User:John Cummings/SIDS

Wikimedia and Small Island Developing States

This page is an early draft for Small Island Developing States interested in sharing information through Wikimedia Projects thought the Connected Open Heritage Projects. Because Small Island Developing States may be in a different situation to other countries we have produced this guide.

The aim of the Connected Open Heritage Project is to enhance cultural and linguistic diversity online by improving knowledge, data and information including photographs, archives, references on Immovable Cultural Heritage on Small Island Developing States on Wikimedia Projects. The main activities are

1. Adding data from National Registers of Immovable Cultural Heritage to Wikidata.
   
2. Add photographs from archives to Wikimedia.
   
3. Create and improve Wikipedia articles on Immovable Cultural Heritage in Small Island Developing States using existing descriptions.
   

It is possible to work on other subjects including intangible cultural heritage and the natural world.

For all questions please contact John Cummings, Wikimedian in Residence at UNESCO at J.Cummings@UNESCO.org

About Wikimedia Projects and Creative Commons licenses

Wikimedia is a global movement whose mission is to bring free educational content to the world. Wikimedia is the collective name for the Wikimedia movement, revolving around a group of inter-related online projects. Wikimedia projects are hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation and a group of Wikimedia chapters support the improvement of the projects locally through activities including running events and providing training to external organisations. Wikipedia is a project to build free encyclopedias in all languages of the world. Virtually anyone with Internet access is free to contribute by contributing neutral, cited information. Wikidata aims to create a free knowledge base about the world that can be read and edited by humans and machines alike. It provides data in all the languages of the Wikimedia projects, and allows for the central access to data in a similar vein as Wikimedia Commons does for multimedia files. Wikimedia Commons aims to provide a central repository for free photographs, diagrams, maps, videos, animations, music, sounds, spoken texts, and other free media. It is a multilingual project with contributors speaking dozens of languages, that serves as a central repository for all Wikimedia projects. Wikivoyage aims to create the world's largest free, complete and up-to-date world-wide travel guide. Wikivoyage was launched in January 2013 and is written by volunteers in the same spirit of sharing knowledge that makes travel so enjoyable. Wikisource is a multilingual project to archive a collection of free and open content texts. It is not only a superior format for storing classics, laws, and other free works as hypertext, but it also serves as a base for translating these texts. Wikisource has several editions in many individual languages.

If you have any questions please see the Frequently Asked Questions section at the bottom of the page or email J.Cummings@UNESCO.org

Benefits for Small Island Developing States contributing to Wikimedia

The main benefits for Small Island Developing States contributing to Wikimedia projects are:

1. Wikimedia projects have a huge audience meaning that more people will learn about your country.
2. Tools exist to measure the outcomes of working on Wikimedia projects through easy to use online tools.

For these reasons many organisations have worked with Wikimedia.

More people to see your information Wikipedia is the 7th most popular website in the world. Wikimedia projects receive between 16 - 23 billion page views per month (including 6.5 billion on mobile devices) There are 375 - 500 million unique visitors per month Wikipedia is available in 292 languages Wikipedia Zero provides Wikimedia projects to 600 million people in 64 countries on their mobile phones with no data charges. Wikimedia content is reused by many organisations including by Google in its Knowledge Graph.

Tools to measure outcomes There are several tools that exist to measure outcomes on Wikimedia projects including: Number of page views of a specific Wikipedia page or set of pages Number of times an image or other media file is viewed and what pages it is used on across all language Wikimedia sites.

Organisations who have contributed to Wikimedia Many organisations have worked with Wikimedia including contributing media and text content and creating and improving Wikipedia articles. These organisations include The British Library Wellcome Library list list A list of case studies are available here.

Add data from National Registers of Immovable Cultural Heritage to Wikidata

Wikidata Wikidata aims to create a multilingual free knowledge base about the world that can be read and edited by humans and machines alike, it hosts data that can be used on Wikimedia projects and beyond. By adding data to Wikidata you can ensure the data on your subject is well covered and up to date in all Wikimedia project languages. All data on Wikidata is released under Creative Commons CC0 (public domain). However individual facts and identifiers, such as numbers and IDs are not copyrightable. For more information on contributing data please go here

Reusing Wikidata data Once information on immovable cultural heritage has been added to Wikidata it can be used in many ways including: Histropedia: uses data from Wikipedia and Wikidata to automatically generate interactive timelines with events linked to Wikipedia articles. Example: Timeline of the Apollo missions Wikidata Graph Builder:: uses data from Wikidata to create graphs of concepts and their related concepts. Example: Parent taxons of the Blue Whale Wikidata Query Service: A service that offers the ability to run complex queries on items in Wikidata, and related tools. Example: World Heritage sites

Add photographs from archives to Wikimedia

Wikimedia Commons Wikimedia Commons aims to provide a central repository for free photographs, diagrams, maps, videos, animations, music, sounds, spoken texts, and other free media. It is a multilingual project with contributors speaking dozens of languages, that serves as a central repository for all Wikimedia projects.

