BEN VERSHBOW

Director of Community Programs,
Wikimedia Foundation

10th Dec

2:40PM – 3:20PM

Ben Vershbow is Director of Community Programs at the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization supporting Wikipedia, Wikidata, and nearly a dozen other open knowledge projects. He leads a globally distributed team focused on growing participation and partnership across the Wikimedia movement in key knowledge areas such as GLAM, education, science, and gender diversity.

Ben comes from a theater and literature background but fell down the internet rabbit hole 15 years ago working with digital publishing pioneer Bob Stein at the Institute for the Future of the Book. He went on to work for more than 8 years at the New York Public Library, where he founded NYPL Labs, a program focused on activating heritage collections through open access, crowdsourcing, and collaboration with artists, technologists, scholars, and other institutions. He currently lives in Philadelphia.

ABSTRACT

Wikipedia is the only top 10, 50 or 100 website with a nonprofit mission fully aligned with the cultural sector. For well over a decade, Wikimedia communities in all parts of the world have collaborated with cultural institutions such as galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAMs) to grow diverse, reliable content across the Wikimedia projects. Uploads of digitized heritage collections into Wikimedia Commons have enriched countless Wikipedia articles, or been transcribed and turned into free digital ebooks on WikiSource, reaching vast digital audiences. Institutions of all shapes and sizes, from local libraries in Côte d’Ivoire and Colombia to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, have opened their doors to host thousands of trainings and editing events, connecting professional knowledge stewards with the crowdsourcing potential of Wikimedia.

In 2017, the global Wikimedia movement began an expansive planning process to determine its direction for the year 2030. The resulting strategy is focused on “collecting knowledge that fully represents human diversity, and by building the services and structures that enable others to do the same.” To realize this vision, collaboration with GLAM institutions is more important than ever.

Increasingly, Wikimedia’s newest project, Wikidata, offers one of the most promising vehicles for such collaboration. Wikidata is a free, collaboratively edited knowledge base collecting machine-readable, multilingual data describing a vast array of topics, concepts, and objects. With its flexible, community-driven ontology, mappings to external databases, and query service and APIs, Wikidata provides a multi-purpose open data infrastructure that enables new ways of curating, integrating, and reusing knowledge across the Wikimedia projects, as well as through the broader web ecosystem.

In his talk, Ben Vershow, Director of Community Programs at the Wikimedia Foundation, will explore how Wikidata and other Wikimedia projects strengthen the ability to describe, interpret, and access institutional collections large and small: from great national libraries and museums to aggregators like Europeana and the National Digital Library of India, to the most under-resourced or hidden collections from all corners of the world: from Armenia to Argentina, Bulgaria to Brazil, Ghana to Indonesia, and many others. This talk will cover three overlapping areas of opportunity for collaborating with Wikimedia:

• Using Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, and WikiSource to share, describe and connect collections across all languages and cultures.

• Encouraging citizen collection and curation of heritage topics on Wikimedia sites through photography and transcription projects, Wikipedia article writing, and other content campaigns focused on increasing representation.

• Identifying new ways for GLAM institutions to use the data produced on Wikimedia projects to improve their own collections platforms and services.

PRESENTATION

BUILDING A MORE INCLUSIVE GLOBAL HERITAGE WEB WITH WIKIMEDIA

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