Wikipedia:GLAM/Oxford/Month 6 report

Strategic Goal 1
Increase the quality and quantity of coverage of subjects that are currently underrepresented on Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects, with a particular focus on cultural content

Outcomes
We received the data dump for the Atlas of Hillforts and are beginning to match with Wikidata.

Electronic Enlightenment: Matched 3112 records from this database, creating a link from Wikidata for each. This has helped us to identify 381 EE entities that have a Wikipedia article but are not in English Wikipedia, plus a further 171 entities with a representation in Wikidata but no article in any language version of Wikipedia. Oxford University Press will be adding the EE biographical database to their Wikipedia Library arrangement, enabling us to run a campaign to create missing articles using EE as a source. Wikidata has also allowed us to identify 1879 EE entities that have freely-reusable images in Wikimedia Commons, and further sources of images. For example, 135 of the matched individuals have entries in the National Portrait Gallery database. I've created a range of example queries for the imported data.

The EE team have identified some biographical dictionaries which play a vital role in book research, and which it would be useful to have in a checked electronic form. We have begun a transcription project in Wikisource for one of the books, and two of the team have been learning Wikisource markup by proofreading pages.

Ritual Modes project: I previously worked with this team of anthropologists to get an article undeleted. I have helped a new article, Modes of religiosity, get accepted in Wikipedia. I will recommend that they release some freely-licensed text on their own site to help get their field better represented in Wikipedia.

Partnerships
Social Anthropology: Working with Prof. David Zeitlyn on ways to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of Africa, inspired by the BBC 100 Women project. The limiting factor is the lack of reliable sources. Zeitlyn is an editor of the open access scholarly journal Vestiges: Traces of Record. This summer, the journal will introduce a new section for biographical notes. These will be short biographies with basic biographical data, written by researchers in the field and published more rapidly than the journal’s research papers. The journal’s CC-BY licence means that once published, the articles can be copied into Wikipedia. I will act as an editorial advisor to help the articles fit Wikipedia style, similarly to what Daniel Mietchen does for the Plos Computational Biology topic pages.

Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative: This is an international, multi-institution project that runs a database and a wiki with thousands of accessible articles about Assyriology. They have agreed to 1) license their wiki as CC-BY-SA (apart from some pages where they don’t own copyright) and to encourage the Wikipedia community to copy articles with attribution, and 2) dump data from their database (an initial tranche of 1,000 records) for import into Wikidata. We have also discussed 3) uploading images to Wikimedia Commons for re-inclusion in the CDLI Wiki, although they do not own copyright in most of the images they use. They are also interested in harvesting labels for their items from Wikidata.

I have come up with an idea for a project that will connect together various University of Oxford databases, as well as external data, into a semantic web to support research on historical books. During May, this will be developed into a bid for funding for a three-year project. Electronic Enlightenment and the Oxford Text Archive intend to support this bid and help write it.

Forthcoming in May

 * Presenting to the Negotiated Texts Network, a research project
 * Giving a course for Bodleian staff on "Working with the Open Content Movement"
 * Giving a workshop for the Technology Enhanced Learning group
 * Presenting to medical librarians
 * Presenting to the Department of Psychiatry
 * Taking part in meeting of the university's GLAM Digital Strategy implementation board

Activities delivered in the past month with stats:
Presentation in School of Social and Cultural Anthropology, 2 May: 3 attendees

Presentation at AssyrOnline meeting, 4 May: 8 attendees.

Users s:User:Rvmcn and s:User:MarkRogerson were inducted into Wikisource by an email conversation and are active on English Wikisource.

Strategic Goal 2
Support the development of open knowledge in the UK, by increasing the understanding and recognition of the value of open knowledge and advocating for change at an organisational, sectoral and public policy level

Forthcoming:
I have been invited to a meeting of the university's GLAM Strategy group, which will happen on the 25th May.

Activities delivered in the past month with stats:
n/a

Strategic Goal 3
To support the use of the Wikimedia projects as important tools for education and learning in the UK

Partnerships
The Bodleian Digital blog published a guest post explaining how to promote awareness of a historic event in Wikipedia. I intend to follow this up with historical projects.

Activities in the last month
Gave a presentation, gave half of a lightning talk, and co-ran a workshop at OER17, the Open Educational Resources conference in London. Stats have been reported to Karla.

Wikidata queries

 * Wikidata queries using a small amount of data from the Cuneiform Digital Library as a proof-of-concept
 * WD queries using Electronic Enlightenment data
 * Listeria list of works of Voltaire: demo of what Wikidata knows about a given author
 * Listeria list article about objects in Cuneiform Digital Library

Press about the residency

 * Publicising a historic event in Wikipedia, guest post on Bodleian Digital Library blog