Wikinews:GLAM/Coverage
Cultural institutions, specifically the traditional Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums, are a group that could benefit from engaging with Wikinews and its reporters. The reporting on Wikinews is neutral, and fact based. Unlike other Wikimedia Foundation projects, it allows original content, known on projects as original reporting. Several Wikinews projects, including English and Spanish, have their stories feed out to Google News; this improves article visibility and views. Articles can get decent views, with a few interviews outperforming Wikipedia articles about the subject of the internet. In English Wikinews, an article can get comparable views to appearing on the front page of English Wikipedia as Did You Know. Wikinews article publishing often involves improvement on relevant Wikipedia articles and, for original reporting, images being uploaded to Commons for use on all WMF projects.
Wikinews GLAM coverage
[edit]GLAM related news appears on 25 different language Wikinews projects. This includes English, Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Czech, German, Esperanto, Spanish, Greek, Farsi, Finnish, French, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Swedish, Tamil, Turkish, Ukrainian and Chinese. A category for art related news appears on 18 of these projects. The other projects, including Catalan, Czech, French, Serbian and Turkish languages, either include this material in a general culture or another category, or do not have art related news. The most prolific project for reporting on Art is English Wikinews, with 51 articles. Italian and Russian Wikinews are second with 28 articles each. Arabic Wikinews if the fourth largest project in terms of articles in their Art category. The only other project with double digit articles is Japanese with 10.
Once beyond this broad general category of Arts, GLAM representation based on the acronym becomes less obvious and the uniqueness of each language's contributor base and each project's internal organizing policies becomes apparent. Only one project, Russian Wikinews, has a libraries category. Only one project, English Wikinews, has a galleries category. German Wikinews has 15 different categories relevant to GLAM. French Wikinews has 12. Russian Wikinews has 8. English, Polish and Italian Wikinews only have 6. Arabic Wikinews has 5 categories.
The categories can be highly specific on these projects. For example, Bulgaria's only populated GLAM related category is Irina Bokova. Catalan language Wikinews's two categories include Museums and Maritime Historic Site of Pointe-au-Père. Spanish language Wikinews's two categories include historical memory and Egyptology. Turkish Wikinews has Archaeology. Schneerson Library is found on Russian Wikinews. Serbian Wikinews has Vatican Museum.
There are seven categories that appear on ten language Wikinews projects. The graph above shows the total number of articles found on the nine different language Wikinews projects that have articles in two or more of those seven categories. French Wikinews leads the Archaeology category with 14 articles. English Wikinews leads the Art category with 51 articles. German Wikinews leads the Art exhibitions category with 23 articles. English Wikinews leads the Museums category with 84 articles. Italian Wikinews leads the Paintings category with 16 articles. German Wikinews leads the Sculptures category with 4 articles. German Wikinews also leads the World Heritage Sites category with 18 articles.
While total article counts by category numbers may look somewhat large on some projects for a comparatively small project, there is the issue of time. Wikinews, unlike Wikipedia, is news based. News is news for only a small window of time where you can write about it. After that, news ceases to be news. This begets a question of when historically have GLAM related articles been published? 5 English Wikinews categories, 1 Finnish category, 3 Polish categories, 3 Russian categories and 2 Spanish language categories easily allow for determining of publication dates in bulk. For all these, all articles in the category and their publication date were determined. Articles appearing in multiple categories were removed. The total list of articles was originally 259 and it went down to 220. Years were assigned based on publication date. Understanding that this is a sample of publication dates based on a limited dataset, in 2005 there were 15 GLAM related articles published. There were small increases in 2006 and 2007, before there was a 2 article per year drop in 2008 when only 23 GLAM related articles were published. There was an increase in 2009, before a big drop in 2010 to 18 total articles. 2011 saw a big increase from the previous year to 35. 2012 saw another increase with 41 total articles. As of 20 April 2013, there have been 17 total published GLAM related articles.
The languages/categories with easily available publication date information include English and Russian Wikinews's museum categories. This includes 104 of the 259 total articles. From 2005 to 2012, with the exception of 2010, the total yearly volume of articles published in these two categories ranged between 12 and 16. Year to date, there have only been 3 articles published. While this specific category represents 40% of all articles published, the growth levels have been historically stagnant.
The graph above shows the average total daily views for articles published in 2013 in the local project museum category. Catalan Wikinews is not included because no articles were published in that category in 2013. Russian and German Wikinews are each represented by one article, Венский музей проведёт экскурсию для нудистов and Luthers Sterbehaus wieder zugänglich respectively. English Wikinews is represented by two stories, Science museum hosts first-ever 'Maker Faire' for city of Tyler, Texas and Andrew Sayers resigns National Museum of Australia directorship. French Wikinews is represented by 8 articles, including fr:France : La Liberté guidant le peuple vandalisée, fr:Québec : entente entre le MNBAQ et l'église Saint-Dominique sur une possible conversion muséale, fr:Québec : exposition sur le Pérou précolombien et colonial au Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, fr:Québec : le nouveau Planétarium de Montréal ouvrira ses portes le 6 avril 2013, fr:Québec : le SHMP reçoit une subvention pour réaliser deux spectacles sur l'Empress of Ireland, fr:Québec : ouverture du nouveau Planétarium de Montréal ce week-end, fr:Québec : une exposition sur les Beatles au musée de Pointe-à-Callière de Montréal, and fr:Québec : une exposition sur les plasticiens au Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec. The dates in the graph above are from 20 March 2013 to 19 April 2013. Both of English Wikinews's articles were published in this period, and 3 of the French articles were published in this period. On average, English Wikinews articles got around 42 more daily views than their counterparts on French, German and Russian Wikinews. As the max average daily views for any single day is 244, this is a large volume of additional daily views that the English project gets. Russian Wikinews only averages 4.3 views a day for their 2013 museum category article. French Wikinews is worse at 2.95. German Wikinews is the worst performer on average at 2.73 daily views.
A similar traffic picture exists for articles in the Arts category. Finnish, German, Swedish and Italian Wikinews had nothing published in this category so far in 2013. English and Farsi Wikinews each had one article published, Andrew Sayers resigns National Museum of Australia directorship and آرجو_يحصد_جائزة_أفضل_فيلم_في_الحفل_السادس_والستين_لتوزيع_جوائز_الأكاديمية_البريطانية_لفنون_الفيلم_والتلفزيون respectively. There were three articles published on Arabic Wikinews between 1 January 2013 and 20 April 2013: مجلة_«شارلي_إبدو»_الفرنسية_تنشر_سيرة_مصورة_للنبي_محمد, فوز_فيلم_آرغو_بجائزة_أفضل_فيلم_في_حفل_الأوسكار_لعام_2013 and آرجو_يحصد_جائزة_أفضل_فيلم_في_الحفل_السادس_والستين_لتوزيع_جوائز_الأكاديمية_البريطانية_لفنون_الفيلم_والتلفزيون. There were ten Russian Wikinews articles published in this period. Like the museums category, English Wikinews had the greatest daily average visits, bearing in mind the sole article was published on 26 March, several days after the start of the reporting period, with 41 views a day. This compares to 2.4 views a day on Arabic Wikinews, 12.0 views a day on Farsi Wikinews, and 1.9 views a day in the Arts category for Russian Wikinews.
Both Russian and English Wikinews did average higher per day views for articles in the Museum category than the Arts category. This suggests that people are more interested in getting museum news on these projects than they are in getting general Arts news.