 Hi! Welcome to the session How to use a thematic campaign to boost your affiliates' reach, the case of Wikiluv's musica portuguesa. I'm Ruth Correia, I'm a Program Manager for GLAM Partnerships at Wikimedia Portugal and this is my first time presenting a session at Wikimedia, so I'm super honored that you took some time to watch it. I hope this is useful for you. In the next 20 minutes, I'll be telling you all about Wikiluv's musica portuguesa or Wikiluv's Portuguese music, how and why the project started, a brief overview of what we've accomplished so far and a few tips on how you can make the most of using a thematic campaign without making some of the same mistakes we did. Instead of focusing on the technical details or a step-by-step view of what we did, I will be mixing that with telling you what worked and what didn't, particularly in terms of community building and outreach work. And just a brief note, since this is a recorded session, if you have any questions or you would like to talk further, please feel free to reach out to me on the email you see on the screen. So here's a bit of context to start with. Wikimedia Portugal already has some fairly long history. The chapter was founded back in 2009 and for more than a decade, a community of volunteers steered a collection of activities that ranged from editing Wikipedia to running the local editions of Wikiluv's Earth or Wikiluv's Monuments to even organizing big wiki-themed conferences. Glam-wise, there have been some projects throughout the years, but most connections were short-lived. Compared to most of its European counterparts such as Spain, Italy or Germany, Wikimedia Portugal is a relatively small chapter. And while there is some stuff now, it is worth mentioning that Wikimedia Portugal's board and executive management is still ensured by volunteers. Last year there was a big change. In order to be able to pursue larger endeavors without overloading the volunteers, the chapter hired a couple of staff members to help promoting the ideals of free and open knowledge for all on a full-time basis. The first one was a Wikimedian in residence, which was me, hired to give direct support to projects which were already using Wikimedia tools such as MediaWiki and Wikibase at Narva, a local social sciences university. There was a second part of the role though. Part of the mission at Narva was finding new partners that were willing to share their work, content, data and multimedia on Wikimedia platforms. Creating a community from scratch where there is no organic involvement can be quite challenging. On top of reaching out directly to researchers and research centers, I also organized a series of events and training sessions about various Wikimedia projects and platforms catering to different needs as they arose. I talked from anything from CC licenses to Wikidata as you can see on the posters. And while these events worked to an extent, allowing Wikimedia Portugal to present itself to a wide range of new audiences, at some point it became clear that there was something missing. You see, these types of events are great to show external people what your affiliate user group or chapter is and what you've accomplished in the past and what the possibilities of Wiki work are. But they are not the best way to create meaningful action beyond their introductory stage. While we know the possibilities are endless, there's often an information overload for newcomers. For those who never created stuff on Wikiplatforms, it can be quite hard to understand how they can leverage the tools in a way that benefits their work and the surrounding community. Wiki means you can do anything, but you need to find a focus. A thematic campaign allows you to do that. And so we started rummaging around this idea in August last year. And that's how Wikiluv's Portuguese music came about. Me and my colleague, Sofia Matias, who is the project manager at Wikimedia Portugal, realized that content and data about Portuguese music on Wikimedia platforms was either in complete or simply in existence. When I say music of Portuguese music, I mean music either made by Portuguese people and or music made by people that are in Portugal. Under this context, the campaign Wikiluv's music of Portuguese was developed as an aggregator. On one hand, it would anchor the outreach work of the residency at Nova, opening up the doors to a closer collaboration with the two research centers that specialized in music. And on the other hand, the wide scope of the project could enhance other partnerships for Wikimedia Portugal, particularly regarding cultural heritage. And so the project kicked off with an editathon co-organized with an archive devoted to the life and work of José Mario Branco, a singer, songwriter and musical producer. This archive is based at Nova University. This meeting allowed us to start an ongoing training process with the researcher responsible for the center. She learned the ropes on the first event, but took a while to feel completely at ease with editing. And so we started regular open editing sessions, which served as technical training grounds that allowed for her to develop her skills confidently. And that's the story of how we created our first power editor. On top of significantly improving the artist's biography, she proceeded to create the pages about his discography and artistic network. In less than six months, she has improved about 90 articles, ensuring their Wikipedia in Portuguese has high quality and well-referenced content about José Mario Branco, a major name in 20th century music and culture in Portugal, who is largely undocumented on the platform until now. And so this brings us to the next step. Pick a theme that you like and know. And it seems quite trivial, but it makes a huge difference when setting up a campaign like this. Obviously, the residency I was doing allowed for privileged contacts with researchers at Nova, who already had the knowledge and content to be placed on the various platforms. Nonetheless, beyond the residency, it really helped that both Sophia and I had worked in the music sector and were very passionate about the topic. Sophia had a background in a local association dealing with traditional music. I had been a music journalist and radio broadcaster, thus more focused on contemporary pop music. This made our approach a lot more complete, as we were able to identify potential partners from the beginning without having to dive too much into research. We also had lots of contacts and knowledge that proved to be particularly valuable. We were able to identify the gaps on Wikipedia almost organically, while immediately knowing who would be the best partner to fix them. It also made it easier to pinpoint key dates and events to get a bit of extra attention, especially at the kickoff. For instance, we knew that José Mario Branco Arcav was at Nova, and we used the anniversary of his death to celebrate him, serving as an anchor of that first event and sparking media interest and coverage. That first meeting spawned another two long-lasting relationships, one with Eurovisions, a group of researchers studying the Eurovision Song Context, with whom we co-organized an editing event in March 2023, and what is arguably the most important media partnership Wikimedia Portugal was able to tie in more than 13 years of activity. Building