Wikipedia:GLAM/Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa/The whole GLAM package/Select your topic
 | 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 |
Now that you know what matters to you and your organisation, you can decide what your project will be about. From there, look around what you have available and what’s already on Wiki platforms to figure out which contributions are the best use of your effort.
Effective and useful contributions[edit]
Checklist task: Set topic criteria
GLAM organisations could work on just about any part of the Wiki ecosystem – and too much choice can make it hard to even start. If you think about what’s important, useful, and achievable you can come up with the single topic that your project will achieve.
 | Tip You might already have some ideas – the following questions will help you determine if they’re the right ideas. |
| What’s especially relevant to your organisation and audience? | What can your organisation do best? Where do you have expertise? What are your strengths regarding collection objects and their images? What collections-based research can be highlighted? |
| What topics need work? | Where can you have the most impact? Look around for existing WikiProject pages like WikiProject New Zealand – someone might already have created a list of articles the community cares about.
You can check the traffic of articles using the Pageviews Analysis tool or the Wikimedia REST API. |
| What’s already available to reuse? | Has there been an exhibition or public programme about a particular topic or collection?
This might mean the images are already selected, relevant data is well-populated and up to date, files with research are available, articles or blog posts have already been published and can be used as citations. |
_-_The_Noun_Project.svg){kind=small} | Example
Te Papa’s strategy clearly prioritises Papatūānuku, the natural world and our relationships with it, and we knew from community contacts that there are significant gaps in articles about Aotearoa’s native species. Our Subject Matter Expert was also years into a taxonomic revision of native forget-me-nots (Myosotis) and had collected and photographed many of the relevant plant specimens herself. The Botany team’s data management practices meant metadata on specimens, collection events, and agents (that is, collectors, identifiers or describers) was in good shape. |
Sources of information[edit]
Checklist task: Identify source material
Think about what sources you’ll be using when you create articles or enrich the data in your collections database. Depending on your topic you might want to focus more on academic or popular sources.
Wikipedia falls into systemic biases in the topics that get covered and the references it cites, which projects like Black Lunch Table and Women in Red seek to address. As a GLAM, you’ll have a depth of expertise and knowledge to use sources from people who might often be marginalised.
That said, take care when seeking to incorporate Indigenous knowledge (such as mātauranga Māori, Māori traditional knowledge). The Wiki ecosystem assumes that all knowledge can and should be openly and freely shared at all times. But many Indigenous peoples know that some must be held close, due to its sacred or dangerous nature, or because sharing has previously harmed them while only benefitting a coloniser.
A project team can navigate these waters more easily if it includes people from the relevant group, or already has close relationships with them. The team should also think about how the project actively benefits the community, not just how it avoids harm.
In Aotearoa New Zealand, the Kaupapa Māori research and evaluation framework operates this way – by Māori, with Māori, and for Māori – prioritising relationships built on fundamentally Māori principles.
| Example
Te Papa’s Myosotis project didn’t include any mātauranga Māori because we don’t know any that’s related to this genus. We had no Māori staff on the project team or relationships with iwi (tribes) that we could quickly draw on to determine what knowledge might exist, and if so what would be permissible to share. Future projects will put more emphasis on what works for Māori and Pacific communities. |
| Tip When referencing online sources like blogs you can use the version saved in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. This means that even if the post or website goes down, it will still work as a verifiable reference. |
Create your plan for what you’re going to create or improve[edit]
Checklist task: Create plan for contributions
Stop scope creep by deciding now which articles you’re going to work on. Make a list of the articles (existing or not) that are relevant to your topic, including any broader topical pages you want to enhance – and then do your best to stick to it.
| Tip Put your list – or your overall plan – on a project page on Wikipedia. This can be a motivator and help get you back on track if you get distracted by other things. Whenever you edit an article, you can add the date and updated link, and move onto the next one. |
If your initial goal is to create or edit Wikipedia articles about a particular topic (such as a plant or animal species), also look for articles that summarise that topic like Spiders of New Zealand. Check the articles about people, places, or concepts that are related to your topic.
