big needs, but we would not mind some help with technical uploads and with extracting data from databases to make it available on Wikidata. We do have a lack of tech/developers in the community and it is hard to do training in data uploads as there are not that many volunteers who are interested in working with that.

What does the best support look like for a successful partnership?

We would be happy to do some cross promotion/translation of articles/descriptions of GLAMs and GLAM material.

Do you know of someone in your network who would be interested in this kind of collaboration too?

There are relatively few people working with that topic, as Estonia is still a small country. On the positive side: it is easy to reach every one of them, as there are so few. And we are pretty open to joint projects.