Wishlist for Commons and GLAM in 2022

This is an open document for collecting thoughts and desires for the development of Wikimedia Commons and the support for GLAM activities in the Wikimedia movement.

Wikimedia Commons

• Be willing to affect Wikimedia platforms to leverage the principles of conduct, ethics, diversity etc.
• The WMF should see creating and maintaining the tools for uploading and maintaining data and content as part of their core mission.
• Be able to read machine-readable structured data via SPARQL endpoint.
• Design the data structures and interfaces to support recording provenance of captions and statements.

The ecosystem around Wikimedia projects

• Develop an app that allows people to upload their images to Wikimedia Commons directly from their phones (knowing that Open Culture projects have a lot to do with public space manifestations and urban art and culture).
• Develop new ways to visualize the content and navigate through Wikimedia Commons, taking advantage of all the information that images can give already (WikiAtlas is a good idea).
• Roundtripping, develop a workflow for institutions (or anyone) to keep their data synced with Wikimedia Commons. This could result in an extensive collaborative project between platforms & cultural heritage data providers that could also allow recording data provenance and licensing information for media.
• Support interfaces and protocols that allow easy development for tools around the Commons ecosystem.
• Promote and facilitate community growth activities for more people can participate in this project, and diversify its scope.

GLAM activities

• The GLAM practitioners need a stronger sense of community, direction and support. The GLAM work is an important part of the work of the chapters, but a significant number of practitioners do not work in chapters. This is not only a technical need for upload tools.
• Need for learning resources about using the Wikimedia platforms and the open ecosystem to solve specific needs of institutions in order to expend the reach of the platforms, and to solve the challenges of the open ecosystem together with practitioners outside the Wikimedia community.
• Making sense, advocating and learning about open access to cultural heritage – resources, exchange of ideas, emerging issues (crypto, AI etc.).
• Opportunities for exploring new ways of making use of the networks and the content.

Your projects

Talk about your projects and what they would need from the Wikimedia and open ecosystem to function better. What is missing? What would become possible if...?

• Hack4OpenGLAM is a co-creation and learning event for exploring new ideas, mingling between practitioners in online cultural heritage, learning skills. Intertwine with Wikimedia events.
• Wikidocumentaries aggregates audiovisual material from the Wikimedia projects and GLAM institutions, and provides a hub for interactions between them.
• GLAM School will collect information about what learning resources would be needed to facilitate Open Access to cultural heritage among Wikimedians and more broadly. The results of the study are a good starting point for creating new resources.