The aim of this presentation is to show how Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, the
Wikimedia project and also OpenStreetMap and other resources can be used as open infrastructure
for research.
We're talking about websites that are based on an open infrastructure, so they're based
on open and free software and of course they have all content that is available openly.
What is also interesting about this ecosystem is that it's incredibly multilingual, so
you have a really wide community of contributors in over 300 languages.
And even more, it's one of the biggest existing online communities and this is obviously a
feature if you want to collaborate with citizens, which is one of the aims of OpenScience,
so working and collaborating among people and institutions.
Also something that is also valuable is the fact that we're talking about resources that
can host different kinds of content.
So it can be data, but it can be also images, audio, documents with also a community that
can contribute in different ways in improving this content.
It can be restoration or improvement of images.
It can be also adding captions.
It can be transcribing documents.
There are many advantages in those projects.
Some of those are very well known.
The visibility is probably one of the biggest.
We're talking about for Wikipedia, 28 billion views per month.
We're talking about the visibility that Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Commons have provided to
collection like the Met collection, the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
It moved from a collection that was viewed two million times to 10 million times.
So the visibility of those projects is very impressive.
But also we're talking about an international community, a community that has also chapters
around the world and the desire of enlarging the community with policies and with funding
that have been created.
Also we're talking about reusable resources, so a resource that really provides content,
information data that are really available also to people that don't have particularly
technical skills.
And also there are other features like the fair data principles that are applied also
on all those resources, but also an attention to new ethical principles, the care principles,
or the synergy with open government and with GLAMS, so with cultural institutions.
So those resources are already used in research.
Wikidata is probably one of the major examples.
And the beautiful project, SCOLIA, is one of the examples that you might access that
provides information about researchers and topics.
But there's been a lot of work related to how to use those resources as a research infrastructure.
And I'm just quoting some of the papers related to this and focusing on Wikidata.
Daniel Michen has done an incredible job in this.
He was also a Wikipedia in residence for the Open Knowledge Foundation.
We just heard a presentation from them.
He was the first Wikipedian in residence and he worked extensively on open access, improving
content also on Wikipedia related to it, improving also the communication of the project among
the open science system.
And in 2015, there was this project in working on Wikidata as a virtual research environment,
which is very promising.
It was not financed, but it kind of gives an idea of how the infrastructure can be used
and is already used in this direction.
Furthermore, there are studies that are highlighting how, sorry, I need to breathe.
This is something that I, you all noticed that it's something that I sometimes forget.
So going back to, in 2019, there came up this study about Wikidata.
So it shows how Wikidata is already extensively used, but he also talked about how art and
humanities and social sciences are not very present in the field.
And a research about art and humanities used and it's used in Wikidata show how there
are projects that use the data, but there are a few projects that collaborate using the
data.
So create a community that actually upload the data from research and use the data.
So I'm just going to present to you three positive elements and three challenges that
I encounter in my work related to arts, humanities and social sciences that I think might be
interesting to highlight.
So for the advantages, the large use of all those resources combined together, so not
only using Wikidata, but really take advantage of the different format that those resources
allow to upload.
A second element is the broad interest for a heritage and museum, so the existing and
real attention that are on those projects.
And the last issue is the possibility of visualizing and monitoring content.
I breathe a moment and then get back to you.
So for the challenges, a major one is a copyright and the restriction to public domain, the
difficulties of course of collaborating with a community and also the challenge of scaling
up and working with the different skills.
So the first element, the possibility of using all the infrastructure is particularly interesting
for humanities, arts and social sciences because it allows to really take research,
resource and data.
And in humanities and social science, you have a lot of also qualitative data.
So you have interviews, photos, you have site exploration, you have artworks, you have content
that comes from archives for example.
And you can find on those resources the possibility to upload it.
Also working with OpenStreetMap allows for example to enter data that Wikidata would
not allow.
So the combination of those two really allows you a broader work on those infrastructure.
This is an example that comes from the upload of data from the Ticino region, the region
in Switzerland.
And the upload was done on Wikidata but also OpenStreetMap and with the upload of images
on Wikimedia Commons and the creation of articles also on Wikipedia.
The second issue is related to heritage.
At the moment the 97 nations have participated in this contest called Wikilov's Monuments
and they have uploaded an incredible number of data but also they have worked in creating
one of the most incredible database of heritage sites around the world.
And this content enriches the existing resources but can also be used to evaluate the existence
of images and also the presence of heritage in different countries.
This is a visualization we've been working on that allowed also to create a research
based on the analysis of those data.
Another project, another focus of the community is working on content coming from GLAMS.
So GLAMS stands for Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museum.
So we're talking about the broad network of cultural institutions and institutions.
Consider also that universities have libraries, have collections, have archives.
So it's very strange how sometimes the research institutions perceive separately the GLAMS.
And there is sometimes a great difficulty in Brigida too.
Also a lot of research for humanities and social sciences comes from those sources.
