Wikiproject Local Contexts

This page is to discuss potential collaboration between Wikimedians and users of the Local Contexts system of content labelling (particularly galleries, libraries, archives, and museums). This may be part of a wider Indigenous Languages and Knowledge on Wikimedia Projects Toolbox.

Background

Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons are managed by the Wikimedia movement of mostly volunteers, and stewarded by the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF). Their mission is to collect, develop, and disseminate freely-licensed educational content.

Local Contexts (LC) is a nonprofit corporation with a registered agent on the Navajo Nation. LC partners with GLAM organisations to label content as part of an overall goal to "support Indigenous communities with tools that can reassert cultural authority in heritage collections and data", a concept often called data sovereignty. These labels in some cases constitute forms of non-copyright restriction on content.

TK, BC, and Notices

Traditional Knowledge labels (TK) are an initiative for Indigenous communities and local organizations that allows them to express conditions for sharing their materials and engage in research in ways that respect community rules, governance and protocols for using, sharing and circulating knowledge and data.

The set of tools for communities includes additionally Biocultural labels (BC) that are used to define expectations about appropriate use of biocultural collections and data.

The Notices (N) are tools for institutions and researchers to identify Indigenous collections and data and recognize Indigenous rights and interests.

Current status

One obstacle to use of the labels on Wikimedia Commons is the licensing of the label icons; LC has stated they "do not give that permission" (ref) to upload them under permissive terms.

Additional points to address include:

How might these labels be used on Wikimedia Commons?
How would adding them be administered?
Who can assign labels to images?
- TK and BC labels are used by indigenous communities and should not added by anyone. For them, we can only refer to what institutions have assigned in collaboration with heritage communities.
- How about Notices?
We have to express that the labels are not licenses.
Local Contexts has a database. What information does it have? How can that inform adding labels?
What can a user of Wikimedia Commons do to tag content?
How is adding them managed in practice?

Organisational contact

GLAMhack23

Once a year, the Swiss OpenGLAM working group brings together cultural institutions, software developers, digital humanists, artists, Wikipedians and other interested parties to promote openness among galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM). The GLAMhack collaboratively experiments and innovates with cultural content and digital tools for research, web and mobile applications, Wikipedia and other uses. This edition focuses on colonial collections, provenance research, as well as the application of the FAIR and CARE principles in data governance.

The challenge at GLAMhack charts how Local Context labels can be utilized on Wikimedia Commons.

There was a meeting with Local Contexts on 29 September 2023 15:00 CEST with the following minutes:

Round of presentations
- Susanna presents the challenge and the meta-wiki page
Presentation of the possible use of the labels and notices of Local Contexts
"Notices" are tags which could be used by institutions, researchers and volunteers
- Iolanda suggests to use it in the discussion pages
Labels can only be used by communities so on the Wikimedia projects they need to cite
We look together at the database they use, with the different data and labels and notices

Workflow

Scenario

An institution has a collection of items that originate from a community. The institution wishes to make informed choices about sharing information about those items on the internet. They seek collaboration with the community and decide to use the Local Contexts labels and notices.

The originating community assigns Traditional Knowledge Labels or Biocultural Labels to the collection items, an entire collection, or all holdings in an institution. The community defines the choice of labels they wish to use and the description of each label. These decisions are recorded in the Local Contexts hub. The institution attaches the correct labels to each item according to this information.

at Wikidata

The Wikimedian makes sure that there are Wikidata items for the heritage element, the originating community, the collection and the institution.

To be able to use the labels on Wikimedia Commons, the labels must have items on Wikidata, the label images be available on Wikimedia Commons and they must be openly licensed. {{cc-zero}} and {{PD-textlogo}} templates are added to the label images. To mitigate the misuse of the labels, a {{trademarked}} template will be used with the images.

at Wikimedia Commons

The institution uploads images to Wikimedia Commons. The Wikidata item of the individual heritage element, the collection or the entire institution is marked as having one or more Local Contexts labels attached to it. The data about this can be queried via the APIs made available by Local Contexts.

The Wikimedia Commons page for the image knows it must display the related Traditional Knowledge label on the page based on the link to the Wikidata item of the heritage element, the collection or the institution. Wikimedia contributors should not be able to add labels themselves.

Possible steps:

Wikidata items for Local Contexts — Done
Uploading the Label and Notices images on Wikimedia Commons with {{cc-zero}}, {{PD-textlogo}}, {{trademarked}} — Partly done, file:Local Contexts.svg
Wikidata items for the Labels and Notices — Waiting
Institutions and communities are added in the Local Contexts hub. It records which Labels and Notices are attached to items, collections and institutions. On Wikidata, add information to items about the Labels and Notices that an item, collection or institution uses.
Check if the institutions have collections on Wikimedia Commons
Add the labels to the collections and works on Wikimedia Commons
Enrich Local Contexts item on Wikidata d:Q122870872
Create Wikidata items for each label and notice Done
- add their links on this page Doing...
Add label images to Wikimedia Commons
- License the label images openly: Local Contexts will send an authorization to the Volunteer Response Team on Wikimedia Commons. commons:COM:deletion requests/Local Contexts
- Create Category on Wikimedia Commons Done
Add labels and descriptions in several languages