Content Partnerships Hub/Needs assessment/Research results/Wikimedia España and Amical Wikimedia

Meeting with WM-ES and Amical Wikimedia.

Date: 2021-11-24 (video recorded)

Participants:
Francesc Fort, WMES, Amical Wikimedia
Tore Danielsson, WMSE
Axel Pettersson, WMSE

Questions:
Experiences and best practices from earlier work with content partnerships?
What are the main needs for working with partners?
What could a good support look like?

Partnerships:
Each partner have their own model. Working mostly with partners who have their own infrastructure. Ismael Latorre Mendoza photo archive (link 1) is basically a family/city photo archive with 500 000 images. One photographer have taken photos and now the family wants to share the images. A lot of every day photos. Images being digitized and uploaded by the family. Ethnological Museum of Valencia (link 2, 3, 4) WiR program at the museum library. Several Wikipedia volunteers in the region helps at events and activities. Modern Art museum (link 5). Not as experienced as the other partnerships, working more when initiative comes from the Wikimedia side.

When museums can’t cover a partnership it’s hard to cooperate. Volunteers do some work but when the GLAM only observe and don’t actively participate it’s not working as well as it should. Also, existing partnerships absorb most of the volunteer time, so without any “pushing” from the institution, it’s difficult to start anything new.

Partnerships focus mostly on images, both archive and new photos of objects. Sometimes uploading whole archives, sometimes doing thematic uploads (painter…) from collections. Cleaning up data before uploads, but not that many uploads to Wikidata.

Museums in Spain are not at a point where Wikidata is relevant to work for them yet. They don’t know it exists. They are more interested in the visibility an article in wikipedia gives.

WiR is the most common way of doing partnerships. There are some agreements with Institutions, but that works in Libraries. In GLAMS only WiR (and one-shot edit-a-thons).

Needs:

Plenty of partners around, more than can be covered. Tutorials for Montage would be needed, and tutorials for other tools also. Using Montage for photo walks. Mainly using commons uploader, sometimes commonist of vicuña uploader.

Support:

Having access to a hotline where help and hands could be provided. Getting extra eyes to look at scripts and meta data matching to see if things could be done in a better way or with smarter tools. Formal/informal mentorship to get knowledge transfer going between community members. Both central and distributed points of contacts and list of ongoing projects. Some projects are listed and accessed through one place, others are informal and connections happens due to personal friendships and connections or by seeing post on mail lists or social channels.

Links:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Arxiu_Ismael_Latorre_Mendoza
https://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viquiprojecte:Museu_Valenci%C3%A0_d%27Etnologia
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Poster_Fesabid_Wikipedista_residente_biblioteca_museu_valencia_etnologia.jpg?uselang=ca
https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7246951
https://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viquiprojecte:Institut_Valenci%C3%A0_d%27Art_Modern