Wikimedia news/numero 81/en
- Specimen: /Specimen
Wikimedia News n. 79, June 26th, 2014
A bridge between Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap
From June 13th to 15th in Karlsruhe, Germany, it was been held the annual conference of the european OpenStreetMap community: State of the Map-EU 2014. As anticipated in previous issues, Wikimedia Italia accepted a request for support by the national community of mappers in creating the official Italian chapter of OpenStreetMap, and then we are quite interested in their initiatives. Also, two members of our board, Simone Cortesi (vice president) and Cristian Consonni (treasurer), participated to the event. In particular, Cristian introduced a personal project aimed to keep together both our "souls", the encyclopedic one and the mapping. The title of his presentation tells about a bridge between OSM and Wikipedia: Wikipedia tags in OSM: building a bridge between OSM and Wikipedia; if you are interested we suggest to watch the video of Cristian's speech. Other Italian speakers were Marco Quaggiotto (BikeDistrict), Alfonso Crisci (amount of OSM data) and Francesca Murtas (SardSOS). The conference was a fruitful chance for exchanging views, and among the initiatives we would like to highlight the 'poster competition', a selection of which can be found in this page. For more information about the event you can follow the hashtag #sotmeu, while to know where the conference has been held... just search Karlsruhe on OpenStreetMap.
More GLAM
The board of Wikimedia Italia appointed Virginia Gentilini as head of GLAM projects (Galleris, Libraries, Archives, Museums). Given the amount of requests from institutions willing to begin joint activities on open knowledge with our association, a single contact person was in order. Virginia, who proved to be a very active volunteer during the years, will coordinate all the initiatives with Libraries, Schools, Museuns and Municipalities.
Among the last activies supervised by Virginia we would like to recall a cycle of classes at Edmund Mach Foundation, that devoted one full page of its June bulletin to that. Anyone who would like to join the Institution committee, established and managed by Virginia, can contact her directly, while members can stay up-to-date via the dedicated page in our website (log in required).
Wiki Loves Monuments
Having more than 100 institutions joining Wiki Loves Monuments Italia, from parishes to hospitals, to municipalities to foundations, the list of monuments is getting new elements. Then, it is time to check your camera and before your next field trip you should check if your destination is one of the competition places. To keep up-to-date on news, get spoilers about the prizes and become aware of local initiatives, you can subscribe the forthnightly newsletter. here a sample of the last issue, published last week.
OpenStreetMap
In this issue we would like to give you some advice on how to contribute to OpenStreetMap and to show you what are the possible uses of the open mapping. If you want to get the hang of OpenStreetMap, one nice activity is data quality control: the website MapRoulette published a set of challenges about Italy, proposing easy changes useful to those who will use the data. Those more interested in having a cocktail under the sun may find useful knowing if the venue is in the shade thanks to the new website Pints in the Sun.
More news on openstreetmap.it.
Appuntamenti passati e futuri
- Saturday June 14th Andrea Zanni (president of Wikimedia Italia) and Virginia Gentilini participated in Bologna to the RENA Festival about "change community". It was a day of discussions and brainstorming, with more than 450 people and activists from no profit, civic hacking and politics. It was a good chance to get in touch with other associations working on openess (from open data in government to open access in the academia).
- June 27/28/29th 2014, Bologna: with two talks, Wikimedia participates to Hackmeeting 2014 at XM24. One talk is about open access (Piero Grandesso and librarian Ornella Russo) while the other is about a comparison of the wikipedian and the hacker communities (Ginevra Sanvitale).
- Monday July 7th 2014, Siena: Ginevra Sanvitale (projects manager) and Virginia Gentilini participates to the International Conference ICOM Museums and cultural landscapes.