Hello all,
Hereby I like to announce the project Wiki Loves Art in Belgium.
In November we had a meeting with a museum and we noticed that they were
very enthusiastic about Wikipedia/Wikimedia, but they experienced it as
difficult and maybe dangerous to open up their collection. This relatively
closed attitude appears to be not unique, but often occurring among Belgian
cultural institutions, compared with other countries, as we understood from
various organisations in the open knowledge sector.
Therefore we have thought about how to work together with cultural
institutions and we came up with Wiki Loves Art. This project has been
organised earlier in various countries, and in 2009 also in the
Netherlands. A Dutch team is currently working on organising Wiki Loves Art
in 2016 again, and that gave us the inspiration to start with the
organisation in Belgium as well.
Wiki Loves Art is a photo contest in what participants visit the museums,
galleries, archives and libraries which have determined a part of their
collection to be photographed and published under a free license. Wiki
Loves Art gives participating photographers often a unique possibility to
take photos in a cultural institution and/or to visit an organisation
behind the scenes. This has resulted in other Wiki Loves Art projects in
many photos that are widely used on various Wikipedias. For cultural
institutions this project gives the opportunity to collaborate with
Wikipedia/Wikimedia in a save way, without having opening the doors of
their entire collections, and show a part of their collection with
relatively little costs.
In an organisational point of view the project is intended to make the
Belgiumgap less wide and the availability will increase the coverage of
Belgian art on Wikipedia. In comparison with other countries, relatively
less articles have been written about subjects in Belgium in the various
language versions of Wikipedia. This project tries to stimulate to fill
this gap and that Belgian art and more is better visible and described on
Wikipedia.
Wiki Loves Art is a project under the flag of Wikimedia Belgium, but is a
joint project in what we work together with several organisations with a
long-term expertise in working with cultural institutions and/or open
knowledge projects. Together with them we had last week a meeting and
agreed on how we want to organise Wiki Loves Art in Belgium.
We need to start in time as the project is very labour intensive with much
time spend on communication with the various cultural institutions. The
Dutch team has therefore highly recommended to hire someone for one or two
days a week during the project to be able to manage all the communication
and organisational needs. We are also going to set up a website, print
flyers and leaflets, and after the contest we organise a jury to judge the
photos and organise a prize giving ceremony.
Therefore we created a grant request at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:PEG/WM_BE/Wiki_Loves_Art_2016
If there are any suggestions or feedback, please let us know.
The project will be brought in at the General Assembly coming Saturday.
If you are interested in volunteering as part of the organisational team,
let us know!
The project page can be found at
https://be.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Loves_Art_2016
Kind regards,
Romaine
Hi list,
this is just to let you know that a group of Commons volunteers have
just launched a crowdfunding campaign at Indiegogo to fund a macro
lens for Jeevan Jose a.k.a. Jkadavoor so as to allow him to take even
better pictures of the amazing biodiversity in his home state of
Kerala, India.
The pictures, of course, are released by Jee under a free licence and
uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, and then used in Wikipedia articles in
multiple languages.
As an uninvolved person who has just been made aware of this, all I
can say is: have a look at the campaign page at
<http://igg.me/at/jkadavoor> and decide for yourselves whether this is
a project you want to help with.
[CC-ing this to the Commons mailing list as well.]
Regards,
--
Tomasz W. Kozlowski
a.k.a. [[user:odder]]
Greetings,
After a delay in updates to the Structured data on Commons[1] project, I
wanted to catch you up with what has been going on over the past three
months. In short: The project is on hold, but that doesn't mean nothing is
happening.
The meeting in Berlin[2] in October provided the engineering teams with a
lot to start on. Unfortunately the Structured Data on Commons project was
put on hold not too long after this meeting. Development of the actual
Structured data system for Commons will not begin until more resources can
be allocated to it.
The Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Germany have been working to improve
the Wikidata query process on the back-end. This is designed to be a
production-grade replacement of WikidataQuery integrated with search. The
full project is described at Mediawiki.org[3].This will benefit the
structured data project greatly since developing a high-level search for
Commons is a desired goal of this project.
The Wikidata development team is working on the arbitrary access feature.
Currently it's only possible to access items that are connected to the
current page. So for example on Vincent van Gogh you can access the
statements on Q5582, but you can't access these statements on Commons at
Category:Vincent van Gogh or Creator:Vincent van Gogh. With arbitrary
access enabled on Commons we no longer have this limitation. This opens up
the possibility to use Wikidata data on Creator, Institution, Authority
control and other templates instead of duplicating the data (what we do
now). This will greatly enhance the usefulness of Wikidata for Commons.
To use the full potential of arbitrary access the Commons community needs
to reimplement several templates in LUA. In LUA it's possible to use the
local fields and fallback to Wikidata if it's not locally available. Help
with this conversion is greatly appreciated. The different tasks are
tracked in Phabricator[4].
