Hunting for Lost Heritage on Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata
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Authors Biographies: An active contributor to Wikipedia since 2004, he is one of the administrators of the Italian edition of the free encyclopedia since 2005. As a Wikipedian in residence he collaborated on many OpenGLAM projects for sharing the contents of cultural institutions, including the National Museum of Science and Technology Leonardo da Vinci in Milan and the Central Institute for Archives (ICAR) of the Italian Ministry of Culture (MiC). Having joined the Wikimedia Italia staff as a trainer and GLAM specialist, he has been a Wikimedian in residence at the BEIC Foundation, the Academy of Sciences of Turin, the Ricordi Historical Archive of Milan, the Polo del '900. He collaborates with various universities, including the Politecnico and the Statale of Milan. Since 2021 he has been among the first two Wikipedians in residence at an Italian university, the University of Padua. With Unipd he created 3 MOOCs for students, teachers and cultural institutions on EduOpen. In 2024 he’s migrating the Museo Egizio di Torino catalogues to Wikimedia projects.
Keywords: Wikimedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, Heritage, Churches, architecture, crowdsourcing, AI, cultural heritage, architecture, historical buildings, historical heritage
TL;DR: What if we apply data mining on Wikimedia projects to build a more comprehensive open catalogue of Cultural heritage in Italy?
Abstract: A lot of content has been produced with crowdsourcing by Wikimedia users, not only on Wikipedia. Hundreds of thousands of photographs of cultural heritage were uploaded in the last 20 years and are available on Wikimedia Commons, still not linked to structured data on Wikidata, often of unknown historical buildings, like ruined churches in Southern Italy. We will demostrate that is possible to use data mining techniques on Wikimedia projects and build on Wikidata a more comprehensive open catalogue of Cultural heritage in Italy from crowdsourced contents. We will present the result of phase 1 and 2 of this project, where OpenRefine was used to create thousands of new items on Wikidata about "lost heritage" in Italy, and discuss of the possible use of AI to speed-up the process.
Format: Paper (20 minutes presentation)
Submission Number: 12
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