So you work on documents, you work on images, you work on collections and this is really
a center of interest for researchers in those fields.
And the Wikimedia project, particularly after 2006-2008, have really invested a lot of energy
in encouraging institutions to become open access and to upload content on Wikimedia
commons and also with synergies with Wikidata.
And in Italy we did a project in which we contacted all museums.
We created the best existing database of museums existing in Italy.
It was done in collaboration with ICOM Italy.
We uploaded a national statistic about museums.
So on Wikidata you can really access all the available data about museums and museums
in Italy are quite numerous, as you can imagine.
And also they started also collaborating and opening up their content to make sure that
also museums were engaged in checking their data and contributing with authorization.
This is a topic that I will shortly touch.
We created a forum that allowed the museum to upload authorization for the content.
In Italy there are restrictions also on public domain.
And this forum was also developed with Daniela Scasciatratte, who might be here, so one
of the developers, and so to facilitate also the institutional contribution to the project,
which is one of the problems with Wikimedia commons.
You need to be an individual to contribute to Wikimedia project.
So you need an external interface or a system that allows to associate to a user an authorization
that gives the authority to that user to upload content for an institution.
So it is a step that is still missing.
Those data allow to produce research.
So you can monitor museum in a country.
You can view if they have a person in charge of communication, how is their collection,
if it's digitalized or not.
And we enter in this a third positive aspect of the Wikimedia project and OpenStreetMap
is that you can really visualize content in amazing ways.
And visualizing content doesn't simply mean I have a statistic, I see what is there.
It means also to visualize knowledge because what is on Wikipedia and what is in Wikimedia
commons very often provide you information of what is available as knowledge.
For example, images of heritage.
In Italy we had a discussion with the Ministry of Culture because they miss images of certain
areas of Calabria.
So the community actually negotiated with the government, the data, and then they produced
content that is now accessible also for the government.
So monitoring what is available there somehow provides an image of what is actually available
on the internet and to anyone.
So monitoring knowledge is also interesting if you are contributing to it and you're contributing
to modify it.
So if a museum or a researcher is improving content related to the architect Paraviccini
you can really see how you made an impact on that knowledge.
And it's quite incredible to visualize this impact because normally impact on research
is made with completely different criteria.
So this criteria is actually something that is the mission of a museum of course to improve
knowledge otherwise if their mission was to have a lot of visitors they would offer
beer that would make it a bit easier.
But also it's really a way of changing the perspective on how you create a researcher
that is really available and visible.
Now I brief a couple of moments and then I move to the challenges.
Okay the first one is copyright.
This is an issue that is present on all humanities, social science research.
This is obviously a very well-known challenge.
So you would expect that for example you take a photo of a monument and you upload it.
Actually things are a little bit more complicated than this in particular.
The fact that you need to identify what is heritage and what is not.
You need the rights obviously of the photographer but there are other issues related to property
and also to the rights of the author of that building.
If you live in a country that has freedom of panorama you can take photos of everything
that you can see outside so you're fine.
But many many countries do not have freedom of panorama and it's a right that was not unfortunately
made accessible to anyone with European copyright law.
So in those countries you need to ask the authorization of the architect that has not
been dead for more than 70 years or the artist that produced an artwork.
This is a layer of complexity.
Furthermore you have layers of complexity that are added to public domain content.
This is tricky maybe it will change because in theory with the European copyright law
maybe we are moving in the right direction.
But in Italy you need to pay a fee for every commercial use of content in public domain.
And this is obviously a very complex block.
So those restrictions create layers of complexity and makes it more complicated of course to
upload content on the Wikimedia project.
In particular because those projects really want content that is clearly open and accessible.
I still have a lot of time so I should relax.
So I want to make sure that I tell you everything that I might know.
So we did a project to explore the impact of culture on safety in Africa.
We did it in three countries and in particular in Cameroon we worked a lot with authorization.
So we uploaded Cameroon, Duane Cameroon has a great production of public art since 1991.
So there are artworks that are disseminated in 13 neighbourhoods and it's quite an incredible
project because they've been commissioning artwork to international artists, local artists.
You can see the transformation of the city through those artworks.
So what we did, we uploaded images on Wikimedia Commons.
We created data on Wikidata connected of course to the categories.
We created a list of artworks on Wikipedia in English and in French.
And we uploaded text because all the production of the research project was on CC by SA and
with the authorization.
So for every single institution and every single author we created a permission that
was then sent to the system of recording permission of Wikimedia Commons.
And this allowed to create really the possibility of uploading content.
Since it was done in Africa it was a bit more complicated so what we did was we had printed
a form that the artist would sign, we scanned them and send them to the permission system
that recorded them and registered a ticket.
So of course I took an example that is particularly complicated because public art in Africa with
a living artist with no freedom of panorama is probably the worst you can get.
But it's feasible so it's complicated but it's something that is possible to do.
