How to strengthen the public domain with Wikidata

Since 2025, a group of initiatives from Latin America that share a common vision on how to strengthen the cultural heritage of our territories have come together to launch the regional project “Strengthening the Latin American public domain with Wikidata”. In this post we tell you why Wikidata is an excellent tool for improving information on heritage in countries of the Global South, what strategies we consider successful, and how to replicate the initiative in other places.

Barriers to cultural heritage in Latin America

Access to cultural heritage works in Latin America faces severe limitations due to the scarcity, dispersion, and lack of systematization of data on authors and their copyright status. The lack of open and accessible data hinders digitization projects and disproportionately affects the visibility of marginalized cultural expressions (those of women, diverse groups, and racialized communities).

Added to this are the lengthy copyright terms and the legislative complexities that vary from country to country. Not knowing the legal status of works generates fear of infringing rights, which inhibits the free use of materials that are already in the public domain.

From local projects to a regional project

Traditional approaches in the Wikimedia movement to strengthen access to the public domain in partnership with libraries, archives, and museums have been heavily focused on creating and improving Wikipedia articles, or on digitizing works and making them available through Wikimedia Commons and Wikisource.

However, since the beginning of this decade, various people and groups in the region have begun to incorporate a new strategy that focuses on Wikidata to systematize the scattered information on heritage. This strategy has several advantages. Wikidata is a structured database, it is multilingual, it allows a connection with multiple catalogs and cultural databases, and it allows very powerful information searches. We can use Wikidata to connect content already digitized and hosted on other Wikimedia projects, but we can also create and improve Wikidata items even if we don’t yet have access to the works or the ability to digitize them. This way, we will have reliable information for finding already digitized heritage and for undertaking future digitization projects.

On the other hand, although it may seem counterintuitive, working with Wikidata is within anyone’s reach: we have discovered that the learning curve for simple edits on Wikidata about cultural heritage is much shorter than that for Wikipedia (with its complex editorial rules) or for Wikisource (whose transcription and layout system is technically challenging), and it is probably also shorter than that of a project like Wikimedia Commons, where although it is easy to upload multimedia content, it is complex to navigate the copyright restrictions.

Good ideas often emerge in different places at the same time. And indeed, in recent years initiatives have arisen in many countries of the region. This is how, in Mexico, for example, they began to use Wikidata queries to identify works and authors in the public domain; in Chile, they began offering Wikidata courses focused on cultural heritage; in Colombia, they began editing Wikidata to make visible the authors whose works enter the public domain each year; and in Uruguay, we created a web application based on Wikidata to provide a more user-friendly access to heritage data.

During events like GLAM Wiki Montevideo 2023 and Wikimedia+Libraries Mexico City 2025, those of us involved in these local projects met and learned from each other. From these encounters emerged the overarching idea: to coordinate our efforts in a regional project, with the support of local chapters and user groups. Regional collaboration allows us to share knowledge, learn together and from each other, share methodologies, and strengthen alliances at a regional level, among other advantages. To illustrate this with some concrete examples:

• Between September 2025 and March 2026 we organized the course “Wikidata and public domain”, an online training for staff and volunteers from chapters and user groups in the region so they can replicate the learning in their territories. The repository of materials and recordings of all classes are available here.
• At the beginning of 2026, the National Library of Uruguay, in collaboration with Wikimedia Uruguay, published a list of authors that entered the public domain on January 1. This methodology was replicated from the methodology that had been taking place in Colombia through the collaboration between the National Library of Colombia, Fundación Conector and Wikimedia Colombia.
• During the period 2026/2027 we will provide training on Wikidata and the public domain to regional institutions, such as the Latin American Association of Archives (ALA) and the Association of Ibero-American States for the Development of National Libraries of the Ibero-American Countries (ABINIA).

These are just some of the possibilities that come from joining forces, instead of carrying out isolated and disconnected efforts.

