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�UNESCO Wikimedian in Residence

John Cummings

@mrjohnc

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Wikipedia’s mission and reach

�“Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given

free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing.”��Jimmy Wales, cofounder of Wikipedia�

This quote outlines the goal of Wikipedia, as you can see it shares some of the goals of UNESCO and its mandate to promote Open Access.

15 billion page views per month: This is one of the main motivations for working with Wikipedia, if you write something a lot of people will see it.

Available in 285 languages, some languages have a large number of articles like English and French, some are much smaller like Welsh which has only around 100 regular contributors.

Written by 30,000 regular volunteers: Wikipedia is one of the largest educational projects in the world. A community of volunteers write articles together, many people can work togetheron the same articles over years. Because of this community aspect it is more complicated to add information that to than social media platforms.

Uses CC BY-SA license, because many people work together to create articles all text is available under OA, meaning most text from UNESCO publications is compatible with Wikipedia.

John Cummings has been working at UNESCO for two years funded by the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Sweden. He has been working to assist UNESCO share their content on Wikimedia projects and promote Open Access.

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Wikipedia’s reach

�

20 billion page views per month
Available in 300 languages
Written by 30,000 volunteers working together
Uses CC BY-SA 3.0 Open Access license

��

This quote outlines the goal of Wikipedia, as you can see it shares some of the goals of UNESCO and its mandate to promote Open Access.

15 billion page views per month: This is one of the main motivations for working with Wikipedia, if you write something a lot of people will see it.

Available in 285 languages, some languages have a large number of articles like English and French, some are much smaller like Welsh which has only around 100 regular contributors.

Written by 30,000 regular volunteers: Wikipedia is one of the largest educational projects in the world. A community of volunteers write articles together, many people can work togetheron the same articles over years. Because of this community aspect it is more complicated to add information that to than social media platforms.

Uses CC BY-SA license, because many people work together to create articles all text is available under OA, meaning most text from UNESCO publications is compatible with Wikipedia.

John Cummings has been working at UNESCO for two years funded by the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Sweden. He has been working to assist UNESCO share their content on Wikimedia projects and promote Open Access.

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UN information

Much of the information exists for people to achieve the SDGs, a portion of it is held by the UN

UN publishing models don’t make it easy for people to find the information. A World Bank study showed 1/3rd of their publications had never been downloaded, 13% downloaded over 250 times

Wikipedia has the audience and the community to give this information to the public.

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Text

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A process to reuse any open license text on Wikipedia

CC text

Instructions

Wikipedia

Metrics

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UNESCO publication text on Wikipedia

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UNESCO text on Wikipedia

Wikipedia volunteers and UNESCO staff/consultants adding text to Wikipedia�
230 Wikipedia articles now include UNESCO text

The articles received 4.8 million views per month

WIPO and FAO pilot projects

In total 225 Wikipedia articles now include UNESCO text: This text is mostly from publications but also from the website. Now we have the documentation and skills to continue to more easily do this in the future.

The articles received 3.2 million views per month: on average a Wikipedia article receives 1200 page views per month. However we cannot not measure how many people went to the section of the article with UNESCO text if the text was added to an existing article. We are working on a way to measure this more accurately.

Over 50% of articles are the first result on Google search and almost all appear on the first page of results. This number increases over time as newly created articles are indexed by Google.

No drop in publication downloads: We did not see a drop in publication downloads when we have added text from publications to Wikipedia, doing this work is building a new audience for UNESCO content.

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Images

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UNESCO images on Wikipedia

Shared around 3000 images on Wikipedia
Appear on articles that have received 267 million views
Appear on 50 different language Wikipedias
Large project with UNESCO archives in 2019

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Competitions on Wikipedia

We ran 2 competitions to use UNESCO images on Wikipedia with small prizes�
Image views increased from 1 million to 10 million per month

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Data

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UNESCO data on Wikipedia

Wikipedia articles on World Heritage sites (that use UNESCO data) receive�7.3 million page views per month

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UNESCO data in Google search results

Wikipedia

Wikipedia and

other sources

Wikipedia

Google uses Wikipedia as one of its sources of data in their ‘Answer box’ and ‘Knowledge graph’ search results. This provides another way for UNESCO to share information through Google (80% of search marketshare worldwide).

