International Museum Day Datathon 2023

by Moheen Reeyad

Board member, Wikimedia Bangladesh

Bangladesh National Museum. Photo by Babul Abdul Malek, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

On the occasion of International Museum Day, Wikimedia Bangladesh organized a datathon where volunteers from Bangladesh and India contributed data and enhanced the Wikidata items related to museums located in Bangladesh. It was a day-long datathon jointly supported by Wikimedia Bangladesh's regional community "Chattogram Wikipedia Community" and "Mymensingh Wikipedia Community". Since “museums are an important means of cultural exchange, enrichment of cultures and development of mutual understanding, cooperation and peace among peoples”. The goal of the campaign was to enrich Wikidata items about the museum and add relevant images to the museum.

Preparations

An event page was created on Wikidata with a table containing a list of articles showing whether they exist or not. This system also allows participants to work on Wikidata items that do not exist. We primarily focus on Bangla Wikipedia where there are Bengalispeaking contributors. Fortunately, the response was good. All participants have been issued e-certificates by Wikipedia Bangladesh.

Results

The day-long datathon was held on 18 May 2023, which was International Museum Day. This year's theme was “Museums, Sustainability and Well-being”. A total of 26 new items were created in Wikidata, while 66 items were improved. Which covers a total list of museums in Bangladesh. The Bengali community has once again shown that in this area of knowledge, the visibility of data related to museums and archives is very important. As always, we invite all of you to create items on any topic that should be on Wikidata to reduce the irrelevance of existing information.

Published on 14 July 2023

Diff, a Wikimedia community blog

https://diff.wikimedia.org/2023/07/14/international-museum-day-datathon-2023/