Wikipedia:WikiAfrica/Share Your Knowledge/Guidelines/Wikipedia

A guiding path that makes the collaboration among cultural institutions and Wikipedia easier. It has been created for WikiAfrica and gives its contribution to the GLAM project.

Hints on how cultural institutions can give their contribute to Wikipedia.

This answers list about contents use has been written down on the basis of the FAQs made by Share Your Knowledge project involved institutions.

See also the answers about free license use.

Which contents are fittest for Wikipedia?

Our cultural institution owns many contents that can be release under a free license: which content should be chosen to be uploaded on Wikipedia?

A. Here there are some content sample that can be more easily reused to enrich Wikipedia articles:

Biographies. Authors, directors, artists, intellectuals' biographies can be used to create short biographical articles or to enrich existing texts (example).
Films. Film reviews presented at cinema festivals can be used to create articles on films (example).
Artworks. The synthetic description and the images of artworks produced by or belonging to the institutions can enrich the biographies of their artists and become autonomous articles (example).
Institution documentation. The article can be enriched with documentation from the institution website: institution history, synthetic description of the major fulfilled projects, bibliographies and reviews.
Festivals, big exhibitions, projects. This documentation can be used to update the articles of the institutions that promote these initiatives or to produce autonomous entries (example).
Illustrations and didactic images (such as photographic archives, photos of historical events, art collections) can be uploaded on Wikimedia Commons and used – even later – to enrich the entries on Wikipedia and of other projects (example). You can do the same with videos or audio tracks for didactic purposes.
Articles and essays already published can be wholly uploaded on Wikisource (example) and therefore linked to Wikipedia corresponding entries.
Didactic material can be uploaded on Wikiversity. The one at a university level in the relative faculty. The one related to high school in the corresponding section (example).

How to communicate the license release to Wikipedia?

We own some contents we would like to release under free license, but actually they are not available on the web. How can we communicate to Wikipedia that these contents can be freely used? Where can the license release be communicated?

A. First of all, the license should be quoted in the document (i.e. website or pdf file). In order to guarantee the best spreading, it is advisable that the contents are uploaded online on the institution website. The license release can also be communicated with written authorization to someone who must reuse/publish the material.

A. As far as Wikipedia is concerned, before uploading the material on the free encyclopaedia, send an email to OTRS service: see WP:Donating copyrighted materials. Send the authorization directly in the e-mail text and not in attachment.

Who uploads the contents on Wikipedia?

When we have released our material under free license, who will be in charge of uploading the contents on Wikipedia and how?

A. You are the expert in your field and a casual contributor might not do as well as you do. It can be easier for other Wikipedia users help “wikifying” (formatting) and refine an article when you have provided the essential contents. Thus the institutions must involve their staff, collaborators and network, letting them know that the institution has freed its own contents and prompting their use to enrich Wikipedia articles. For example, it is possible to activate internal training paths in order to provide everyone with the basic knowledge about Wikipedia guidelines to be followed.

To get Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects users collaborate, it is important to provide interesting and attractive contents and to inform the community that they are available. Within Wikipedia you can involve a series of field "wikiprojects" that coordinate users’ groups sharing the same interests about specific topics. All Wikipedia users are volunteers, therefore it is really hard to foresee how does it take for all the contents to be uploaded by the community, since it will depends on a) users’ availability and b) content type: not all contents are fit to be uploaded on an encyclopaedia and some of them might be considerably revised (See guided path: "start uploading contents on Wikipedia", "get he community involved").

Finally you can turn to your Share Your Knowledge tutor for help in peculiar circumstances (i.e. when a huge quantity of data have to be uploaded).

Where can be uploaded our publication, absent from any website?

We would like to release a publication (or a graduation thesis) under CC BY-SA license. We have got the pdf or .doc file, but nowadays it is absent from any website. What shall we do?

An already published document (like an artiche or a book) or a graduation thesis that has already been discussed can be wholly uploaded on Wikisource. If the document is not yet available online with a clear free license indication, first of all you have to send the l'authorization.

The editing of a long document to make it suitable for WikiSource might need some time and more than one user’s work. In such cases it is advisable to make the document available online, uploading the file under free license on an audience accessible website. According to the situation we suggest:

A) Documents with texts and images can be uploaded on Wikimedia Commons. Thus they will be available also on WikiSource, where they must be copied next. The file format has to be PDF or DjVu. DjVu (deja vu) is advisable in most of the cases (see later), while the PDF should be used when the exact original layout has to be kept.
B) Documents with text only have to be uploaded on Wikisource (not on Wikimedia Commons, unless they are historical texts scans).

In case of a simple text, the easiest and most immediate way is to copy and paste the text in one or more WikiSource pages (i.e. a page for chapter o subchapter).

Otherwise you can upload the document as a PDF file on Internet Archive, from where you will be able to convert it into a DjVu format and then upload it on Wikisource; this method can be adopted only if you are starting with a PDF file you cannot turn into another open text format.

An easy way to convert a document in DjVu format is that of uploading the PDF on Internet Archive (that is a good website where these contents can be left available for the audience) and then export it in DjVu format. The .doc format (MS Word) documents cannot be uploaded, thus they have to be converted into PDF format. It is important to remember that a PDF or DjVu file uploading is just an intermediate step, since the document text will have to be put in one or more pages, in order to be really published on WikiSource.

Please refer to Wikisource community for more infos and updates on how to upload written documents.

Whom may I talk to in case of doubt or help?

If you have any doubt you can ask for suggestions on the GLAM wikiproject discussion page or on the most inherent field wikiproject talk page. To ask for an emergency help you can also contact the GLAM project volunteers. See also “With whom may I talk to in case of help” within GLAM.

Related pages

Wikipedia:WikiAfrica/Share Your Knowledge/Guidelines/License - answers about free license use
Wikipedia:WikiAfrica/Share Your Knowledge/Guidelines/Enforcing the license - practical guide on how to insert license on documents
Wikipedia:GLAM getting started - hints for cultural field professionals