Volunteers are continuing to add data about artworks to Wikidata. Sometimes
an institution website is used and sometimes data is being transfered from
Commons to Wikidata. Wikidata now has almost 35.000 items about paintings.
This is done as part of the Wikidata WikiProject "Sum of All Paintings"[5].
This helps us to learn how to refine metadata structure about artworks.
Experience that will of course be very useful for Commons too.
Additionally, the metadata cleanup drive continues to produce results[6].
The drive, which is intended to identify files missing {{information}} or
the like structured data fields and to add such fields when absent, has
reduced the number of files missing information by almost 100,000 on
Commons. You can help by looking for files[7] with similarly-formatted
description pages, and listing them at Commons:Bots/Work requests[8] so
that a bot can add the {{information}} template on them.
At the Amsterdam Hackathon in November 2014, a couple of different models
were developed about how artwork can be viewed on the web using structured
data from Wikidata. You can browse two examples[9][10]. These examples can
give you an idea of the kind of data that file pages have the potential to
display on-wiki in the future.
The Structured Data project is a long-term one, and the volunteers and
staff will continue working together to provide the structure and support
in the back-end toward front-end development. There are still many things
to do to help advance the project, and I hope to have more news for you in
the near future. Contact me any time with questions, comments, concerns.
1. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Structured_data
2.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Structured_data/Berlin_bootcamp
3. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikibase/Indexing
4. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T89594
5. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_sum_of_all_paintings
6. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File_metadata_cleanup_drive
7. https://tools.wmflabs.org/mrmetadata/commons/commons/index.html
8. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Bots/Work_requests
9. http://www.zone47.com/crotos/?p=1&p276=190804&y1=1600&y2=2014
10. http://sum.bykr.org/432253
--
Keegan Peterzell
Community Liaison, Product
Wikimedia Foundation
Hi folks,
The multimedia team completed a review of Media Viewer in recent weeks, and we'd like to share a few highlights of what we learned from this project in 2014.
1. Research
Here are some key findings from our research about this product:
• Media Viewer serves a lot more images than before (17M intentional views/day)
• Most users keep Media Viewer enabled (99.5% enabled)
• Media Viewer key features were found easy to use
• Media Viewer is more useful for readers than active editors
More information can be found in this Media Viewer Research 2014 report:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Media_Viewer/Research_2014 <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Media_Viewer/Research_2014>
See also these companion slides for a visual presentation of more findings:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Media_Viewer_Research_-_2014_Slides… <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Media_Viewer_Research_-_2014_Slides…>
2. Retrospective
The multimedia team also discussed lessons learned from this project in 2014, identifying what worked and what didn’t work, in order to inform future product development.
Here are some highlights of that team review.
The Media Viewer project ran from July 2013 to November 2014 and was more challenging than expected. While the product received favorable or neutral feedback on most Wikimedia sites, it was met with negative reactions from many contributors on the English and German Wikipedias, as well as on Wikimedia Commons. This caused the team to work longer than planned, to improve features based on user feedback.
What worked well:
• Detailed activity and performance metrics.
• Design research -- before and after implementing a feature.
• Working with community champions in different projects.
• Agile development process and tools.
• Unit tests to improve the code.
What didn't work well:
• Many community discussions did not effectively inform product development.
• Surveys were not representative, because they were optional.
• We lacked the tools to get productive feedback from different user groups.
• Juggling feature and platform development at the same time was hard.
• Scope creep; the workload kept growing beyond available resources.
• No clear success metric; we couldn't tell if we had met our goal.
More findings can be found in this Media Viewer Retrospective summary:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Media_Viewer/Retrospective <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Media_Viewer/Retrospective>
Please let us know if you have any questions about this research or retrospective. You’re also welcome to add your feedback on the Media Viewer talk page:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension_talk:Media_Viewer/About#Media_View… <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension_talk:Media_Viewer/About#Media_View…>
I'm grateful to all the team members who worked on these documents, especially Gergő and Gilles. These findings can help us better understand how Media Viewer serves our users — and how we can improve not only this product but also our development and release process.
This will be my last post on behalf of the multimedia team, as I have now transitioned into a new role at the Wikimedia Foundation, working as Movement Communications Manager. Senior engineer Gilles Dubuc is now leading the multimedia team and can answer questions related to upcoming projects.
I’d like to thank all the community members who worked closely with us on this project, as well as my colleagues on the multimedia and product teams. We learned a lot together, and I really enjoyed creating a better product with you all. I look forward to more collaborations in coming years.
