Wikipedia:GLAM/Bodleian/9th month report
| Institution | Resident's Name | Period Covered | Date of Report |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Bodleian Libraries, Oxford | User:MartinPoulter | 1 December-31 December 2015 | 7 January 2016 |
This report covers about half a month of work because of the Christmas break, and some holiday taken before that.
Content
[edit]Summary objective: To make content from the Bodleian available for use on the Wikimedia projects.
There have been no new uploads in December: instead I have been working towards bulk uploads. I have chosen this collection of images of ephemera as the first bulk upload, and obtained a manifest file which links to all the metadata files. I have written perl scripts to 1) download all the individual metadata files, and 2) convert the metadata (IIIF encoded in JSON) to the flat XML format required by the Toolset. Now written, these scripts can be reused for other collections from Digital Bodleian.
This translation has been less straightforward than anticipated, because one item in the Digital Bodleian database does not correspond to one image, but to one item. Sometimes the item is a physical object of which there are multiple photographs. Hence although there are 876 items in the collection, the upload will be of just over 1,000 images.
I have an account on beta.commons and am now waiting for the Bodleian servers to be whitelisted (Phabricator Task T121779) so I can do a test run of the bulk upload.
With the help of the Free Speech Debate participants (see below), WMUK staff, and Bodleian colleagues, I've made a lot of headway with internationalising the Bodleian Libraries source template, which now covers 14 languages.
Community
[edit]Summary objective: to expand, diversify and train the contributor community
I ran a Wikipedia training session for the Free Speech Debate project: 16 trainees, mostly postgraduates from St. Anthony's College, whose first languages included Spanish, Arabic, Russian, German, Farsi, Turkish, and Urdu. Evaluation forms are summarised on the WMUK site. Over the coming weeks they will try to improve the "Freedom of speech" article, or related articles in their language, and report back at a meeting early in 2016.
IT Services at the University of Oxford also run training events for the John Radcliffe Hospital. I have proposed a workshop on "Wikipedia as a public health intervention", which has been accepted, and we are now trying to pin down a date and room.
A talk I proposed to a local "Geek Nights" group has been scheduled for 27 January.
There is now a project page for the Wikipedia 15th birthday editathon to be hosted by the Oxford Internet Institute.
I visited the Bodleian Library's Maps Room and gave two staff there one-to-one training on Wikipedia editing (in one case) and the Wikimaps Warper (in another). I also showed them some features of Wikipedia and Commons related to maps (including that Commons can include SVG files). The current 1000px limit on files that I can share from the Bodleian means not much can be done with maps so far, since map scans at that resolution are not usually legible, but there may come out of this grounds for a specific request for higher-resolution images.
We put out a call on the Bodleian's Twitter feed for someone to translate Wikipedia's article on the Bodleian Library into Turkish (since the Bodleian Libraries template had been translated to Turkish as part of the above internationalisation). A volunteer came forward who had not edited before, and with a bit of prompting over Twitter, registered an account (User:Mzeyneb) and completed a translation of the article.
The following report went out in the 10 December issue of Outline, a newsletter for all staff connected with the Bodleian Libraries:
UPDATE FROM THE WIKIMEDIAN IN RESIDENCE
It has been a busy eight months as Wikimedian in residence, and our presence is already being felt on Wikipedia! 833 images from the Bodleian Libraries are now being used across 35 different language versions of Wikipedia. The articles they illustrate are receiving 1.2 million desktop views per month, with around the same number on mobile. Thank you to all volunteers who have contributed to the project so far, which among other things has resulted in the creation or improvement of 59 articles relating to women and their achievements and 100 articles relating to non-Western cultures.
There are hundreds of different language versions of Wikipedia, and I am hoping to use the one-sentence source statement in as many languages as possible. The sentence, which appears on all the files I upload, is ‘This file comes from the Bodleian Libraries, a group of research libraries in Oxford University.’ So far I have the sentence in Turkish, Czech, Urdu, Arabic, Farsi, German, Spanish, Russian and Welsh. If you can help with a language not on this list, I will be hugely grateful, and another language community will get more information about the files I am sharing. To help you along, here is a list of ‘Bodleian Library’ in different languages: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q82133#sitelinks-wikipedia .
Wikipedia’s fifteenth birthday is also coming up on 15 January 2016. The Oxford Internet Institute is celebrating with an afternoon event in which we’ll learn about and try to address Wikipedia’s geographic biases, including improving articles about non-Western cultures and geographies. This is open to newcomers and includes training in Wikipedia editing. Details and free booking are at http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/events/?id=749 .
Wikipedia’s fifteenth birthday is also the beginning of 1Lib1Ref, a global campaign to get every librarian supplying one reference to Wikipedia. Of the 5 million articles in English, 369,000 are tagged as having ‘unsourced statements’. Inserting a reference is a way to connect Wikipedia and its massive audience to the formally reviewed literature, whether print or electronic. If you create an account on Wikipedia, you get access to a nifty new ‘Cite’ tool which makes it quick and easy to properly format citations. If you add a reference or just need some help please get in touch, and for more information see this link: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/The_Wikipedia_Library/1Lib1Ref .
One reader of the above article has requested a guest blog post about open access, Wikimedia, and science, to be published on Wikipedia's birthday.
Policy
[edit]Summary objective: Shape and implement policies and workflows for licensing and releasing digital media and reporting their use and impact.
There have been no activities directly focused on policy in December. Early in January I will be speaking on intellectual policy at a one-day conference on DIY Digitisation, hosted at the Bodleian but with attendees from around the country.