Wikipedia:GLAM/Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa/The whole GLAM package/Set up your project
 | How to use this manual · Set up your project · Select your topic · Select images · Make Wikidata edits · Upload images · Create and edit articles · Review and promote · Project checklist |
Getting up and running means finding the people who can get the project done and fit it into the rest of their work. As a group, you’ll work out your goals and set the scope – giving you a smart, realistic, but exciting project to do.
Find your people[edit]
Checklist task: Build team
A good project team will be made up of enthusiastic people who have their specialisations but collaborate well. Get yourself a project lead, a subject matter expert, and a data wrangler.
| Role | Example jobs | Responsibility | Example tasks |
|---|---|---|---|
| Project lead | Digital Content Specialist | Keep an eye on what’s happening, what still needs to be done, and get blocks unblocked |
|
| Subject matter expert (SME) | Curator, Researcher | Use in-depth knowledge of the topic and collections to get the right stuff out |
|
| Data wrangler | Database Specialist | Get information in and out of the GLAM collection management system and guide connecting up with Wiki platforms |
|
Don’t be too strict about how you divide up tasks. You’re a small team and will probably all need to help each other out.
Ideally, one of you will already be an experienced Wiki editor, but you can also find a volunteer to be your support person if you have a willingness to learn and a few cups of coffee.
You’ll benefit from some other support roles, though they don’t need to be involved end-to-end.
- Community contacts – local Wiki editors with experience and interest in the topic your project is focusing on.
- Communications – staff in your organisation who can help you promote the project and its results, both internally and externally.
- Tool and platform specialists – people who work on or use OpenRefine and Wikidata who can help you understand both what’s possible, and how to do it.
_-_The_Noun_Project.svg){kind=small} | Example Te Papa’s core project team was a digital outreach specialist, a curator, and a collection management system specialist. At the start, only the curator had some experience editing Wikipedia, but we got more support from much more knowledgeable editors inside and outside the museum, and we gained experience in Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons together and by linking up with Wikimedians in the community. We also got fantastic support from Sandra Fauconnier at OpenRefine, who wanted us to help test the then-new bulk upload functionality. |
Hold your kickoff meeting[edit]
Checklist task: Hold kickoff meeting
Get your core project team together for a kickoff meeting – this is for establishing the parameters of the project, so don’t worry about articles or images yet.
| Is this kind of project right for you? | It’s okay if the answer is no! Maybe you need to work on opening up image licensing first, or want to support a community-driven effort, or have too much else on. |
| What is your museum getting out of this? | See if you can draw a line from what your museum wants to the project.
There will also be practical benefits like updated collection records, or the chance to improve data management standards. |
| How much time can you commit? | Remember that some tasks can be shared but others will probably sit with one person. This might affect not just how long things take but what order you need to do them in.
Think about not just hours per week per team member, but also how much you can commit over the next few months. |
| How will you keep the project on track? | Figure out the tools and methods that will help you make decisions and stay in touch. Decide what you need to write down and where you’re going to save that information. Having a shared folder or virtual space is helpful. |
| Example
Te Papa had committed to exploring the usefulness of different platforms for digital outreach, and wanted to build staff capacity on Wikipedia.
During kickoff, the team members were clear about what skills and knowledge they could bring to the project, and also had a realistic discussion about their other commitments. The project team held fortnightly planning meetings, used a kanban-style Planner board in Teams to break down and track tasks, and had a running team chat to share resources and ask questions. |
Set your scope[edit]
Checklist task: Set project scope
Decide now how much you want to get done, and then do your best to stick to it – scope creep is real! If you change your mind during the project, discuss it as a team so you know it’s for a good reason.
Go through the questions below together – they’ll help you create a clear, fixed task list that’s based on your goals and the material you have available.
| What’s a manageable number of articles, images, and items? | Think about how much stuff you’ll have to review, and remember you’ll be doing a mixture of manual and automated updates. You might also be creating supporting material like an upload schema. |
| Are rights already sorted for both data and images? | Is your data open? If so, is it open enough to share on Wiki? If not, can you get agreement to open the subset you’ll share for this project? |
| What’s part of the project and what’s business as usual? | Talk to your managers and directors about the work you are planning to do, and how it fits in with your organisation’s strategy and your own workplan. |
| Do you want to roundtrip data from Wikidata? | Data roundtripping for GLAMS
Roundtripping example from the Biodiversity Heritage Library Do you have the ability to both export from and import into your collections database? If so, data already in Wikidata could be brought back into your system to enrich your records. Even just adding the Wikidata identifier (Q number or QID) will make it easier to connect with the information held by other organisations. |
| Example Te Papa’s forget-me-not (Myosotis) project was aiming for around 300 images, which the OpenRefine team said was a good number for testing the then-new bulk upload functionality. Te Papa’s project was primarily about the images and data, and articles have been ongoing work. Keep in mind this needs to fit in for the writer and be recognised as valuable work by their manager, and the larger strategy of the organisation. |
Rights![edit]
Has your organisation already openly licenced your data and images? Everything that goes onto Wiki platforms has to be open, meaning it has to be legally reusable with only minimal restrictions.
Usually GLAMs will have a single license for all their data, especially if they already share it in downloadable datasets or an API.
GLAMs probably have many different licences on their images, depending on how old they are, who took them, and policies about reproductions.
| Example
Te Papa’s published data is CC BY, with the attribution requirement waived. If data isn’t okay to share, we don’t publish it, for example personal information, some mātauranga Māori (indigenous knowledge of the Māori people of Aotearoa New Zealand), or endangered species exact locations. Te Papa’s images might be licensed All Rights Reserved, CC BY-NC-ND, or CC BY. If copyright (under New Zealand law) has lapsed, they’re marked “No known copyright” instead. We only load images that are CC BY or out of copyright, which for us means mainly images of specimens or historic art and photographs. Sharing other images would either require getting an exception to policy about some of the images we create, or asking the original work’s creator to open up the license. |
If you don’t have material that’s open enough, you can still look into other options.
- Seek permission to release just the subset of data/images you need for the project, and make that agreement available online so it can be linked as a reference.
- Just release out of copyright images – but keep in mind you’ll need to either adhere to or have a clear exception to United States copyright law in addition to the law of your own country. More information on working this out and how to add copyright tags is available in Wikimedia Commons
Licensing resources[edit]
If you’re uploading images taken by your organisation, you aren’t actually contributing your own work as Wikimedia defines it. Instead, you need to accompany the upload with the licencing details that prove the image is freely usable.
If the image already has its own page on your website that specifies the license, you can use that link as a reference. If that’s not an option, you could create a page on your website about the project that includes a statement listing the images and the licence you’re using.
To upload someone else’s work that isn’t owned by your organisation, the creator needs to clearly give permission. You can ask them to publicly release it under an open license, for example by changing it on the platform they uploaded it to: Flickr, YouTube, iNaturalist and more all have options for this.
You can also ask the creator to email a permission statement to Wikimedia. Example requests for permission includes information about this process, text to use in your request, and a link to a tool the creator can use to generate a clear and definite permission statement.
Next up: Select your topic