GLAM/Newsletter/April 2024/Contents/USA report

This Month in GLAM – Volume XIV, Issue IV, April 2024

USA report

WCNA open for submissions, GLAM CSI at the Hackathon, and Meetups

WikiConference North America

WikiConference North America 2024 is happening in Indianapolis, Indiana. The conference's annual Culture Crawl will take place on October 3, followed by conference programming from October 4-6. This year's conference theme will be "Crossroads", inspired by the Indiana state motto and also alluding to the multiple meanings of the word—as the place where Wikimedians from across the continent cross paths, as well as what we hope will be a turning point for participants.

Scholarship applications and program submissions are now open. For more information, please see the Submissions and Scholarship pages. The deadline for both is May 31.

For last year's 2023 WikiConference North America in Toronto, Lane Rasberry summarized the proceedings in a recent Signpost article, "WikiConference North America 2023 in Toronto recap: Pics, tales and videos".

GLAM CSI at Wikimedia Hackathon

The GLAM CSI project (Contributor Study Initiative), is a project to assess the Wikimedia contribution pipeline and technical infrastructure for supporting cultural and heritage partnerships and projects. It aims to create user stories to guide future technology tool development and support.

A survey is currently running that anyone involved with large-scale or complex contributions to Wikimedia projects is encouraged to complete, which can be found at meta:GLAM_CSI#Survey.

Most recently, project leads Andrew Lih (Smithsonian Institution Wikimedian at Large) and Olga Tichonova (WMF) attended the Wikimedia Hackathon in Tallinn, Estonia from 2-5 May, 2024 to introduce the project and to gather feedback. Over three days, they met dozens of Wikimedians in the GLAM and developer community to gain insights on how to best document user stories, ranging from mobile users utilizing the commons:Commons:ISA Tool for Wiki in Africa, to how Wiki Loves Monuments uses the Wikimedia tech infrastructure, to the experiences of Wikimedians in residence in mass metadata uploading. More information can be found at:

Phabricator ticket for the Hackathon and the meta page
Etherpad notes from the first day

Feel free to contact Andrew if you are interested in documenting your user stories. You can also sign up on the meta page to stay informed of developments, or leave a message on the talk page.

(The related AI Sauna was held in Helsinki, Finland immediately after the Hackathon. See the longer report.)

Ivo Kruusamägi, executive director of Wikimedia Eesti, demos some interactive multimedia GLAM projects on an iPad (May 4)
Susanna Ånäs of AvoinGLAM of Finland discussing GLAM issues. (May 5)

WikiPortraits at the International Journalism Festival

WikiPortraits attended the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy, which featured more than 500 speakers from around the world. Among the notable people who were photographed were Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa and Theranos whistleblower Tyler Schultz. Using a ChatGPT-written Python script, we were able to figure out that of the speakers, over 75 had Wikipedia pages, and 50 of those had no photos or poor photos (learning scripts is always a work in progress as it returned Duke Ding of Jin for Jin Ding).

The photographers Jay Dixit and Jennifer 8. Lee were able to get photos from a wide variety of journalists from Africa, Middle East, India, and Ukraine in a very short period of time.

Photos can be found at commons:Category:International Journalism Festival 2024 (uploading still in progress).