GLAM/Newsletter/April 2016/Contents/Special story
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Halfway point of the Europeana Art History Challenge
Having begun in Mid-April, the 6-week Europeana Art History Challenge is now at the halfway mark!
Europeana 280 is a pan-European campaign to get people excited about Europe’s shared art heritage by celebrating the diverse and magnificent artworks that are a part of it. The campaign coincides with the launch of the Art History collections, one of Europeana's first thematic collection sites. All 28 EU Member States were invited to nominate 10 pieces of art held in their country that have contributed to a major European art movement. Every EU member state is involved, and Norway too!
As part of Europeana 280, we are running the Europeana Art History Challenge: to improve the Wikidata item, and create/translate the Wikipedia article about the 10 important artworks from each participating country. This is therefore the largest ever GLAM-Wiki competition, and also the largest to be hosted on Wikidata - a project of increasing significance to GLAM-Wiki collaborations.
Following announcements in the Wikimedia Foundation and Europeana blogs; and also, thanks to the Wikimedia Chapters, to the local communities in Finnish, Bulgarian, Danish, Polish, and Spanish, participants representing 24 nations have signed-up to join the challenge, and to list their progress, and many others are participating unofficially without claiming points. There are also active participants from countries that are not part of the campaign itself - including Armenia, Ukraine, Israel, Switzerland and Australia! You too can join (and learn about the prizes available) by visiting the sign-up page.
At the beginning of the challenge, the combined number of Wikipedia articles about the selected artworks across all target languages was 472. Now, just three weeks later, it is over 850 articles and rapidly rising! A series of editathons are also planned around the continent - including this coming week in Warsaw.
Of the dozens of language versions being tracked, these are some of the highlights:
- English Wikipedia now has articles about all 10 artworks from: Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, England, Finland, France, Italy Latvia, Malta, Netherlands and Sweden. It is also very close to complete with having articles about all the works from Bulgaria, Spain, and Hungary. It now contains over 200 articles for these works, up from less than 50 at the start. (stats) Many of these articles were created by a new Wikipedian - Sudowoodoo - using the new Content Translation tool.
- Bulgarian Wikipedia is very close to having articles about all of Hungary's artworks, and also has the fastest proportional growth - from only 7 pre-existing articles across the whole project it now contains over 50! (stats) Thanks in particular to Спасимир for this work.
- Swedish Wikipedia has articles about all 10 items from both Denmark and Sweden and is very close to compete with Finland and Norway. Apart from English it is also the only language to have a complete set of Wikidata labels and descriptions. (stats). Boberger deserves much credit for this work.
- Danish is almost complete with Denmark and Belgium's artworks, and almost has a complete set of Wikidata labels and descriptions (stats), Slovak Wikipedia has all the Slovakian artworks (stats) and Norwegian has articles about all the artworks from Latvia (stats)!
You can view the full statistics of translations and metadata, as well as download the dataset to create visualisations on the project page.
The Challenge coincides with Wikimedia CEE Spring, a large article writing contest in which the countries of Central and Eastern Europe write about the history, culture and art of the other countries in the region. Many artworks from the Europeana challenge have also been included in the lists of important articles about each country - multiplying the two projects together to achieve a common goal.
Of course - many of the articles are still short, so please do join the challenge and improve them!
There are Prizes provided by Europeana for each country, and by Wikimedia Norway for articles of quality overall.
