Wikipedia:GLAM/Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa/The whole GLAM package/Set up your project

Getting up and running means finding the people who can get the project done and fit it into the rest of their work. As a group, you’ll work out your goals and set the scope – giving you a smart, realistic, but exciting project to do.

Find your people
Checklist task: Build team

A good project team will be made up of enthusiastic people who have their specialisations but collaborate well. Get yourself a project lead, a subject matter expert, and a data wrangler.

Don’t be too strict about how you divide up tasks. You’re a small team and will probably all need to help each other out.

Ideally, one of you will already be an experienced Wiki editor, but you can also find a volunteer to be your support person if you have a willingness to learn and a few cups of coffee.

You’ll benefit from some other support roles, though they don’t need to be involved end-to-end.


 * Community contacts – local Wiki editors with experience and interest in the topic your project is focusing on.
 * Communications – staff in your organisation who can help you promote the project and its results, both internally and externally.
 * Tool and platform specialists – people who work on or use OpenRefine and Wikidata who can help you understand both what’s possible, and how to do it.

Hold your kickoff meeting
Checklist task: Hold kickoff meeting

Get your core project team together for a kickoff meeting – this is for establishing the parameters of the project, so don’t worry about articles or images yet.

Set your scope
Checklist task: Set project scope

Decide now how much you want to get done, and then do your best to stick to it – scope creep is real! If you change your mind during the project, discuss it as a team so you know it’s for a good reason.

Go through the questions below together – they’ll help you create a clear, fixed task list that’s based on your goals and the material you have available.

Rights!
Has your organisation already openly licenced your data and images? Everything that goes onto Wiki platforms has to be open, meaning it has to be legally reusable with only minimal restrictions.

Usually GLAMs will have a single license for all their data, especially if they already share it in downloadable datasets or an API.

GLAMs probably have many different licences on their images, depending on how old they are, who took them, and policies about reproductions.

If you don’t have material that’s open enough, you can still look into other options.
 * Seek permission to release just the subset of data/images you need for the project, and make that agreement available online so it can be linked as a reference.
 * Just release out of copyright images – but keep in mind you’ll need to either adhere to or have a clear exception to United States copyright law in addition to the law of your own country. More information on working this out and how to add copyright tags is available in Wikimedia Commons

Licensing resources
If you’re uploading images taken by your organisation, you aren’t actually contributing your own work as Wikimedia defines it. Instead, you need to accompany the upload with the licencing details that prove the image is freely usable.

Licensing – Wikimedia Commons

If the image already has its own page on your website that specifies the license, you can use that link as a reference. If that’s not an option, you could create a page on your website about the project that includes a statement listing the images and the licence you’re using.

To upload someone else’s work that isn’t owned by your organisation, the creator needs to clearly give permission. You can ask them to publicly release it under an open license, for example by changing it on the platform they uploaded it to: Flickr, YouTube, iNaturalist and more all have options for this.

You can also ask the creator to email a permission statement to Wikimedia. Example requests for permission includes information about this process, text to use in your request, and a link to a tool the creator can use to generate a clear and definite permission statement.

Next up: Select your topic