Wikimedia Foundation GLAM team/Office Hours/February 2021

February 2021 meeting: Analytics

This meeting was on Monday 22 February 3.30-4.30pm UTC and was repeated on Tuesday 23 February 9.30-10.30 UTC. Wikimedia Switzerland presented their latest version of the Cassandra tool and Wikimedia Israel shared their work to localize and extend it. We were also joined by researchers Trilce Navarrete and Elena Villaespesa, who shared their analysis of the consumption of museum images on Wikipedia, Digital Heritage Consumption: The Case of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Presentation

Trilce Navarrete and Elena Villaespesa, Museum Collections on Wikipedia

Discussion

Collective notes in Etherpad

Highlights

• Cassandra offers a user-friendly way to add new GLAM institutions using the Commons category. Data going back to 2015 is available within 48 hours. The data is broken down by time periods and language versions.
• The main updates for Cassandra v2.0:
  • Now includes Commons sub-categories
  • A new feature that suggests relevant Wikipedia articles and Wikidata items
  • Free text search to find an individual file
  • Wikimedia Israel worked on the localization of the Cassandra tool. It is now available in English and Hebrew, with Swedish and Portuguese language versions coming soon.
• There was a lot of interest from other affiliates in using this as a common tool.
• The software is on Github and both Wikimedia Switzerland and Wikimedia Israel were open to being contacted about further installations of Cassandra. Wikimedia Israel can supply language files for translation.
• Trilce and Elena found that paintings were used on Wikipedia as visual documentation and information sources, not only as art works.
  • In their analysis of 8,000 paintings used in 10,000 articles in the English Wikipedia, they found that 33% of articles were art-related, receiving 12% of views, while 67% of articles containing a painting were non-art related and received 88% of views.
  • Paintings often serve as portraits (of artists, of historical and political figures, of mythological and religious characters) and to illustrate places. Images that have a title like portrait or location are used most often.
  • Twenty-six paintings were used in more than one article. One image was used in 76 articles. The Scream can be found illustrating an article about itself, the artist Edvard Munch, but also the page for anxiety disorder, Krakatoa, and existential angst.
• Trilce and Elena would be interested in seeing analytics by topic rather than institution. Their future research interests include:
  • What programs facilitate reuse of images, e.g. WiR, picture of the day?
  • How does the diversity of editors impact representation and types of content?
  • Why do editors make the choices they do, especially for more abstract representations?
  • How can we track engagement with images?

Tools

GLAM stat tool Cassandra v2.0 by Wikimedia Switzerland (on Github)

GLAM Wiki Dashboard by Wikimedia Israel (on Github)