Preserving Indonesian Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAM) assets through Wikidata in GLAM-Wiki Month

Wikimedia Indonesia has organized an event called the GLAM-Wiki Month (Bulan Wiki GLAM in Indonesian) every May. This event was organized in conjunction with the International Museum Day worldwide. During this month, we hosted various activities, including workshops, datathons, and talks. These activities are coordinated by two of our program divisions: GLAM and Wikidata.

As part of a month-long celebration, the Wikidata team organized two activities related to Wikidata: a beginner-friendly workshop and a datathon. In this article, we will discuss the activities we undertook and reflect on their outcomes.

Wikidata workshop: Introducing Wikidata to the public

Wikidata can appear tedious to understand for those who begin contributing without a background in computer science. Its triple data model, usage through SPARQL syntax, and layers of statements, properties, values, and qualifiers can be overwhelming. Moreover, to fully harness its potential as an ontology and graph, one must have a solid understanding not only of Wikidata itself but also of concepts in the Semantic Web and Knowledge Graph domains.

Over a period of two years, the Wikidata team has observed that, in the Indonesian context, Wikidata is more easily introduced to communities of computer science enthusiasts, such as students, lecturers, researchers, and activists, than to general audiences from other backgrounds. Responding to these findings, we sought to bridge this gap in the Wikimedia community and Indonesian audiences in general by organizing a beginner-friendly workshop introducing Wikidata in a “less-technical” sense. 

During GLAM-Wiki Month 2025, we organized an online Wikidata workshop focused on editing museum data in Indonesia. During this workshop, we collaborated with 15 participants from diverse backgrounds to edit over 38 items on Indonesian museums. We learned to add new statements and qualifiers, searched for, selected, and archived reliable references to be incorporated into the statements.

Through this workshop, we introduced Wikidata in a simple way to people without a background in computer science. We explained Wikidata’s structure in a way that everyone could understand—by describing each item as a kind of “biodata page” for museums, and by illustrating that everything in Wikidata is structured like a simple Indonesian sentence: subject, predicate, and object.

Although this was a good achievement, we did not reach the advanced SPARQL practice session due to technical difficulties and the need for a dedicated time slot. We acknowledge these challenges and the gap in understanding they have created: participants have learned how to contribute data on Indonesian museums in Wikidata, but they have not yet learned how to write advanced queries or reuse the data they have contributed.Nita, one of the participants, commented on how the workshop introduced her to Wikidata. After a short demonstration on basic SPARQL usage, she generated various potential ideas for queries that she would like to explore further.

Wikidata Datathon: Completing GLAM data in Wikidata through competition

The 2025 GLAM-Wiki Month Datathon was not the first datathon organized by Wikimedia Indonesia focusing on cultural data. Previously, we organized the 2024 GLAM-Wiki Month Datathon with the specific theme of maintaining and updating Indonesian museum data. During this three-day event, attended by 23 editors, we managed to edit more than 700 Wikidata data items related to museums in Indonesia. 

In line with this event, we also organized the February 2025 Datathon, focusing on updating and maintaining Indonesian manuscripts data in Wikidata while also synchronizing manuscripts data in Wikidata and open repositories across the internet. We successfully added and edited more than 2,000 data items of Indonesian manuscripts stored in various repositories, including the Royal Asian Collection and the collections of the National Library of Indonesia.

During the 2025 GLAM-Wiki Month Datathon, we chose “Indonesian Visual Art” as the primary theme. This theme is related to the collection of paintings and/or sculptures created by Indonesian artists. Participants edited data items related to Indonesian visual arts, ranging from organizations and institutions that conserve art objects to individual artists who produce them. During the datathon, we successfully maintained, edited, and synchronized over 800 data items related to Indonesian visual art. One of the items edited by the participant is about a painting by an Indonesian maestro, S. Soedjonono titled Rose Pandanwangi Istriku (Q134485456), which previously was only mentioned in a catalog stored in the repository of the Ministry of Education of Indonesia, but is now available in Wikidata.

Another participant of the 2025 GLAM-Wiki Datathon commented that this event was an excellent opportunity to sharpen their skills in using QuickStatements. One of the challenges they mentioned was that although the references are available in public repositories, some of them are missing or have their URL changed.

Bottom line

The datathon has proven to be an effective method for maintaining and updating data items related to GLAM objects, as demonstrated by the recent event focused on Indonesian visual art, manuscripts, and museums. Beyond simply digitizing artworks or manuscripts, enriching metadata through Wikidata contributes to the digital preservation of GLAM collections in a structured and reusable form. With this data now existing on Wikidata, we can even begin to trace object provenance, linking creators, institutions, and historical contexts in a way that is openly accessible and machine-readable. 

However, this effort represents only one part of the broader picture. While we continue to add data to Wikidata, there remains the essential task of promoting its usage across GLAM institutions and real-world applications, encouraging them not only to contribute data but also actively reuse it in their own systems and storytelling. In the next GLAM-Wiki Month instances, we plan to organize advanced sessions in SPARQL usage or data visualization, as a way to reuse the data stored in Wikidata. Therefore, promoting and encouraging institutions to utilize data in Wikidata, its connectedness to other repositories, together with the help of the community, in shaping a reliable GLAM archive available online.