Of course it requires a lot of changes also in procedure and also the need of creating
processes that allows the upload of those authorization and facilitate also this connection
between institution and the rights management.
The second challenge is related to collaborating.
And now I don't know how many of you contributed to Wikipedia.
How many had their content deleted on Wikipedia?
This is something that is an experience that I think everyone...
So contributing to Wikimedia Project is not easy.
It's a little easier sometimes on Wikisource and Wikiquote I would recommend as a first
if you want to go on holiday on those projects is quite fun.
Also no Viki Voyage can be challenging too.
So those projects have a lot of rules, policies and also collaboration is never easy.
So everybody that collaborates know that they are challenging in involving other people
and also creating processes that are transparent.
There are some specific rules of the project that researchers need to take particular attention
to those in particularly of course the no original research which is also an advantage
for a researcher because you quote the work of everyone and you source everything.
Also conflict of interest, the fact of declaring why, how we are contributing, neutral point
of view for the encyclopedia and of course Wikipedia is an encyclopedia.
So it doesn't provide space for everything.
But it's true that for museums, cultural institutions, for heritage, also for improving
articles related to territories that are very connected to topics related to architecture
and art, this Wikipedia is perfectly suitable.
Also you need to consider that research in humanities and dissemination.
Sometimes the two boundaries are storing information and disseminating information.
Sometimes also scholars would like that the way they store information is beautiful, is
accessible because it's something that might interest a broader public.
So it's sometimes not sufficient to store a folder on Zenodo.
You would like to have an interactive map that allows you to see the building, having
access to all the documents on.
And Wikimedia project can somehow provide this infrastructure.
The last issue is how to make this scalable.
So of course working on licensing, working on CC0 for data is an issue.
But the upload of content on the Wikimedia project requires a certain expertise.
And what I saw in the past is that very often projects worked when there was the community
involved.
So people that were experts already of those projects.
So this joint work and also maybe the model of Wikipedia in residence could be an approach
that can be interesting also on the Wikimedia project and OpenStreetMap.
Finally I wanted to just mention that I'm working on a landscape analysis of research
infrastructure for social sciences and humanities.
So I started on Metawiki, that is where we start, we always say, oh you find the don't
make it Metawiki.
So here you find a list of research infrastructure to make sure that Wikidata has those resources.
But the truth is that at the moment there are two problems.
The first one is that all local infrastructure or collection databases are not connected
and they're not perceived as research infrastructure because they are too small and they don't
have national relevance.
So having the possibility of bridging those resources and maybe Wikidata can really provide
a landscape analysis on this would be very valuable.
Also making sure that we know about those is very useful because those are resources
that can also nourish those websites.
And finally there is the problem that investment by government on research infrastructure normally
they focus on implementing the infrastructure and maintaining the infrastructure while also
populating the infrastructure is another issue.
And there's going to be also a presentation about OpenRefine that is very important and
relevant for this because obviously you need tools that allows really to nourish and to
connect those infrastructure.
I'm done.
Thank you.
So now you land there and take some questions.
I told everybody that I know to not ask questions.
Yes.
One question they asked the question was if we have an idea of how much data from research
feeds Wikidata and is accessible on Wikidata.
I think this research of 2019 might give some insight of it.
I don't think it was more focused the study on models rather than actual data.
It is sourced.
So I presume it's something that is possible to is an information that is possible to view
on Wikidata.
So that would be feasible.
It's true that sometimes the taxonomy of also property so the possibility of actually getting
a full access to the information is not obvious.
Also for research infrastructure one of the challenges that one thing is called the virtual
library.
The other one is a digital library.
The other one is a repository.
So combining all those also broader terms makes it a bit complicated to get a full idea
of it.
Thank you.
Another question.
Thank you.
I enjoyed the talk.
One thing I was wondering is there is a link up talk in the chat here because I enjoyed
any and Chris's talk talking about opening infrastructure finder and now you're talking
about opening infrastructure finder.
I wonder whether there is dialogue or anything at all.
Yes.
So the question was how to connect maybe the if I understood correctly connect the possibility
of finding open repositories and how we can connect with this one.
It is important to notice that a lot of libraries and repositing existing repositories are already
collaborating with Wikidata.
So there is a desire.
Europe Anna which is one of the biggest repository has a very strong collaboration for example
just to mention one of the most well known.
This is a repository of Glam's for open research.
There are lots of connection associated rather to repository that provide information about
researchers or papers.
This is something that is implemented on Wikidata quite nicely.
But it's true that also in general the investment are not on something like Wikidata.
So investment are either repository by topic and at a national level I never saw an investment
that is on Wikidata.
It is rather in maybe creating some interconnection.
So this is something that my but of course I'm also here to actually stress this.
I think we should collaborate more with Wikidata that would be valuable, useful and efficient.
So that's all.
Thanks.
If you have any more questions we can welcome them.
Thank you.