News

Tag: community engagement

You can now add automatically generated citations to millions of books on Wikipedia

Wikipedia editors can now draw on WorldCat, the world’s largest database of books, to generate citations on Wikipedia thanks to a collaboration between OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) and the Wikimedia Foundation's Wikipedia Library program.

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Wikipedia builds a digital library system

Through the Wikipedia Library program, the resources available to Wikipedians continue to grow, allowing these editors to use the best sources available to improve Wikipedia.

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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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Switzerland’s ETH-Bibliothek is uploading 134,000 images to Wikimedia Commons

"We are trying to bring the material to where the users are": the uploads from Switzerland's largest public scientific and technical library include photos from noted aviator Walter Mittelholzer, who flew to places around the world in the 1920s and 1930s.

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Engaging librarians (and others) through social technologies: A #1lib1ref think-piece

This campaign was more than an outreach effort: it helped us to explore new technologies that facilitate diverse communities to participate in Wikipedia. To support a clear call to action for librarians, we incorporated three social technologies to grow the campaign: social media, hashtags (both inside and outside of Wikipedia), and microcontributions. Together they helped us share an inviting and compelling story of collaboration between Wikipedia and libraries.

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Writing an open-access encyclopedia in a closed-access world

On Friday, Elsevier, one of the world’s largest academic publishers, announced its recent partnership with the Wikipedia Library—a program that helps editors access reliable sources to improve Wikipedia. The collaboration gave 45 ScienceDirect accounts to Wikipedia volunteers, to use the database’s scholarly literature for research when writing and editing the encyclopedia. The announcement led to….

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What happens when you give a Wikipedia editor a research library?

The Wikipedia Visiting Scholars program gives editors special access to university and library resources, which helps them improve content quality and support new collaborations, as part of the Wikipedia Library project.

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