Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Library/Newsletter/March-April2015

• to define a set of properties that can be used by citations, infoboxes, and Wikisource.
• to map and import all relevant metadata that currently is spread across Commons, Wikipedia, and Wikisource.
• to establish methods to interact with this metadata from different projects.
• to create a large open bibliographic database within Wikidata.
• to reveal, build, and maintain community stakeholdership for the inclusion and management of source metadata in wikidata.

(list from Wikidata:WikiProject Source MetaData)

TWL continues to engage non-English Wikimedians to set up Library branches on their projects. TWL coordinators have created a new branch setup guide to help editors with the page setup and organization (translations of the guide are very welcome). This is a community-led approach; TWL recommends a consultation with the editing community in each new language to help create branches that serve their editors' specific research needs. Any multilingual readers are encouraged to join in on the setup drive.

Rolling out

Brand new branches are being organized with volunteers in several languages:

• Spanish: With potential new Spanish-language resources from JSTOR, and a good group of interested es.wikipedia editors, TWL hopes to get this branch on its feet soon. Contact for support: Patrick
• Finnish: After meeting the Finnish Chapter's partnerships team at GLAM-Wiki 2015, and discovering they were thinking about a branch, Alex was put in contact with several fi.wikipedia contributors and the Finnish Chapter and they have started developing a conversation. Join the conversation on Finnish Wikipedia or contact Alex for information.
• French: Potential French-language resources are being finalized, and TWL is looking for interested fr.wikipedia editors to coordinate them and begin branch setup. Contact for support: Alex
• Norwegian: With support from the chapter and the National Library of Norway, this branch is scheduled to get started in May. Contact for support: Jake

Ramping up and next opportunities

Existing branches on Arabic, Chinese and German are looking for ways to expand and better serve their communities. Potential next projects for expansion include:

• Rapsar
  in November, this branch is already off the ground, but needs more participation and engagement
• Dutch: At GLAM-Wiki 2015, Alex met a number of interested community members, and we are beginning to get interest for donations from Dutch-language publishers. Let him know if you are interested in joining the group.
• Farsi: TWL is seeking Farsi editors to help with this effort
• Hebrew: Several he.wiki editors are interested in helping, but more involvement will help get this branch off the ground

This guest post was written by Timothy Thompson and Mairelys Lemus-Rojas of the University of Miami Libraries. They are the developers and maintainers of the Remixing Archival Metadata Project. "We welcome perspectives from the Wikipedia community on this project."

Many galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM institutions) have acknowledged the benefits of using Wikipedia as a means to increase the visibility of their collections. Yet even for information professionals like librarians and archivists, it can be daunting to find the time and resources to tackle the Wikipedia learning curve and become actively engaged as Wikipedia editors. In the spring of 2013, a group of librarians, programmers, and archivists at the University of Miami Libraries came together to work on a project that could help bridge this Wikipedia participation gap.

We wanted to see whether it was possible to take some of our existing metadata, remix it, and republish it to Wikipedia; we postulated that a tool that did this would help librarians and archivists see some of the parallels between their existing standards for resource description and the way that Wikipedia structures its data, expressed as wiki markup. Archivists, in particular, have a tradition of contextual description that emphasizes the biographical and historical background of their collections. Many archival finding aids include an introductory section that reads in some cases like a brief encyclopedia entry. Moreover, a new metadata standard called Encoded Archival Context—Corporate Bodies, Person, and Families (EAC-CPF) had recently been established to encode this kind of contextual information. So, that was where we started with RAMP, the Remixing Archival Metadata Project.

Essentially, the RAMP editor lets you generate records for creators of archival collections and publish the content of those records as Wikipedia pages. RAMP extracts biographical information from Encoded Archival Description (EAD) finding aids using EAC-CPF and converts it from XML into wiki markup for publication to the English Wikipedia. Along the way, it also allows for the integration of additional data from other sources such as WorldCat Identities and Virtual International Authority File (VIAF).

To test the tool and its associated workflows, we started with a thematic focus on a set of theater collections from the university's Cuban Heritage Collection (CHC). We reviewed a total of 32 finding aids to determine which ones had the most complete biographical content and identified 18 target collections for which to create Wikipedia entries. As a central part of the editing process, we released the text of the relevant finding aids using a CC-BY-SA license, per Wikipedia guidelines. The creators of these collections included a range of Cuban and Cuban American actors, directors, playwrights, and theater companies. Working on these articles also allowed us to strengthen coverage in the English Wikipedia of an underrepresented group of artists.