up on that first event about José Mario Branco, we secured a partnership with Antena 1, our public service radio station. Not only they advertised our activities, but also took an active role in them. On the left you see Nuno Golupin, the director of the radio station at the Eurovision event, speaking about the contest and its history. On the right you see Diogo Varela Silva, Trasinha Landairo and Pedro de Castro at an editing event that was held at Antena 1. This was quite an interesting one. On this session, they gathered friends and family, essentially artists who had worked with Celeste Rodrigues to give their testimonies on her life and work. Following her Wikipedia entry, journalists were able to publish features that corrected some of the mistakes that lingered on Wikipedia so that the Wiki article could be fixed accordingly following the rule of citing secondary references. And while the partnership with Antena 1 was great, as time went by, it also panned out that it lacked the focus that a long-term partnership needs, and so we're now recalibrating our relationship with them. For instance, working about artists with long career spans may have more references available, but sifting through the information and reorganizing it takes a really long time and requires multiple sessions. If you're looking for more immediate impact or you struggle with being understaffed, you're probably better off starting with smaller partnerships and activities. Narrowing the topics to smaller bits help you move forward, giving you the focus necessary to create meaningful action. And this is very clear when we look at the work we've been doing in the last few months with a couple of research projects. First, the Portuguese Early Music Database. The Portuguese Early Music Database is a digital archive of manuscripts with musical notation from the Iberian Peninsula, mostly written before 1650. We are working with them and using a combined approach of Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata to describe the digital objects that they host, so these manuscripts. The project is still ongoing and we basically still have to upload most of the manuscripts onto Commons, but for now we already have about 330 manuscripts created as objects on Wikidata with detailed metadata, including the material they're made of, the script style, the publication date, and owner institutions among other details. Which gives us this information box on Commons. We expect to upload the whole collection of Portuguese Early Music Database to Commons before the end of the year. Then we have Iconomus, which is a research project looking into music up, sorry, it's a research project looking into musical iconography in public spaces and art in Portugal, allowing to explore the history of musical instruments through these depictions. While the Iconomus project initial goal was to do something similar to what we were doing with the Portuguese Early Music Database, so using Wikidata to enhance the metadata and descriptions of the digital objects, in the end we had to do it in a distinct manner, as the nature of the shared media was very very different. Since we're often using excerpts of artworks, street art, and other visual artistic displays, we are now using structured data on Commons to describe these pieces instead of Wikidata. After that we will be using some of these images to illustrate and improve articles about musical instruments on Wikipedia and Portuguese, which brings us to the next tip. One size does not fit all. Different partners have different needs, priorities, and availability, and on top of showcasing some wonderful possibilities of working with the Wikimedia infrastructure, it's important to let them explore the platforms and figure out what they think works best for them. For both Portuguese Early Music Database and Iconomus, it took us a few hours of guided exploration to reach the best way of working such collections, regarding Iconomus for instance, after about eight hours of live work together, we're still tuning issues regarding data modeling. It's also important to respect the institution's time and nurture relationships even if they take a while to unfold. One of the partners we've started working with in the beginning was Lisbon's Music Records Archive, which is one of the few public music records archives that exist in Portugal. Due to a variety of circumstances, we weren't able to pursue a content partnership just yet. However, we kept a relationship ongoing with them, we invited them for our events and training sessions, and now we're actively planning future activities together starting next month, almost a year after our initial contacts. Things take time and exploration is inevitable. And this obviously goes for your project campaign as well. Our approach at Wikimedia Portugal may not fit your needs exactly, but hopefully with some iteration and exploration, you'll find whatever works best for you. As we can see here, there are multiple stakeholders that we'd like to cover in our work, but there's only a few of us working on this project, and so we really need to ensure we don't spread out too thin. We defined a set of priorities for the next year, and so here's our focus for the next 12 months. The main goal is continuing the relationships we started this year, particularly the ones with archives and research projects, as well as our work with antennas there involved as media. And we're also developing pilot projects with music festivals to put their photo archives on commons, as well as with music schools to work with students both on Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia, which takes us to the very last tip, take time to organize and reassess. There were things that worked well and others that didn't. We often worked rushed, and so we've taken a break this summer to look into the project and recalibrate our future work. We already have an activity plan and know who we'll be working with, and our goal is really to ensure that our partnerships are long-lasting and that things can scale up in the future in a sustainable way. Wikiluv's Music of Portuguesa is now Wikimedia Portugal's flagship project regarding land partnerships, steering much of the work we do. It serves as an anchor for regular technical training for new editors of Wikipedia, Commons and Wikidata. It feeds non-music-related Wiki events. For instance, next month there will be a couple of sessions dedicated to it on Wikidata days, a three-day conference that we're hosting about Wikidata. And last but not least, it gives focus to our general work, pushing for more institutions and groups to share their knowledge and content in the freest manner possible on Wikimedia. So that was it. I hope it was useful to you. Thank you so much for your time. Once again, if you would like to know more about Wikiluv's Music of Portuguesa or share your feedback on the campaign or even this session, feel free to reach out to me using the email address you see on the screen. The video and the slides are both on Wikimedia Commons, so you can grab them and each one of those things that I've showed has the links for the galleries, the categories on Commons, the queries on Wikidata and the articles on Wikipedia. I hope you are having a wonderful time in Singapore and wherever in the world you may be. See you soon. Bye!