A teacher trying Kiwix

First grants announced from the Wikimedia Endowment to support technical innovation across Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects

The Wikimedia Endowment, the long-term fund established in 2016 to support the future of Wikimedia sites, has announced its first recipients of grant funding. The initiatives that will receive grant funding include Abstract Wikipedia, Kiwix, Machine Learning, and Wikidata.

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WikibaseNYC conference explores the frontier of linked open data infrastructure

When you think about the work of art historians or genetics researchers, installing database software is not the first thing that comes to mind. Yet, from 19 to 21 September, Wikimedians, art curators, and scientists gathered at the New Museum in New York City’s Lower East Side for a three-day workshop to talk about an….

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Many faces of Wikibase: Rhizome’s archive of born-digital art and digital preservation

Rhizome, an arts organization in New York City, was one of the early adopters of Wikibase, having been using it since 2015 for its archive of born-digital art and digital preservation activities. Sandra Fauconnier interviewed Dragan Espenschied (Rhizome’s preservation director), Lyndsey Moulds (software curator), and Lozana Rossenova (external Ph.D. researcher) to ask them why and….

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Many faces of Wikibase: Cataloging the history of the Illuminati

Dr. Olaf Simons works as a historian at the University of Erfurt’s Gotha Research Centre. He is the initiator of FactGrid, a database for historians. As a long-term Wikipedia editor, he grasped the potential of Wikibase for historical research early on. Among the treasure trove of data he has recorded with Wikibase’s help is an….

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Making women more visible online—with Wikidata tools!

To celebrate International Women's Day and Women's History Month, Wikimedians around the world make a concerted effort each March to add and edit articles about women in Wikipedia. You can also have an impact (and fun!) by adding information about women to Wikidata, Wikimedia's multilingual knowledge base. And there are quite a few interesting and fun, volunteer-developed tools to help you with that.

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How we’re using machine learning to visually enrich Wikidata

Only 2.5 million of 45 million Wikidata items have an image attached. A new algorithm helps people find relevant and high-quality images to add to Wikidata items.

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From the life of Wikidata

With the Wikidata Concepts Monitor (WDCM) we can now begin to discover how our communities use knowledge across more than Wikimedia 800 projects.

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The Metropolitan Museum of Art makes 375,000 images of public domain art freely available under Creative Commons Zero

Today, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, known by many as the Met, announced that it is placing more than 375,000 images of public-domain works in the museum’s collection under a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) dedication. The release, which covers images of the great majority of the museum’s holdings, is part of the Met’s Open Access initiative and will….

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Wikimedia Foundation receives $3 million grant from Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to make freely licensed images accessible and reusable across the web

The funding will support Wikimedia community efforts to enable structured data on Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository with more than 35 million media files.

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Why you should be paying attention to Wikidata and GLAM

As a collaborative project, Wikidata is looking for more partners to fill in data gaps. Every one of the initiatives listed above needs help matching data from important collections to existing Wikidata entries, or help for the Connected Open Heritage community in prioritizing the next source of cultural data to target and improve.

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