Here we have asked a natural language question ‘How big is Yellowstone National Park’ and Google has given both a correct answer to the question and contextual information. The answer to the question uses data we added to Wikipedia from World Heritage.

Whilst this is a very powerful way to reach a global audience with UNESCO content there are issues:

We have no metrics, we know our impact will be big but Google does not provide information on number of searches for a topic.
UNESCO is not credited as the source of this data (even though it is referenced on Wikipedia). This may change in the future because of concerns including fake news.

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Supporting Open Access

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Promoting Wiki Loves …..

Wiki Loves Monuments

Wiki Loves Earth

Promoted by UNESCO, UN and other agencies to over 10 million people

Wiki Loves Africa

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Wiki Loves Earth Biosphere Reserves

Over 6500 OA images from 50 countries

Images are viewed 800,000 times per month on Wikipedia

Website

Blog post

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Wikipedia photography exhibition

UNESCO, Paris

United Nations, Geneva

Spain

Sweden

We ran a 30 panel photography exhibition in exploring cultural heritage using Open Access photographs. The exhibition included images and information for:

World Heritage
Intangible Cultural Heritage
Illicit Trafficking
Underwater Cultural Heritage

Which was developed with the different sectors in UNESCO.

The exhibition showcased the high quality of many Open Access images on Wikimedia and elsewhere. The information boards encouraged people to document their own heritage under Open Access.

All text and images are Open Access and the exhibition is available for others to display.

The text is available in English, French, Italian and Swedish and Wikimedia ran the exhibition in Rome, Stockholm and Montreal. There will be a smaller version of the exhibition displayed at UN HQ in Geneva from November to March.

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Wiki4Women: International Women’s Day

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FindingGLAMs

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A worldwide database of cultural heritage institutions on Wikipedia

Wikimedia Sverige�

25 April 2015. Nepal is hit by a massive earthquake. Around 9,000 people loses their life and much of Nepal stops working for a long period of time. This was a terrible loss of lives and it was also a terrible loss of cultural heritage.

700 temples, palaces and museums were damaged and for many of them the digital information available was limited, or even nonexistent, preventing a fast and efficient response. This lead to more damages, risks and more problems rebuilding the buildings and collections.

This might come as a shock for you, I know that it was for me, but as of now we are lacking a global database of where the worlds libraries, archives and museums are located! To change this we have started the initiative FindingGLAMs.

Welcome, thank you very much for coming�Before we start I’d like to ask for a show of hands, who has looked at Wikipedia this week?

https://www.unisdr.org/archive/64971

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FindingGLAMs

(Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums)

The first worldwide database of cultural heritage institutions in Wikipedia, in 300 languages

We are building it through official datasets and crowdsourcing through cultural heritage institutions and the general public

Working with UNESCO delegations to source datasets

Hardknott Roman Fort, United Kingdom�Markas1370

CC BY-SA 4.0

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Other UN agencies working with Wikipedia

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IGO Open Access working group

Open Access working group is a group of 15-20 heads of rights/publications
Meet every few months in person to discuss Open Access�
I’m writing a handbook to help IGOs adopt Open Access in 2019
I’m supporting IGOs to share their content on Wikipedia

Presentation to heads of publication departments at IGOs on this project: Similar to this presentation we have been sharing information with other Intergovernmental Organisations through working group presentations and answering any questions they may have about working with Wikipedia.

We created a central place on Wikipedia for content from all UN agencies, to share Open Access content on Wikipedia using the tools we have developed.

We have worked with the European Space Agency to share ???? images on Wikipedia, something they were already doing in a very labour intensive way, we helped them set up bulk upload of images and measure their reach.

We created the Wikipedia article Industrial property using text from two WIPO publications as a proof of concept for their Open Access publications, the article is viewed around 1000 times per month.

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OHCHR

Project with Wikimedia Argentina to improve human rights information on Wikipedia

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FAO

Developed a process to release text from a publication under an open license without changing the FAO website

Graphics from publication viewed 80,000 a month on Wikipedia

Text from publication viewed 70,000 a month on 10 Wikipedia articles

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WIPO

Images from publications seen 7000 a month on Wikipedia

Text from publication used to create Industrial Property article

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Wikiproject United Nations

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Wikiproject United Nations: Collaboration

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Using images from Commons