Wikimedia Foundation Culture and Heritage team

About us

The Culture and Heritage team at the Wikimedia Foundation works with the Wikimedia Movement to strengthen collaborations with libraries, museums, archives, publishers, and many other heritage organizations using and enriching Wikimedia Projects. We’re particularly interested in addressing visual knowledge gaps and diversifying information sources.

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  Silvia sharing data at Atelier 1Lib1Ref in Côte d'Ivoire
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  Satdeep delivering Wikimedia training at the Bophana Center in Cambodia
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  Fiona chatting with conference attendees at ESEAP Sydney in Australia
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  Giovanna posing questions after the table ¿De quién es el conocimiento y cómo se construye? during WECUDI 2023

Annual plan (2023)

For the 2023-24 annual plan, we will continue to focus on Commons and Wikisource , which are so important to this network, and build our strategic alliances with museums and archives to fill visual knowledge gaps and diversify information sources in local and indigenous languages.

Last year, we supported OpenRefine to develop a Commons extension to batch upload media with structured data. This year, we’re providing follow-on support, so they can promote its use through small improvements, a train-the-trainer program, documentation, and a WikiLearn course.

In response to community calls for a simpler contribution experience for photographers and small institutions, we're partnering with the Flickr Foundation on an integrated upload experience.

To equip our communities and partners to understand and evidence the impact of their contributions to Commons, we will coordinate across the Movement to define the metrics that matter for GLAMs and work with the Product team to start delivering them.

Responding to interest from communities in ESEAP, South Asia, and Africa, we will open the Wikisource Loves Manuscripts initiative to a broader cohort of learning partners, providing support through our grant programs, technical partnerships, and links to institutions that hold relevant collections.

We will strengthen the culture and heritage network through improved support for thematic user groups, including the potential Language Diversity Hub; a coordinated engagement with museums at the conference of the International Council of Museums; and support to the Movement's first global community convening in five years, GLAM Wiki: The Culture, Heritage and Wikimedia Conference.

The Movement's engagement with libraries is at a more developed stage. We will continue to collaborate with key partners and user groups to evaluate our library programs and develop a plan for sustainable support in the Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and CEE regions where we see the most momentum. We will also proactively support the next global Wikimedia + Libraries convention, anticipated in 2024.

Active collaborations

Activity	Partners	Calls to action
Wikisource Loves Manuscripts	Wikimedia Indonesia, PPIM, IIIT Hyderabad, British Library, READ COOP (Transkribus), and the Learning Partners Network	This activity has concluded and we'll share our learnings soon
Flickypedia	Flickr Foundation, Commons Photographers User Group, and Magnus Manske	Try the first release of Flickypedia
OpenRefine training	Code for Science and Society	Take the new WikiLearn course
Outreach to ICOM	Wikimedia España, Amical Wikimedia, Wikimedia Italia, Wikimedia Deutschland, Wikimedia Portugal, and Wikimedia Switzerland	Join the International Museum Day celebration
Metrics that Matter for Commons	Wikimedia Israel, European GLAM Coordinators	Collaborate with Marcel Ruiz Forns at the Wikimedia Hackathon

Meet the team

Leave a message on our talk page, email cultureandheritage@wikimedia.org, or contact the most relevant member of our team using the Book a meeting link in the table below:

Fiona Romeo

Senior Manager
Culture and Heritage

United Kingdom
UTC+0/+1
English, Italian (A1)
FRomeo (WMF)
Book a meeting
Talk to me about:

images and media, metrics, Commons, partnerships with cultural institutions

Satdeep Gill

Senior Program Officer
Culture and Heritage

Punjab, India
UTC+5:30 (IST)
English, Punjabi, Hindi, Urdu, Farsi-2, Español- 2
SGill (WMF)
Book a meeting
Talk to me about:

language diversity, Wikisource, manuscripts, oral culture

Giovanna Fontenelle

Program Officer
Culture and Heritage

Brazil
UTC-3 (BRT)
English, Portuguese, Spanish, French (reading only)
GFontenelle (WMF)
Book a meeting
Talk to me about:

visual knowledge and image descriptions, museums, structured data, accessibility, gender, decolonization

Silvia Eunice Gutiérrez De la Torre

Senior Program Officer
Libraries

Mexico
UTC-6
Spanish, English, German (C1), French (B1), Italian (A2)
SEgt-WMF
Book a meeting
Talk to me about:

1Lib1Ref, library-led Wiki campaigns or projects, disinformation, artificial intelligence

Sailesh Patnaik

Program Officer, Education & Language Inclusion

India
UTC+5:30 (IST)
Odia -N, English -P, Hindi -P, Bangla -L
SPatnaik (WMF)
Book a meeting
Talk to me about:

community engagement, language inclusion, decolonization, the intersection of culture, heritage and education

Vipin SJ

Senior Partnerships Manager

India
UTC+5:30 (IST)
English, Malayalam, Hindi, Tamil (spoken only)
VSj (WMF)
Book a meeting
Talk to me about:

The Wikipedia Library, academic publishing, content partnerships

Regular updates

We publish occasional articles to Diff and regular updates to the This Month in GLAM Newsletter.