Regards as ever,
Fabrice
_______________________________
Fabrice Florin
Movement Communications Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)>
Dear all,
thanks for all your help with answering questions and giving feedback
over the last couple of months. I'm happy to say that we're finally at
a stage where we've hashed 22,452,638 images from Wikimedia Commons
and launched Elog.io in public beta: http://elog.io/
Elog.io is an open API as well as browser plugins, that can query and
get information about images using a perceptual hash that's easy and
quick to calculate in a browser.
What the browser extensions allow you to do is match an image you find
"in the wild" against Wikimedia Commons. If it can be matched against
an image from Commons, it'll show you the title, author, and license,
and give you links back to Wikimedia, the license, and a quick and
handy "Copy as HTML" to copy the image and attribution as a HTML
snippet for pasting into Word, LibreOffice, Wordpress, etc.
Our API provides lookup functions to find information using a URL (the
Commons' page name URL) or using the perceptual hash. You get
information back as JSON in W3C Media Annotations format. of course,
the information you get back is no better than the one provided by the
Commons API, so if you already have a page name URL, you may as well
query it directly, and rely on our API only for searching by
perceptual hashes.
The algorithm we use for calculating perceptual hashes, which you'll
need to query our API, is at http://blockhash.io/
Sincerely,
Jonas
Crossposted to commons-l. This is about making the Video
transcoding/upload tool on labs a bit more visible for potential video
contributors on commons.
Nkansah Rexford <nkansahrexford(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> The video upload convert tool on wmflab, likely is exactly what I need(ed),
> however I wished it was easy to find. Just recently that it was added to the
Good point. We should think about adding it onto
[[Special:UploadWizard]] for example in the form of a third button
below the "Share images from Flickr".
Although I foresee some demand for discussions about this, as the
failed MP4 RfC may be relevant here.
Daniel
Hello everyone,
What is your favorite image or media file about love?
As millions prepare to celebrate Valentine’s Day around the world, we’d like to know how the topic of love is covered on Wikipedia and its sister projects, for a special blog post at the end of next week.
We’re looking for great wiki articles, images, sounds or videos on this topic -- from platonic to fraternal or romantic love.
Please add your suggestions on this email thread -- or on one of these pages:
On Meta:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Love_on_the_wikis
On the Blog:
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/02/06/wiki-articles-about-love/
Be sure to include a link, with a sentence or two about why you picked it!
We welcome your suggestions until Wednesday, Feb. 11, 2015 at midnight PST.
We'll post some of your top picks next Friday on the Wikimedia Blog and social media -- just in time for Valentine’s Day.
Thanks for sharing the love :)
Fabrice
on behalf of the WMF Comms team
_______________________________
Fabrice Florin
Movement Communications Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)
There are an interesting selection about love in the LGBT categories
on Commons. Not surprising as most LGBT campaigning is about "love
rights". :-)
Here are a handful that I would like to see used more widely:
1. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fucking_IKEA.jpeg
- This photo of two men kissing has an interesting background, as it
was created during a protest against Russian censorship of an IKEA
catalog that included a lesbian couple. Apparently the Russian
authorities feel that even acknowledging lesbians live together might
be promoting homosexuality, which is of course, sadly against the law
in that country.
2. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wasteland_company.jpg
- The photographer (Kargaltsev) is well known for his photographs of
gay life and love in New York, this tense shot is one in a series with
the same couple.
3. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Um_beijo_gay_no_parque.jpg ~
"A gay kiss in the park"
- This is a classic kiss during a gay pride event in Brazil, and is in
use in several language Wikipedias to illustrate kissing and
homosexuality.
4.File:Kimbo Kissing Carolyn rszd.jpg
- Another image used to illustrate homosexuality on different
Wikipedias, a lesbian couple in the USA.
Cheers,
Fae
On 7 February 2015 at 00:19, Fabrice Florin <fflorin(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> What is your favorite image or media file about love?
>
> As millions prepare to celebrate Valentine’s Day around the world, we’d like to know how the topic of love is covered on Wikipedia and its sister projects, for a special blog post at the end of next week.
>
> We’re looking for great wiki articles, images, sounds or videos on this topic -- from platonic to fraternal or romantic love.
>
> Please add your suggestions on this email thread -- or on one of these pages:
>
> On Meta:
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Love_on_the_wikis
>
> On the Blog:
> http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/02/06/wiki-articles-about-love/
>
> Be sure to include a link, with a sentence or two about why you picked it!
>
> We welcome your suggestions until Wednesday, Feb. 11, 2015 at midnight PST.
>
> We'll post some of your top picks next Friday on the Wikimedia Blog and social media -- just in time for Valentine’s Day.
>
> Thanks for sharing the love :)
>
>
> Fabrice
> on behalf of the WMF Comms team
>
>
> _______________________________
>
> Fabrice Florin
> Movement Communications Manager
> Wikimedia Foundation
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Commons-l mailing list
> Commons-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
--
faewik(a)gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae
Personal and confidential, please do not circulate or re-quote.