During the year following completion of the pilot project with CHC theater collections, we tracked web traffic and referrals from Wikipedia to our collections and found a noticeable increase in pageviews. From April to September 2014, there was a 67% total increase in pageviews for the 18 finding aid pages in the project over the previous six months of Web traffic (258 pageviews from October 2013 to March 2014 versus 432 pageviews from April to September 2014). Direct referrals from Wikipedia accounted for about 59% of this increase (102 pageviews). Although the absolute numbers are not large, the relative impact of this increased visibility is significant given the limited amount of traffic these pages had received prior to the pilot. Based on our positive experience with the pilot project, we have continued to use the tool to harvest and republish descriptive metadata from CHC finding aids. A list of pages created or edited using RAMP can be found at "Category:Articles with information extracted by the RAMP editor."

RAMP is still very much an experiment, and this initial phase of the project has focused on proving its viability. Moving forward, we would like to begin using OAuth for secure login functionality. RAMP has already been registered as a MediaWiki OAuth consumer, and we are investigating possibilities for integration. More generally, we would like to shift our focus toward linked data and incorporate a wider range of metadata--broadening the scope of the project to something like Remixing All the Metadata rather than only archival metadata. Achieving this goal would involve a significant redesign of the software, most likely using a NoSQL database platform like eXistdb.

• Try out RAMP: https://tools.wmflabs.org/ramp/
• See the RAMP GitHub code: https://github.com/UMiamiLibraries/RAMP

From the community

• Outreach – Spanish editathons at libraries: [1]
• WMF adopts Open Access research policy:[2][3]
• WikiData's WikiProject Open Access launches: [4]
• Wikimedia sues NSA [5], Jimmy and Lila do a Reddit AMA about it: [6]
• Wikimedia Foundation adopts Open Access Policy to support free knowledge: [7]
• GLAM-Wiki US Consortium relaunches "GLAM-wiki & what's next": [8]
• Wikimedia France publishes insightful partnership policy: [9]

Of note

• April 23rd was World Book and Copyright Day, raising awareness of copyright's impact on the developing world: [10]
• Stanford Libraries releases EarthWorks, a GIS tool: [11]
• OCLC updates the RDF of VIAF: [12]
• DPLA hits 10 million items: [13]
• PLoS journal Computational Biology launches peer-reviewed topic pages written for Wikipedia: [14] and the first topic page is up [15]!
• Oxford Dictionaries acquires multilingual online language portal bab.la: [16]
• U.S. publishers donate $250 USD worth of e-books to low-income students: [17]

Worth reading

• "Open access and research data management: Horizon 2020 and beyond" (LibFocus): [18]
• "Bridging the Journal–Wikipedia gap" (PLOS): [19]
• "Using Wikipedia: a scholar redraws academic lines by including it in his syllabus" (The Conversation): [20]
• "Professors See Shift in Academic Attitudes on Wikipedia" (The Crimson): [21]
• "The open access advantage considering citation, article usage and social media attention" (Springer, ironically not OA): [22]
• "Feminist Encounters with Wikipedia (Video)" (The New School): [23]
• "The GNU Manifesto Turns Thirty" (New Yorker): [24]
• "Gaming Altmetrics"(Altmetric): [25]
• Jack Andraka publishes his book Breakthrough about using Wikipedia to diagnose cancer: [26]
• Beyond Beall's List: Better Understanding Predatory Publishers (ACRL): [27]
• DigitalScholarship.org releases Altmetrics bibliography: [28]
• New Journal launch: "A radical publishing collective: the Journal of Radical Librarianship": [29]
• "Where does information in Wikipedia come from?": [30]
• MIT publishes LibGuide of open APIs: [31]

Data dump

• Project GITenberg launches to curate a free and open library of books: [32]
• Open Data Resource: OrgRef Contains Data About More than 31,000 Academic and Research Organizations Around the World [33]
• National Science Foundation Releases Plan for Public Access to NSF-Funded Research: [34]
• UNESCO's Open Access (OA) Curriculum is now online: [35]
• SpaceX takes advantage of new public domain and Creative Commons licensing options on Flickr: [36]
• National Endowment for the Humanities and Mellon Foundation provide $1 million to convert out-of-print books into e-books with a Creative Commons license: [37]

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