Wikipedia:GLAM/Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa/The whole GLAM package

A manual for GLAMs releasing packages of collection images, data, and research to Wiki platforms.

This manual was created by Avocadobabygirl and is based on projects done at Te Papa in Aotearoa New Zealand in 2022 and 2023. Please feel free to try it out and make improvements!

How to use this manual

GLAMs don’t just have objects they hold or display. We have the results of years – even decades or more – of hard work collecting and describing objects, doing in-depth research, structuring and enriching data, creating beautiful and comprehensive digital representations, and finding connections between objects and people.

By packaging together the results of all this work you can really take advantage of what makes our organisations so special – detail, context, and connection – and share that with world outside your walls.

Use this manual if you’re in a gallery, library, archive, or museum (GLAM) – or you’re a volunteer looking to support a GLAM – and want to:

contribute to Wikipedia using your organisation’s collections and knowledge
do it in a way that’s focused, achievable, and sustainable
come away with useful experience and more benefits for your organisation.

By the end of this manual you’ll know how to:

start a project and pick a good topic
scope a reasonable amount of work across each platform
identify and select the right collection items, images, and knowledge to share
use OpenRefine to filter and massage your data to make it suitable for upload
create and use an OpenRefine schema to bulk upload images with solid metadata
develop and fill in a template for new articles
measure and report on your project.

Why use all these platforms?

Wikipedia articles are enhanced if they also have useful images, and both are improved if they’re backed by structured data.

Your project can contribute in all three areas:

Add credible, well-referenced information to Wikipedia articles to make them more reliable and more likely to reach the people who need them.
Add images to Wikimedia Commons so they can be included in Wikipedia articles, along with descriptive metadata that makes them easier to find and share.
Add data to Wikidata as structured statements to enhance articles with infoboxes, cite references more easily, link up information about people, places and things, and support further research and reuse of your articles and images.

What does a package of contributions look like?

While making edits to any Wiki platform is a worthwhile contribution, Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikidata can be used together to make each article, image, and item better.

By understanding the connections between platforms and planning your contributions around this, you can:

be more effective with your time
flesh out Wikidata items and Wikipedia articles with images
make images of your collection objects more findable
provide users with richer information about the topic
get information from the project and Wiki platforms back into your own systems.

Tools

This kind of project relies on OpenRefine, an open-source piece of software that helps you review and work with data. It also has great functions that let you hook directly into Wiki platforms, including bulk uploading tons of images at once.

Check it out at the links below, which have information about how to set it up and use it.

You’ll also find it useful to have tools that let you:

View and edit whole folders of images, like IrfanView or XNView
Manage your project, like Trello or Planner in Microsoft Teams
Export data from your collection management system or API

Use of terms

This manual uses a few specific terms it’s good to keep in mind.

Instead of Wiki projects it talks about Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikidata as platforms, to avoid confusing them with the project you’re working on.

At Te Papa, a record is a set of structured data associated with a single collection object, but we also have records for each image, person, taxon, and other connected entities, some of which ends up attached to the collection record. This is also where we can save relevant information like Wikidata identifiers (QIDs).

Mātauranga Māori is the body of knowledge originating from the ancestors and worldview, values and perspectives of Māori, the Indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand.

Descriptive metadata refers to information that describes an object (or image of an object), which is usually shown alongside that object. In particular, the table of information that sits under an image on Wikimedia Commons.

Structured metadata refers to that same information, structured as statements using Properties and Items in Wikidata.

What you’ll need (and how to get around it)

This manual assumes you’ve already got a number of things in place. If you don’t, here are some workarounds.

You need	You could
Open licenses on your data and images	Use out of copyright images, or seek an open license for just the data and images you want to use
Unique IDs for each of your records and images	Come up with a way to uniquely and reliably identify them, and save that information safely
Records for associated entities like people, locations, and scientific names (taxa)	Keep this data in a spreadsheet, but make sure you’re in touch with relevant staff so they can review, contribute to, and use it themselves
Ability to save Wikidata QIDs to your records	Keep this data in a spreadsheet, but make sure you’re in touch with relevant staff so they can review, contribute to, and use it themselves

These workarounds aren’t particularly sustainable in the long run – if you’re using them, treat your project as evidence that your organisation needs to prioritise some bigger changes.

Next up: Set up your project