GLAM Wiki 2025/Program/Heritage at Risk Lightning Talks
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| Date & Time | October 30, 16:30-17:45 |
| Room | Auditorium |
| Language | EN/PT |
| Presentations |
Newspapers have long been rich sources of information. They cover all subject fields and provide a record of ordinary life in communities. Uganda has a rich newspaper history dating back to 1900 with over 100 published since then. However, Wikipedia (one of the most popular websites in the world) documents only 15. To address this information gap, we came up with a project called WikiProject Newspapers: Uganda, to help document Ugandan newspapers on Wikimedia projects. The goal was to significantly expand this online record by creating high-quality Wikipedia articles, associated Wikidata items and uploading images to Wikimedia Commons, ultimately increasing awareness of Uganda's journalistic heritage. Link to the meta page. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Community_User_Group_Uganda/WikiProject_Newspapers_:_Uganda
The presentation explores the special nomination “Photofilm” (Фотоплівка) within the Ukrainian edition of the Wiki Loves Monuments contest. Launched in 2022, this initiative encourages participants to scan and upload old analog photographs of cultural monuments. It offers a way to document heritage sites that may no longer exist, have been reconstructed, or suffered damage—especially during Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. By focusing on historical visual materials, often stored in private family archives, this nomination helps preserve cultural memory beyond the reach of official GLAM institutions. The talk will also reflect on how crowdsourced digitization of physical photographs enables civic participation in cultural preservation, particularly in communities without access to state archives or institutional support. This initiative provides a valuable grassroots model for safeguarding visual heritage during crisis, and could be replicated in other regions facing similar risks to their cultural legacy. Links: https://wlm.org.ua/film-2024-winners/ https://wlm.org.ua/film-results-2023/ https://wlm.org.ua/film-results-2022/
The Memory of the World International Register lists 570 pieces of documentary heritage judged to be globally important, including Anne Frank's diary, the records of Nelson Mandela's trial, and the Rig Veda. For the past year, we have been working to make the Register more visible on Wikimedia platforms. This has involved a surprising amount of fixing inconsistent or outdated information, in data, Wikipedia articles, and media categories. This work is funded not by UNESCO but by the Khalili Foundation, an independent charity. The presentation shows the problems we encountered and how we have implemented a long-term solution for representing the Register. We have developed good practice in representing a heritage register on Wikidata and worked with the UNESCO MoW team to share a data set from which Wikipedia lists can be created. We have worked multilingually, sharing links in French and English and adding knowledge to Wikidata so as to inform all versions of Wikipedia. This session does not go into data modelling or querying, but introduces Wikidata as a pivotal platform for this kind of multilingual project. Project page on Meta: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/UNESCO_Memory_of_the_World_project Page on the UNESCO MoW website: https://www.unesco.org/en/memory-world/documentary-heritage/about
In 2023, the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) started a Wikimedia engagement by organizing a working group and publishing a whitepaper about the value of unifying biodiversity knowledge on the Wikimedia projects for a sustainable planet. (available here: https://bhl.pubpub.org/pub/bhlwiki/release/6). In 2024, these activities led to the hiring of a Wikimedian in Residence to model and enhance structured metadata on images from BHL collections available on Wikimedia Commons. In the meantime, BHL and the Wikimedia Foundation partnered to test two ideas for the Product and Tech section of the Foundation's annual plan: adding descriptive metadata to BHL files related to Africa and South America available on Commons and organizing events to encourage their usage on Spanish, French, and Portuguese Wikipedia. The Wiki work happened amid a transition time in BHL, as the Smithsonian Institution ended the support for the administrative functions of the platform, a function it held for 20 years. In this session, we will present concrete outcomes of the residentship, including a metadata model for biodiversity illustrations and tools to explore the BHL collection on Wikimedia Commons. At the same time, we will reflect on the challenges of organizing diversity-related events (both biodiversity and diversity in terms of target audience, languages, etc.) in a challenging, politically charged moment, framing the Wikimedia work in supporting the mission of biodiversity heritage institutions, bringing hope for continued impact in the face of change.
We are working on the project ""The history of the Basque Country in 100 objects"" with the main idea of having all those 100 objets well documented in the Basque Wikimedia, related to the historical fact affecting them. We will work every object with the museum in which is located. We will also have a comic for children for every object, a newsletter article every week and a Podcast. It can be a good example of how to start making a relationshipp with a museum. https://eu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari:Ondarea/Euskal_Herriko_historia_100_objektutan |
| Speakers | Caroline Nankinga: I'm a Librarian working with a National Library. I am an active editor and contributor on Wikimedia; I have been doing this for five years now. I’ve participated in various campaigns such as Wikisource 101, Women in Wikisource, #1Lib1Ref, Every Book Its Reader, Wiki Loves Monuments, Wiki Loves Africa, Uganda society @100, Wikimedia and GLAM Professionals in Uganda etc.
Viacheslav Mamon: Viacheslav Mamon is a librarian and historian from Kharkiv, Ukraine. Active on Wikimedia projects since 2009, he works with the Yaroslav Mudryi National Law University Library and the Kharkiv Korolenko State Scientific Library. His work focuses on digitization, open access to cultural heritage, and mentoring students to contribute to Wikipedia and Wikidata through GLAM-Wiki collaborations that preserve cultural memory in wartime Ukraine. Martin Poulter: Martin Poulter (User:MartinPoulter) is the Wikimedian In Residence at the Khalili Foundation, and previously the WIR at the University of Oxford, based in the Bodleian Libraries. He is also an occasional consultant/trainer about Wikipedia and Wikidata for universities and cultural institutions. His present work involves sharing content from the world's largest private collection of Islamic art on Wikimedia platforms. Tiago Lubiana: Tiago earned his PhD in 2024, studying Wikidata and cell types at the University of São Paulo, and has acted as the first Wikimedian-in-Residence at the Biodiversity Heritage Library (Smithsonian Libraries and Archives) from November 2024 to May 2025. He has been contributing to Wikimedia projects since 2014, focusing on life sciences and structured content on Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons. He has been a volunteer member of the Wikimedia Brasil chapter since 2020. Edurne Agirre I'm part of the Basque Wikimedians User Group since 2017, mostly in charge of the administration-contracts work. Rita Cêpa; Moderator |
| Type | Lightning Talks |
| Track | Collections beyond GLAM: expanding the broadness of what GLAM can encompass and narrow the digital divide - collections outside of formal institutions, gender gap, decolonization, minority and underrepresented languages, traditional knowledge, and restitution. |
| Level | 1 - Everyone can participate in this session |
| Commons File | Video - Slide 1 - Slide 2 |
| Etherpad | Etherpad |
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