“Did you know that most images on Wikipedia were uploaded by one person?”

Wikimedia projects have a special relation with the cultural heritage sector. There are many collaborations but these mostly rest on volunteers working with individual institutions.One volunteer in particular, Multichill, is instrumental in getting images from cultural institutions on Wikimedia projects. As a volunteer developer he writes and maintained upload scripts that connects the back-ends of cultural institutions to the upload API of Wikimedia Commons.

The GLAMWiki Toolset tried to aid Multichill by created a generic tool for cultural institutions to upload their media to Wikimedia Commons. I have  experience working with volunteers of Wikimedia projects and working with cultural institutions. It was my role in this project to advise the project team on the functionality of this tool.

Simultaneously I wrote a proposal for the Wikimedia Foundation’s analytics team to start keeping specific statistics on the use of institutional content on Wikimedia projects. As part of my overall strategy to remove or lower barriers at cultural institutions to share their collections as widely as possible. Collection managers often need statistics to prove that openly sharing their collections is good for their collections. This proposal was part of that effort.