A call to action: Wikidata-fy your Commons photos
By Martin Poulter, Wikimedian in Residence at the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford
The speed at which Wikidata is acquiring descriptions of paintings, sculptures and other museum holdings is impressive, but there is much further to go. It’s ironic that at the same time, we already have an enormous art database hiding in plain sight.
The Commons index of Indian art may be the largest digital collection of Indian art ever created. Its collection of Cities of France in art may be the biggest such index in the world. No institution has collected as many pictures of astrolabes as are in the Commons astrolabe category. The superlatives go on.
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What are WikiJournals?
This article was jointly authored by Thomas Shafee and Jack Nunn from the WikiJournals board, and edited by John Lubbock of Wikimedia UK.
The WikiJournals are a new group of peer-reviewed, open-access academic journals which are free to publish in. The twist is that articles published in them are integrated into Wikipedia. At the moment, there are three:
www.WikiJMed.org (the original medical journal)
www.WikiJSci.org (science, technology, engineering and mathematics)
www.WikiJHum.org (humanities, arts, and social sciences)
WikiJournals are also highly unusual for academic journals, as they’re free for both readers and authors!
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How Wikipedia infiltrated academia
Blog John Lubbock, Communications Coordinator of Wikimedia UK
It was about 2007 when Wikipedia hit the mainstream. Millions of students were using one website to get an introduction to their new course subjects, and many, of course, were not particularly careful about their use of copy and paste.
In a way, Wikipedia was the victim of its own success. It expanded rapidly and gained a place in the public consciousness before the community and organisations that support it had a chance to catch up. Wikipedia is supported by a network of charities, with the Wikimedia Foundation – which owns Wikipedia– based in San Francisco, and local Wikimedia chapters set up in other countries where big editing communities existed and had begun to organise themselves. Wikimedia UK wasn’t formally established until 2009.
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- Read more at blog.wikimedia.org.uk
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