A Wikipedian in Residence at the History Museum of Catalonia

The History Museum of Catalonia. Jordi Ferrer. Wikimedia Commons CC-BY-SA 3.0

[[User:Galazan]], a historian and member of Amical Viquipèdia, will be the Wikipedian in Residence at the History Museum of Catalonia, the reference to know our closer Catalan history. Galazan, 29, has a degree in History from the University of Barcelona and is currently studying a Master in Cultural and Natural Heritage management. He frequently edits on Catalan Wikipedia since September 2005, centered in various subjects of social sciences, particularly on his professional insurance. As a Wikipedian in Residence his goal is to "train" museum staff to edit the famous online encyclopedia. In this way the museum professionals will be able to improve content providing them with high quality references.

The task of the resident will be establishing a relationship between the History Museum of Catalonia and the Catalan Wikipedia community through a range of activities, both internal and open to the public. One of the most important will be to expand and improve the quality of the encyclopedia articles related to our War of Succession and 1714. He plans to do some workshops with museum staff to teach them how to edit Wikipedia and solve typical newbie issues. In addition, the museum hosts and manages a network of Catalan Monuments. Other contents of the museum as highlights of its collection and its photographic collections are also some of the goals of the project. We will keep you informed!

"Viquimodernisme: Lucky crossroads": How Wikimedians and a Research Center can work together

NOTE: This is a guest blog post by Esther Solé, Contemporary Art Historian & Catalan Wikimedian

Barcelona's Modernisme is the Catalan version of European Art Nouveau:
"Casa Batlló Interiors". [[User:Amadalvarez]]- Wikimedia Commons. CC-BY-SA. 

In one of his recent raids as a GLAMwiki ambassador, Àlex Hinojo (a.k.a Kippelboy) , knocked on the door of GRACMON, a research group in the History of Contemporary Art and Design at the University of Barcelona.

Traditionally, Wikipedia and its sister projects caused some kind of rejection among Academia, but in this case, suspicion soon gave way to curiosity, and this was replaced by an unprecedented enthusiasm and a proposal : the viquimodernisme project: A project to improve worldwide known Catalan Modernisme presence on Wikipedia

Goal

This wikiproject is based on the fact that Modernisme-related contents on Wikipedia, one of the crown jewels of Catalan art-especially in Barcelona, needed an urgent improvement. Considering that Wikipedia occupies the top positions on Internet search engines, it is normal that Academia agrees that the information presented in this online encyclopedia should be correct and adequate. Who better than the members of GRACMON, world authorities on the Catalan Modernisme, to help us in this goal?

Previous steps

First we did a previous Wikipedia audit, conducted in the summer of 2012, which allowed us to determine the status of the issue and draw the lines of action to propose a methodology and indicators to assess the wikiproject. The audit is available (in Catalan) here. This experiment represents a milestone in the whole of Barcelona & Catalan GLAM projects, and is done with the will of establishing working mechanisms and protocols that will be a reference for future experiments of a similar nature.

Calling teachers and students

On the other hand, GRACMON researchers decided to make an innovative turn on the way of teaching art history subjects in the University of Barcelona, which meant that students would have a specific active role in the realization of this wikiproject: instead of performing traditional course work in the form of stapled sheets of paper that ended up probably in the trash bin, students must edit Wikipedia articles, based on a wikiproject page.

This paradigm shift led to a rethink on how to tackle a task, doing it in an open way, as a constant work in progress. It caused a big change in mind both for students and teachers.

Few aspects of a traditional “homework” remained intact, beyond the search for references and bibliography. Thus, participants were immersed in a world of encyclopedic language, where the code-wiki-syntax is strange, where the community of Wikipedia editors was actively involved and participated and intervened in student's articles. In addition, the work done by students acquired great outreach: rather than regular course works, that may only have two readings (from the student and the teacher), it had changed to produce a text that will be read by thousands and sometimes-great virtue of Wikipedia- could be translated and spread like wildfire worldwide.

How we did it

During the first semester of the academic year 2012-2013, more than one hundred students from three subjects from art history degree and post-degree from the University of Barcelona participated in this wikiproject. Most of them were completely novice to wiki-world, but this has not meant that the result is unsatisfactory: they have created and improved over one hundred articles related to Catalan Modernisme (biographies of artists, research publications of the time, articles on works prominent modernists, etc.) 

Articles have been improved mainly on Catalan Wikipedia, but depending on student's language preference, some of them has also been created or improved on Spanish, French and English Wikipedia. Most of them did not even exist on any Wikipedia, or if existing, they had a room for significant improvement. Our expectations have been surpassed by far, even before wikiproject has come to an end (planned for June 2013).

Avaluation

Teachers did the avaluation in collaboration with Wikimedians, who did a recommendation on how the Wikipedia articles were evolving. The project is still ongoing and now we are about to start our second semester.

When we finished the first semester, we did a survey to the students. Full version in Catalan can be read here. We did a short version in English with some Interesting results:

Volunteer Survey offer to 100 students and answered by 35.

Outreach

Project is still ongoing and we have no final results yet, but it has caused interest among Academia and we will present our final results on the CoupdeFouet International Art Nouveau Congress on Barcelona, this June 2013.

