Wikipedia:GLAM/National Digital Forum/Doing wikipedia when you're not editing wikipedia

note: in the interest of honest transparency, this page as been hidden from google

This is a presentation by User:Stuartyeates for Wikipedia:GLAM/National_Digital_Forum on things that individuals and institutions in the GLAM (industry sector) can do which indirectly help wikipedia.

Some of these things are probably things that you're already doing. Some of them you may consider to be core parts of your mandate. Hopefully by putting these down in this fashion hopefully there are one or two more that you can do (or increase). We recognise that all institutions have limitations (budget, staffing, donor agreements, appetite for risk, available volunteers, etc) and don't expect every institution to do all of these.

General

Encourage the generation of quality secondary sources

Part of the core mandate of most GLAM individuals and institutions is providing people with access to primary sources (archival material, first hand accounts, objects, etc, etc) so they can produce (among other things) quality secondary sources. Wikipedia, as a tertiary source, lives and breathes these quality secondary sources. This is a primary reason wikipedia loves GLAM institutions

Digitise Holdings

The digitisation of documents and creation of digital surrogates of objects has been a major theme at the NDF and needs no real introduction. This is a primary reason wikipedia loves GLAM institutions

Open licensing of holdings

In the past 5 years a number of institutions have moved from required specific referencing standards to "No Known Copyright Restrictions" and/or Creative Commons licensing for holdings and digital surrogates. DigitalNZ is a great showcase for this content. This is a primary reason wikipedia loves GLAM institutions

Open licensing of institutionally-generated content

Institutionally-generated content (which in theory should be easier to control the copyright to) is not commonly openly licensed. This includes blog posts, exhibition guides and notes, photos from exhibition openings, etc., etc. This stuff has a wealth of supporting information on the current generation of people working in your area: creatives, VIPs who attend openings, etc. A usage pattern might go: (a) event is held at institution, maybe for Māori language week; (b) institutional photographer takes photos; (c) a handful of photos are uploaded to institution's flickr stream (d) default settings on stream release photos as CC licensed (e) someone uploads an image of a dignitary taken at the event (f) someone adds the image to the Māori language revival article and that of the dignitary. (e) the institution's association with the dignitary and the Māori language is increased.

Publishing historical institutional content to the web

Institutions which expose their institutional history on the web get better coverage. A handful of New Zealand universities publish complete lists of Honorary Doctors (see List of Honorary Doctors of the University of Canterbury); all of those that do have made their way into wikipedia and articles will probably get written for those people (when I get time). In theory it would be possible to trawl through each year's graduation guff for this information, but few have access to those complex archives. Some institutions have web presences that make it look like they don't care about previous generations of creatives (not looking at Dowse Art Museum or anything).

Publishing historical industry content to the web

The single biggest step forward for our coverage of New Zealand literature would be someone taking polishing New Zealand Post Book Awards and creating Montana Book Awards and New Zealand Book Awards back to their respective foundations. These not only would this increase the gravitas of the awards themselves, but it would increase the chances that articles get written for those authors and for those books. Most creative industries have awards of this kind and should be looking to get them on wikipedia. Since the awards are typically the big press event of the year, getting the award on wikipedia is usually relatively easy and gives a list of awardees to look at. See also: Hector Memorial Medal, New Zealand film and television awards, Halberg awards, Chapman Tripp Theatre Awards, Iosefa Enari Memorial Award, Loder Cup, Rutherford Medal (Royal Society of New Zealand), Newspaper Publishers' Association awards, New Zealander of the Year Awards, Billy T Award, New Zealand Music Awards, Loxene Golden Disc, ...

Publishing obituaries

Obituaries are hugely important for the publication of biographies and the publication of professional biographies is very useful. Obituaries have historically been pivotal sources for biographies in encyclopaedia; are the single most most common source in Te Ara biographies and commonly the only reference. The Royal Society of New Zealand do a reasonable job of this already, but few else do. See also above about open licensing.

Encouraging user groups to publish reviews

Many institutions have volunteer groups who could potentially be encouraged to publish reviews, given the right prompting. Maybe free invites to the next exhibition opening for the best ten blog reviews of the current exhibition? Quality reviews count as secondary sources.

Use an interoperable authority control scheme

VIAF, ISNI, GND, LCCN and ORCID are all supported by {{Authority control}}, for both subjects of biographies on wikipedia and wikipedia editors. Using any one of these guarantees future interlinking options. I anticipate that NLA Trove and DigitalNZ person identifiers will get added to this infrastructure (i.e. when I have time to make it happen).

Don't change your URLs

When you change a URL that someone has bookmarked, you erase a line of someone else's work. You have no way of telling whether it was an important line, nor whether they'll notice. If you're a big GLAM site, wikipedia and it's ilk have thousands of URLs that point deep into your content. If you break those URLs all those sites face the choice of leaving the links broken, depreciating the content dependent on the links, or doing the hard work of fixing them. See http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html http://www.w3.org/TR/cooluris/

Countering systemic bias

Wikipedia has a systematic bias towards white, male, western, Christian anglophones. This is partly a reflection of the culture and biases of our editors; it is partly to do with the available secondary sources. The first is something we're attempting to deal with. The second is something that the GLAM sector can help with.

Wikipedia already has many more New Zealand Māori and women than The Cyclopedia of New Zealand, An Encyclopaedia of New Zealand and Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, see for example Category:New Zealand Māori people by occupation (categorisation of women is not as complete). Most of these, however, are contemporary people (particularly sports-people who have competed on the international stage); we are desperately short of sources on diverse historical people. 'Historical' for us begins in the late 1990s, when newspapers started to be digitised.

Wikipedia has higher bars around coverage of GLBTI individuals than might be expected, since the wikipedia rules are same for GLBTI individuals in New Zealand where these things are accepted as commonplace and in countries where they are illegal and actively prosecuted. Having said that, there are some areas where we have surprisingly good coverage, for example Category:Fa'afafine.

Churn historical institutional content

Find ways to expose on the web small pieces of content from pre-web days. For example Scientific American has a great 50, 100 & 150 Years Ago department which re-surfaces old content to modern users. That's a very formal structured way, but this could be done as easily as a irregular series on the institutional blog.

Reuse / repurpose content on well-known creatives to allow researching of lesser-known creatives

You can cut and paste biographies from wikipedia and adapt them to your needs, all you need is an appropriate credit line. If you have complex questions about reusing CC-licensed stuff (or need someone to present to a reluctant board) give Matt McGregor matt@creativecommons.org.nz a call, he's funded to do that sort of thing.

Prioritise historically female-dominated professions and organisations

Historically female-dominated professions and organisations are under-represented; nursing, housework, teaching, Māori Women's Welfare League, etc.

Prioritise historically Māori-dominated professions and organisations

Historically Māori-dominated professions and organisations are under-represented; Rātana, Māori Women's Welfare League, New Zealand Māori Council, iwi groups, wānanga, urban marae, traditional marae, etc.

Proper authority control for iwi

Yes, building a consensus-based authority control list for Māori groups is going to be hard, but it's really really hard to talk about them sanely without one. http://www.tkm.govt.nz/ seems to be the best we have so far.

Use proper personal names

People often have names that work differently to western names. Make the effort to check. Give name in native script as well as English. Also make the effort to check whether the name you're using is an acknowledged pseudonym, in some cultures most creatives use acknowledged pseudonyms. Hint: good authority control systems have most of this information, with example uses, etc.

Use specific geographical names

Too often we say that someone is "a Wellingtonian" or "African-born" as though they are the same equivalently exact. Attempt to be as specific about non-local locations as about local ones where you have the info.