Strategies to broaden access to heritage

What began as a desire to unite has now solidified into a structured strategy built on six fundamental pillars. We believe these pillars can be useful for replicating the initiative in other regions, so we’re sharing them with you here:

1. Training. It is essential to train Wikimedians, affiliates, and professionals from libraries, archives, and museums in the use of Wikidata to fill information gaps regarding cultural heritage. Our training programs combine local, in-person workshops conducted in collaboration with local institutions with online courses that allow participation from people in different locations. The topics we focus on include, among others: the Wikidata ontology for authors, works, and cultural institutions; the legal aspects of the public domain; conducting SPARQL queries to retrieve information from Wikidata; and bulk editing of Wikidata using auxiliary tools.

2. Partnerships with cultural heritage institutions. To create and sustain these alliances, grassroots work is irreplaceable. But the existence of a regional project allows for the creation of alliances at a continental level with networks of institutions, and also provides greater support to local groups to generate alliances in their territories. When approaching a local library or museum, each group arrives equipped with methodologies and successful examples from the region of how to collaborate on open data work. This is useful for engaging in dialogue with institutions ranging from national libraries to small museums or local libraries. In our case, during the first year we worked in partnership with eight heritage institutions in four countries.

3. Consolidation of a community of practice. Partnerships with institutions are not enough. The Wikimedia movement thrives primarily on the volunteer work of thousands of people who want to contribute to free knowledge for the good of society. For this reason, it is crucial to have a community of editors interested in filling gaps in public domain information on Wikidata. In our case, we do this in several ways:

• We coordinate the WikiProject Public Domain in Latin America. This is a space for those of us who share an interest in this topic to connect, gather training resources, and access technical guides. This wikiproject serves, for example, to map the identifiers from heritage institutions in the region and teach how to add new identifiers.
• We organized the regional Wikidata editing campaign “Public Domain in Latin America”, where dozens of people collaborated to combat information gaps on the subject.
• We collaborate with other campaigns of the movement, such as Wiki Loves Public Domain, Latin America on Wikidata, Every Book Its Reader and 1Lib1Ref.

4. Development of technology based on real needs. Wikidata is an excellent tool for this project. However, it’s a general-purpose database that lacks an interface specifically designed for querying and editing public domain information. Interestingly, the Wikimedia ecosystem offers the possibility of creating and hosting tools tailored to a community’s needs. That’s how we created the web application Paulina, available in paulina.toolforge.org. Paulina provides a simple and user-friendly interface for searching for authors and cultural works, identifying works in the public domain in different jurisdictions, and accessing those works. Recently, thanks to an internship through the Outreachy program, Paulina incorporated functions to easily create and edit items about authors and works on Wikidata. Paulina’s features are constantly evolving to adapt to the needs that arise in workshops and activities. Paulina won the Wikimedia Coolest Tool Award 2025 in the most innovative tool category, and has hundreds of users every day. We invite you to try the tool, use it in local workshops, and suggest improvements.

5. Flexibility. Integrating local projects into a regional initiative is a task that must be undertaken with care. While the projects share the same theme and many of the same objectives, each group in each location has its own unique contexts, histories, and opportunities. Therefore, our project rejects rigid frameworks. While we have a common framework, the modalities of the activities and local partnerships are adapted to the reality of each territory. This fosters innovation and allows us to continue learning from each other.

6. Articulation beyond the four countries. While the project currently includes four working groups in Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Uruguay, we want to continue building networks with other groups working on cultural heritage issues with Wikidata or wishing to begin doing so. We invite you to contact us through the WikiProject Public Domain in Latin America.

A project entering its second year

The regional project “Strengthening the Latin American Public Domain with Wikidata” has just entered its second year. We are a group of 12 organizers, organized into 4 national teams, working together with Wikimedia Chile, Wikimedia Colombia, Wikimedia Mexico, Wikimedia Uruguay, Fundación Conector, Ártica, and Data Uruguay, with the support of a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation. In upcoming Diff posts, we’ll continue sharing what we’ve learned.