Wikiproject with Disseny Hub Barcelona, a design museum

Disseny Hub Barcelona new building, placed next to the Agbar Tower

I'm proud to announce that during 2012, we've been doing a project in collaboration with the Disseny Hub Barcelona, DHUB, a design museum, in order to value and spread their collection, and to open them to society, thus improving both network presence of the museum, as the Catalan design and its most representative designers. DHUB is a merger between a museum, a centre and a laboratory directed at promoting an understanding and proper use of the design world.

The initiative is a pioneer in content (related to Catalan and Spanish design) and gives free access to some of the contents of the collections of the DHUB. In order to do this, the DHUB has released all of its web texts and numerous official pictures of the pieces of the museum collections.

During the last year, we've been working on this wikiproject, which also presents a selection of 21 pieces representative of Catalan and Spanish industrial design, among which are the BKF chair, a Montesa Impala motorcycle designed by Leopold Milà, a TMC lamp designed by Miguel Milà Sagnier or Cobi, the Barcelona 1992 Summer Olympics figurine designed by Javier Mariscal.


Also noteworthy are sections on DHUBdoc files or design awards, as well as designers, personalities and studies related to the museum collections, as Oriol Bohigas, Bigas Luna, GATCPAC or Antoni Miró, among others.

This first phase of the wikiproject want to have continuity with the co-creation of content around the design on the net, with other sector partners, such as universities or associations.

All information and items of the initiative can be found at the link of Viquiproejcte DHUB. (in Catalan)

NOTE: Read this post in Spanish or Catalan

Catalunya Dades. Looking for a Common ground on Opendata

Crowded venue being introduced to OpenData

About 400 people attended today the 1st Open Data Day in Catalonia, organized by Catalunya Dades (Catalonia Data), a Group convened by representatives from the Government of Catalonia, municipalities, Amical Viquipèdia, universities and other institutions related to Open Data. The conference aimed to disseminate Open Data and free knowledge in Catalonia, using lessons learned, case studies and best practices.

The speakers highlighted the momentum to promote Open Data projects in Catalonia despite the difficulties that institutions and agencies have to change the internal dynamics to make the transition to this new culture. We need Open Data to generate wealth and employment, but also to improve the free access to public information and to regain people's interest in public affairs.

The speakers emphasized the need to spread the benefits of openness and reuse of Data and put it at the service of society as one of the possible ways to overcome the crisis period. It is also important to ensure that private organizations discover publicly available data released, which should allow them to innovate products and services. We must move towards linked data.

As a Wikimedian, I explained how in Catalan wiki we use bots to create some geography Wikipedia entries, how we re-use Government released content in our projects and what we are expecting from Wikidata.

Then we have developed several round tables where representatives of different sectors have debated issues related to Open Data and reuse of information. Some highlighted ideas:

• We live in the information society. We are surrounded by data. Creating apps and services based on Open Data is not easy. We need to Open dynamic data. Those with a high variability.
• Now there are several Open Data portals but everyone works in different formats. EU should legislate same global standards for everyone.
• Public information must be given with quality and proven consistency. Standardization is key.
• Both the public and the private world must collaborate. Local councils can provide highly relevant data from their services.
• The digitization of information has been very important because it affects all sectors and disciplines, revolutionizes the concept of democracy.
• Everything paid with public money should remain in the public domain.
• Providing data has costs for government. 
• Some governments already put a clause in Open Data in public procurements.
• Open Data and linked data is something for everyone. There is some much work to do that we have to distribute it between governments, citizens and businesses. The collaboration would help to minimize costs.
• The impact of Open Data in the next 6 to 8 years will be higher than what the one web has meant in our lives.

Nearly 400 people attended the conference, which demonstrates the interest in Open Data. We will learn together.

Amical Viquipèdia is founding member of Catalunya Dades, a group of actors (governments, universities, businesses, communities, developers, and professional from different fields related to communication, technology, open knowledge ...), which seeks to involve society in the process of creating value from free knowledge and Open Data.

Note: This post is an adaptation and English translation of a text written by @joanasoteras in Catalan and published here under a CC-BY license.

Modest Cuixart edit-a-thon

A whole Friday morning, in a Town next to the beach...and improving Wikipedia? Yes, Wikipedians do it!

Within the project of Wikipedian in Residence in Palafrugell, our colleague David Parreño organized the first Edit-a-thon in the municipality, placed at the Cuixart Foundation. Modest Cuixart was one of the most outstanding Catalan painters of the second half of the twentieth century. Unfortunately he passed away in 2007.

Edit-a-thons a great place where newbies
feel comfortable to get in touch with the wiki world

His article on Catalan wiki was pretty bad, so we organized an edit-a-thon at the foundation to improve it together.

10 Wikipedians attended, 4 of which newbie users. Even a user came from the French Wikipedia to give us a hand with translations. Big thank you!

At the beggining of the event, Cuixart'son welcomed us and showed us the workshop where his father used to work, telling us some interesting anecdotes. Then we spent the next 4 hours improving and extending the Catalan painter's biography on Wikipedia.

We had the invaluable help of the Documentation Center of the Contemporary Art Museum of Barcelona, the MACBA, who prepared a complete Cuixart Bibliography, and also from the Municipal Archives of Palafrugell, who offered us quality literature, as well as people of the Josep Pla Foundation, who came to support us.

Here's the article after the activity. It is an excellent example of how a cheerful and relaxed activity can collaborate to improve the presence of our most outstanding artists in the network. From local to global.