GLAM/Newsletter/September 2015/Contents/Netherlands report

Who's afraid of Jacob van Ruisdael? Various gifts from Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Leiden

Since June it is possible to create lists for use on Wikipedia in table form using simple queries on Wikidata. By carefully curating the data, sort options can be added to make these lists more in line with existing lists on Wikipedia. In September (see the Signpost announcement) the first such dynamically updatable list was published on the English Wikipedia, the List of paintings by Jacob van Ruisdael. By adding native language titles to each Wikidata painting item, it becomes possible to copy the list to another language Wikipedia. With some quick translation, the list was thus generated on the German, French, Dutch, Spanish and Catalan Wikipedias. The list was deleted in disgust by German Wikipedians however, who felt the quality of the title translations was below their minimum quality level and no one was interested enough to provide German title improvements. Other language projects seem to feel the benefit of browsing the Ruisdael paintings overcomes any title mistakes, and have kept the option intact. Wikipedians from the Russian, Finnish, and Danish Wikipedias have "userfied" the list by adding it to their user space. Due to the process of adding paintings to Wikidata, the list has increased in length by a third since the original publication, but is currently still at less than half of Ruisdael's recorded oeuvre. Feedback has prompted Magnus to make improvements as well, such as an update feature from the Wikipedia list row directly without forcing unwilling Wikipedians to edit Wikidata in the as-yet-unfamiliar Wikidata editing interface. He has also responded to all of the feedback about list length (what happens when all 700 Ruisdael paintings are added to Wikidata - do we really want to show them all?) and onwiki discussions about notability or title management with truly Dynamic Wikidata Lists, which are not stored on Wikipedia at all, but hosted on Tool Labs. For example, many Ruisdael paintings depict waterfalls, so a dynamic list query asking for "waterfall" in the Wikidata "depicts" property creates a list of over a hundred items that have this and of course many Ruisdael paintings are shown as well as many others.

How does the Wikipedia list work?

The list uses the Listeria listmaking tool built by Magnus Manske (See his blog post about it here). The tool generates a list based on the input query options. Each time the update option is selected, the list will update with the latest results of the query, but this will only happen on the project that selected the option. Since Jacob van Ruisdael was a very prolific painter, the current list is far from complete and as a total of 700 paintings are attributed to him, the process of completing the list may take a long time. When a Ruisdael painting is added to Wikidata, whether through a GLAM data donation or a user action, the next time the list is updated that painting will be included in the list.

Though Wikimedia Commons has many, many more, Wikidata has over 100,000 painting items and volunteers continue to add more every day. The Wikidata project "Sum of all Paintings" has the ambition to create a Wikidata item for all notable paintings, which includes all of the catalogued paintings by Ruisdael, or Rembrandt, or Van Gogh, or any other painter, Dutch or otherwise, on Wikipedia. Multichill has uploaded entire painting collections in Wikidata from museum websites that include the metadata of their painting collections. He is always on the lookout for more collections, but will only start an upload if he is able to include a basic set of key facts for each painting. Challenges when dealing with top collections are the large number of Wikidata items already on Wikidata - when it comes to Wikidata items, we don't want to have any doubles or triples the way we may have multiple images of certain paintings on Commons. Together, project members work on how to properly identify and reference paintings in the Wikidata database. A schema of Wikidata properties has been made that easily map to common painting data fields. Key facts for Wikidata painting items besides the problematic title field, are collection, accession number, date of creation, creator, and location. Volunteers add images to Wikidata items from Commons. If you navigate to a Wikidata item about a painter, you can select the "Reasonator" option in the left-hand menu and browse the paintings on Wikidata. Another prolific painter, Rembrandt, only has a few hundred paintings on Wikidata as yet. All of this is still under construction. Slowly more and more properties are added to Wikidata, such as the recent addition of units. For example, this Wikidata edit shows how the painting's item of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring now has its measurements added since 10 September.

In the past few years, Naturalis made large strides in digitising its museum collections, comprising about 37 million objects. Eight million images were produced this way, ranging from herbarium sheets (five million images) to extensive mollusc and preserved bird collections to historical artworks. Not all of these images are of encyclopedic value, as some serve primarily to manage the collections. Naturalis presents its images with further biological information to experts and the public at large on websites such as http://bioportal.naturalis.nl/ and now also on Wikimedia Commons. As a spin-off of the digitisation project, Naturalis employed a Wikipedian in Residence both to make selected image sets available to Wikimedia Commons and to warm its personnel to the novel approach to outreach Wikimedia projects offer. After five months a preliminary outcome is the donation of 34000+ images to Commons in the eight categories below. Further uploads are ongoing.

See also Gallery of mollusc specimens at Naturalis from the Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie
See also Gallery of mollusc specimens at Naturalis from the Zoölogisch Museum Amsterdam

The National Liberation Museum 1944-1945 in Groesbeek is dedicated to the history of the liberation of the Netherlands at the end of the Second World War. Their collection includes over 56,000 objects and sources which document not only the liberating and occupying armies, but also all aspects of daily life in the Netherlands. The collection mainly covers the period 1944-1945, but also the preceding inter-war period and the period of reconstruction following WW2. To increase the visibility of this collection, the museum has started a small project to make high-quality photos of objects in their collection, and upload them to Commons. A small foretaste of what's in their collection can already be seen here. Keep an eye on this page, as more images will be added soon. Are you working on topics related to the WW2, and are you in need of a photo of an object that might be in the collection of the museum? Go to the project page, and leave a note with your wish on the talk page, and if possible the object will be included in the photography schedule!

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In this issue

September 2015

• Argentina report
• Belgium report
• France report
• Germany report
• Italy report
• Macedonia report
• Netherlands report
• Spain report
• Sweden report
• UK report
• USA report
• Open Access report
• Wikidata report
• Calendar

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