Community Outreach Exemplars
Sum of All Paintings is a volunteer-organized effort to represent “every notable painting” in the world on Wikidata.105 This project has become a focal point for data modeling, not only for paintings and other works of art, but related topics like artistic methods, creators, and institutions holding the works. Sum of All Paintings and the larger cultural heritage community on Wikidata have been a driving force behind ingestion of data from GLAM institutions around the world.106 This community has allowed for the creation of several prototype tools for browsing heritage collections, such as Crotos.107
The Wikimedia community has been running the Wiki Loves Monuments campaign since 2011 to document listed monuments and heritage sites.108 Since its inception, Wiki Loves Monuments has generated millions of freely licensed, high-quality images of heritage sites, and created a Guinness World Record109 for the largest photography competition in the world. In the process of running the contest, the community collected and reconciled heritage registries from hundreds of jurisdictions, creating the biggest monuments database in the world. In the last few years, Wikimedia Sweden, with the support of a major Swedish grant and in collaboration with UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), converted much of that database into Wikidata, and imported additional heritage registries into Wikidata as well.110
How Can an Institution Get Started Doing Outreach on Wikidata?
- Devote staff time to Wikidata by writing participation into job descriptions, and giving release time and professional development time to participate in Wikimedia events. Examples of positions explicitly incorporating Wikidata include a coordinator of Wikipedia initiatives at Brigham Young University Library, in the library’s department of Marketing, Design, and Communications, and the digital initiatives metadata librarian