Articles that are already in great shape might benefit from a new useful fact, section, or image – for example, an article about a person that describes their scientific collecting activities. An image of a specimen they collected perfectly illustrates that section!
| Example Te Papa wants to ensure there are articles for each endemic spider species, but we’ve found that several genus articles and the bigger picture article on Spiders in New Zealand need improvement too, so those are getting added to the project. |
| Tip If it starts to feel overwhelming, you can choose not to do all the work on every article yourself. You can add your information and sources to article talk pages or Wikidata items and let someone else handle the writing, formatting, and polishing. Or you can come back to them later, when you have more time. |
Put a boundary around the kinds of Wikidata items you’re going to create too. Instead of trying to find ways to share every bit of information you hold, pick a few kinds that are crucial to describing your images well, such as related people, places, or subjects (including scientific names).
You’ll probably still end up making other edits (for example, a lot of non-Western personal names and many relevant scholarly research articles still don’t have Wikidata QIDs), but don’t stress yourself if you don’t think you’re being comprehensive.
| Example Te Papa mostly focuses on people and directly descriptive terms, such as collectors, scientific names (species, genera, orders, etc.), and image subjects. We make sure items for people include any relevant information already in our own system and scientific name details are up to date. For subjects – unless they’re people or places we need to add – we’re mainly concerned about finding the most suitable existing Wikidata item. |
Identify data and image source material[edit]
Checklist task: Review available records
From this point in the project, you’re going to be doing several loops of exporting data from your catalogue and reviewing it in OpenRefine] for selections, updates, and refinement.
Review what you have available[edit]
Start by creating a spreadsheet of all object records that match your topic. Include as much data as you can, for example:
- Images (both how many and how large)
- People involved (creators, scholars, collectors, identifiers, taxonomic authors)
- Categories or other tags (depicts, related to, scientific name)
- Record metadata (when the record was updated, if the data is public)
- Wikidata QIDs if you already have them
- Anything else you might want to filter by (is the species endemic, relevant locations)
| Example At Te Papa, we exported every specimen record we had for all species of native New Zealand forget-me-nots. This included names of people and species involved, but we had to go back later to get out the other biographical and taxonomic details from related records. |
Load your spreadsheet into OpenRefine as a new project.
Starting a project in OpenRefine
By looking over all the data together, you can start filtering out things you don’t want to include, like:
- Images that are too small
- Records that have important data missing
- Records that have restrictions on location or personal information
- Redundant images
| Tip By filtering out records in OpenRefine instead of deleting them from a spreadsheet, you can easily add them back in if you change your mind. |
Realising you need to do more work[edit]
Don’t be surprised if this review shows you a bunch of things you want to fix, from misspellings to misidentifications to information that’s just plain missing.
Stay on track by prioritising these fixes:
- Urgent: these have to be fixed or the project can’t continue
- Worth doing: these are probably going to end up on a Wiki site, so it’s a good idea to get them fixed before publishing
- Worth doing, but later: these aren’t going anywhere fast, they can go into your regular stack of work
Start at the top and focus on the first two groups.
| Example Te Papa’s “urgent” fixes included cleaning up some duplicate records for people and species. The “worth doing” fixes were things like correcting the spelling of peoples’ names and adding in geographical details. Other issues “worth doing, but later” were those that could wait if that bit of data wasn’t likely to end up being used in the project, like changes needed at higher levels of taxonomy. |
You may also find you want more or higher-quality images. Maybe there’s images for 30 of the articles you want to do but nothing for the other 10, or they were digitised when a 640 x 480 image was high tech.
Since you’ve thought about how this project connects to your organisation’s audience and strategy, this should help you make the case for prioritising some extra digitisation.
| Tip Balance your desire to share everything you want to with the limits of the time and effort it might take. If it’ll take three more months to share a few more images, maybe you can skip them for now. |
| Example Te Papa is sharing images of all type specimens of spiders and harvesters – a few are currently missing but types are scientifically important enough to put the work in. These fall into the “worth doing” category, so we’ll carry on once that digitisation work is complete. |
Confirm your record selection[edit]
Remove any records you’ve decided against using from your OpenRefine project. The next time you export your data you can use it to produce a cut-down dataset, which means there will be less to sort through.
When you’ve made any needed changes to your data, export it again, get it back into OpenRefine and cut out any other records you don’t want to include. Go back to your goals and workload expectations to help you confirm your final selection.
Next up: Select images