During the last edition of the Wikimedia Hackathon, held in Istanbul, the Paulina project was one of the highlights. This web tool, powered by Wikidata, allows users to discover authors and cultural works from around the world, find out if they are in the public domain, and access the works when they are available. We spoke with Jorge Gemetto to learn about his experience presenting the project, the challenges he overcame, and what’s coming next.
1) What were the main challenges you faced during the Wikimedia 2025 Hackathon when presenting or working with the Paulina portal?
The main challenge was that it was my first hackathon, and I decided to present Paulina to invite others to collaborate. Coordinating a free software project was quite a learning experience, but thanks to the support of the team, everything went very well.
During the hackathon, we focused on improving the tool: redesigning the interface, translating it into more languages, adding search options, and adding statistics about the public domain in different countries.
2) What feedback did you receive from other participants about Paulina’s usefulness and functionality?
The feedback was wonderful. In the weeks leading up to the event, there were already people interested in joining. We formed a group with participants from Latin America, and then collaborators from other parts of the world joined. It was very gratifying to find such enthusiasm and commitment to the project.
3) Could you describe the most significant technical improvements implemented as a result of your participation?
We improved the search functionality with new filters, refined its taxonomy, and added statistics by country about works in the public domain. We also redesigned the work pages and author pages to make them clearer. In addition, we added translations into Ukrainian and Azerbaijani, bringing the total to twelve languages. Finally, we created a testing environment to facilitate future collaborations.
4) Following this experience, what upcoming updates or features do you have planned for Paulina?
We are still implementing the new design of the work pages and author pages. We also need to continue improving the search filters and their functionality. We want to gather more statistics to discover works and highlight representation gaps in Wikidata. And one of the main goals is to allow editing Wikidata directly from Paulina, to facilitate contributions to the project.
The journey continues.
Paulina’s experience at the Wikimedia Hackathon 2025 not only resulted in concrete technical improvements, but also a broader, more engaged community behind the project. With new goals ahead, Paulina continues to grow with the hope that more and more people can discover and access the world’s cultural heritage.
Get to know Paulina at: https://paulina.toolforge.org/
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