Grants talk:Project/CS&S/Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons functionalities in OpenRefine/Final
Feedback from the Culture and Heritage team[edit]
Dear SFauconnier,
This funded project was expected to add Structured Data on Commons functionalities to the OpenRefine tool. OR was already greatly used to perform data management and cleaning in the broader culture and heritage field, but was particularly important in the GLAM-Wiki and OpenGLAM ones. Therefore, its enhancement and update to add Structured Data on Commons functionalities, planned for this specific project, was essential to facilitate and preserve the operation of heritage organizations contributing to the Wikimedia projects and to the open knowledge ecosystem.
The grantees were able to deliver very successfully the ability of OpenRefine to accomplish batch edits (version 3.6) and uploads (version 3.7 to be launched soon) to Wikimedia Commons files, a dedicated Wikimedia Commons extension for OpenRefine, and a cloud version of OpenRefine 3.6 via PAWS. According to the report, six institutions officially made use of the tool, more than 150,000 edits have been done and more than 20,000 files have been uploaded using the new OR. The Culture and Heritage team is excited about these numbers and looking forward to seeing even more institutions making use of this version of OpenRefine.
During the period of development, the OR team made sure to publish several different releases and recurrent updates about the evolution of the work in several spaces, such as at the dedicated OpenRefine Slack and Telegram group, GitHub, and This Month in GLAM newsletter reports, among others. This was very important to keep the communities involved and informed about the progress during the entire operation, even allowing them to collaborate, test, and provide feedback.
The project also received observations from participants during the extensive user research and UX design, which was crucial to the addition of important features. Likewise, the decision to add schema templates was vital to provide the appropriate context for interested users. At this time, it is important to once again continue to encourage community-based discussions and decisions around SDC modeling.
The OpenRefine team dedicated to this project was involved in several presentations, webinars, and workshops during public events, conferences, and courses, as well as during group meetings for chapters, user groups, heritage institutions, and individual contributors. They developed training materials and pieces of documentation. The Culture and Heritage team looks forward to seeing even more OR-related resources and materials being created and shared with the community in several languages and levels of understanding, as well as the organization of a possible Train the Trainers program. The C&H team is likewise anticipating the development of a separate upload tool that will allow for larger-scale file uploads.
Finally, it is also paramount to highlight how important it is to continue the further development and maintenance of OpenRefine's Wikimedia functionalities, as they are essential to the cultural and heritage presence in the Wikimedia projects and the broader Open Knowledge ecosystem. Our team has shared with the relevant product teams your reflection that, in order to fully accomplish these developments, it is essential to have a revamped Wikimedia Commons platform, updated with functionalities that fully support the adoption of structured data, LUA templates, and batch upload tools in a more user-friendly way.