Depending on if your images are already available on your website or on Flickr there are two approaches

1. Change the license of images already available online either on your website or Flickr.
2. Upload the images to your website or Flickr.

Note: Setting up a Flickr account is useful for uploading new photographs quickly

Change the license of images already available online Change the license of the images on your website ▼ Change the license of images on Flickr ▼ Sign in to your Flickr account Click You in the menu at the top of the screen and then click Organise Drag the files you would like to change the license of, or alternatively click select all Click Permissions then change licensing Chose Attribution Share-Alike Creative Commons and then Change License and then Thanks

Upload images Upload images to Flickr ▼ If the photographs are not yet available online the easiest way to make the photos available on Wikipedia is to upload them to Flickr under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license. Go to https://www.flickr.com/https://www.flickr.com/ and clicking Sign Up Once you have logged in to your account go to https://www.flickr.com/photos/upload/ Select the photos you want to upload Add titles to your photos Add descriptions to your photos e.g what the photo depicts Under Owner settings change the license to Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons Click Upload Photos Once the photos have been uploaded please email John Cummings, Wikimedian in Residence at UNESCO at J.Cummings@UNESCO.org to arrange for them to be transferred to Wikimedia Commons (the photo site for Wikipedia). We can then inform Wikipedia editors that the photos are available to use on Wikipedia articles. Upload images to your website ▼

Measuring Outcomes of sharing images

The GLAMorgan tool exists to measure where your images are used on Wikipedia and how many times those pages are viewed. Photographs from your Small Island Developing State will be uploaded to a specific category on Wikimedia Commons, the media site for Wikipedia. Photographs on Wikimedia Commons have categories to help people search for specific topics. The category name will be given to you when the photographs are uploaded.

1. Go to the GLAMorgan tool 2. Enter the name of your category into the search box and press the Get file usage data button, you can also change the date to see page views for different time periods. 3. Depending on the number of files in the category it will take between a few seconds and a few minutes to provide the information (you will see the number of pages left counting down). Results are shown in the following format files in category tree: shows how many files are used) pages use those files: shows how many pages use the files file views in X: shows the number of times all the files used are viewed on Wikimedia pages that month. 4. By default the tool will only show the 25 most used files, to see the usage of all files click Showing only the top 25 files; show all at the bottom of the page.

Create and improve Wikipedia articles on Immovable Cultural Heritage

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a to free-access, collaboratively created, free-content online encyclopedia. It is free to acccess and funded through donations, it is created by volunteers who collaborate often an article is written by 10s or even 100s of people. Wikipedia is made available under a Creative Commons license meaning anyone can reuse most content on Wikipedia. Wikipedia is available in over 290 different languages and currently has over 38 million articles. Some language Wikipedias are very large e.g English has over 5 million articles and French has over 1.7 million articles where as some languages are much smaller e.g Welsh has 70,000 articles and Samoan has 730 articles.

Text from your website or publications can be made available on Wikimedia and be used to create Wikipedia articles about subjects including places, species and concepts by changing the copyright notice on the pages the text appears on. To do this simply change the copyright notice on the pages the text appears on your website to: All text on this page is licensed under the CC-BY-SA 4.0 license. Note: you can customise this message to define which text on a page is available under Creative Commons Once you have done this please contact John Cummings, Wikimedian in Residence at UNESCO at J.Cummings@UNESCO.org to arrange for the text to be added to Wikimedia projects.

Writing and improving Wikipedia articles

Wikipedia is one of the most used educational resources in the world and written collaboratively by over 70,000 regular contributors. Wikipedia is a valuable way of reaching a large number of people with information about your Small Island Developing State, its species, landscapes and concepts. Wikimedia chapters (organisations supporting Wikimedia in many countries) are able to offer free training for organisations interested in contributing to Wikimedia projects. To see how many times a Wikipedia article is viewed: Go to the Wikipedia page views tool Click the x in the Pages field to remove any example pages Enter the name of the article or articles you would like to see the page views for If you would like to see another time period use the calendar tool If you would like to see page views in languages other than English change the Project from en. to your language e.g use es. for Spanish, you can find your prefix here in the wiki column. You can add multiple articles to the graph simply by writing them in For more information please contact John Cummings, Wikimedian in Residence at UNESCO at John Cummings, Wikimedian in Residence at UNESCO at J.Cummings@UNESCO.org

Reusing content from Wikimedia

Almost all content on Wikimedia can be reused by anyonem this includes:

Photos and other media All images on Wikimedia Commons are free to use for any purpose, including commercially, a simple guide for reusing images from Wikimedia Commons is available here.

Text Almost all text on all language Wikimedia projects can be resued by anyone, please click here to find more information.

Data All data on Wikidata is available under CC0 (public domain) meaning that is can be used for an purpose without attribution.

QRpedia A QRpedia code is a QR code that takes the user to the Wikipedia article for a subject in their own language by detecting the language of the user's phone. It is a very useful tool and has been used by several organisations to provide infromation to their visitors in their own language. To create a QRpedia code simply copy the URL of a Wikipedia article of you choice and paste into the QRpedia code creator at QRpedia.org.

Frequently Asked Questions

Coming soon