Europeana and Wikimedia partnership update

Today, Geer Oskam, Europeana Senior Marketing Specialist, tell us about a couple of interesting Wikimedia events that Europeana was involved with last month.

Europeana Fashion Edit-a-thon

First of all, there was the Europeana Fashion Edit-a-thon in Stockholm in collaboration with the Nordic Museum and Stockholm University. At the event, no less then 47 participants showed up to edit the fashion pages of Wikipedia, 23 of them female. Wikipedia is very male dominated (only 9% of all editors are female), which apparently makes the topic of fashion very poorly represented.

One of the images from the Nordic Museum used in the edit-a-thon: 'Hattmode. Modeplansch från 1874', public domain.

In preparation for the event, the Nordic Museum and the MoMu Fashion Museum in Antwerp (partners of Europeana and Europeana Fashion) uploaded hundreds of fashion images to Wikimedia Commons. These, and other images, uploaded during the 10-hour edit-a-thon were incorporated into numerous Wikipedia pages. 57 images were used 72 times in articles. Ten new articles were created and articles were edited in eight different languages. View photos of the event.

This isn't the first edi-a-thon we've been involved with. Read about our Europeana 1914-1918 edit-a-thon in this blogpost. That event was a big success with the number of views of the collection images used hitting the 900,000 mark within 3 months. The lesson we learned from this is to try and get interesting content linked to well-read articles (for example, a postcard written by Hitler was linked to various articles about the man).

The interesting thing about the latest fashion edit-a-thon is that although the number of views might not be as high as those from the World War One themed event, from a Wikimedia perspective it was very successful in terms of participants (women) and the subject (the underrepresented pages on fashion). With both edit-a-thons, we have helped to increase the coverage of cultural heritage on the largest free encyclopaedia in the world.

GLAM Wiki Conference

In April, Europeana attended the GLAM-Wiki 2013 Conference in London to present our collaborations with Wikimedia. We gave a presentation about the fashion edit-a-thon mentioned above, and talked about future events including the Wiki Loves Public Art contest (of which more later!).

On the second day of the conference, Europeana hosted a workshop for Wikimedians and GLAM (gallery, library, archive, museums) staff on the GLAM Wiki Toolset. This set of tools is being developed in the Europeana Office to make it as easy as possible for GLAMs to upload their content to Wikimedia Commons, meaning that their collection items can be featured in Wikipedia pages.

All in all, it was a succesfull conference at which we shared our experiences and showed how Europeana is valuable for Wikimedia and the GLAM sector, building bridges and creating possibilities to work together.

You can find more highlights from the event in this blog by Joris Pekel from the Open Knowledge Foundation, Netherlands.

Wiki Loves Public Art contest

'Paparazzi statue in Bratislava', photograph by DMY, CC-BY.

If you live in Sweden, Spain, Finland, Israel or Austria you can participate in improving online access to artworks as the Wiki Loves Public Art (WLPA) photo contest kicks off in May. The goal of the contest is to get as many pictures of public art as possible available under a free licence on Wikipedia’s online image database, Wikimedia Commons. The photos can then be seen and used by anyone, anywhere.

The Wiki Loves Public Art contest is organised by Wikimedia Sverige, Europeana and volunteers in the Wikimedia chapters and affiliated groups in each of the participating countries. There are great prizes to be won: travel gift certificates for 500 euros, 300 euros and 200 euros. On top of that, Europeana has sponsored high quality prints of the winning pictures that will be sent to the winners.

To make it as easy as possible for people to find artworks suitable for the contest, volunteers in national Wikimedia chapters have put together lists on Wikipedia with information about art that you can find while you're out and about. While in some countries, the focus has been on working with national art museums so that people can go there and take photos of items from the museums' collections. Find out everything about the contest on the contest website or at Wikimedia Commons. Please help us spread the word about the contest and of course: participate yourself!