UTA Photograph Collection, News Service Photograph Collection now on Wikipedia

The purpose of The Compass Rose is to raise awareness of Special Collections' resources and to foster the use of these resources. The blog series also reports significant new programs, initiatives, and acquisitions of Special Collections.

All of the digitized photos in the UTA Photograph Collection and UTA News Service Photograph Collection are now on Wikimedia Commons and many of them are already used to illustrate Wikipedia articles.

Special Collections has shared 426 individual photographs from these two collections that document university history from its foundation in 1895 to the 2010s with Wikimedia Commons, the image and media host site behind Wikipedia. Already, 94 of them have been used in Wikipedia articles in 19 different languages.

In preparation for this project, I worked with Jeff Downing and Claudia Catanzaro Solis in the Digital Creation department and Krystal Schenk in the Marketing and Communications department to change the license used for all of these photographs on the Digital Gallery from the UTA Libraries' default CC BY-NC license to the CC BY license, as the latter is compatible with Wikimedia projects like Wikipedia while the former is not.

Then these photos were uploaded to Wikimedia Commons with full metadata as well as proper source, license, and category information. Most of the metadata used is taken directly from the metadata already on the Digital Gallery, namely the titles and descriptions of each photograph involved. The other fields on Wikimedia Commons include a date field where dates are formatted in the ISO standard (ie, "2020-07-09" for July 9, 2020), a source field that universally includes the text "UTA Libraries Digital Gallery" (which is linked to the exact page on the Digital Gallery that hosts each respective image), and an author field that includes the text "UTA Photograph Collection" or "UTA News Service Photograph Collection" (depending on which collection the image is from, although both link to the UTA Libraries section of the Wikipedia article on UTA).

Beneath this metadata in the "summary" section of the file page, there is a "licensing" section. For every image contributed in this project, there is a header identifying that this image is part of a cooperation project with the UTA Libraries, including the UTA logo and a brief explanation about the library and the university. Immediately below is the CC BY license itself, which states the freedoms allowed and the only required condition (attribution) while also providing a link to the full text of the license on the Creative Commons website.

At the bottom of the file page are relevant Wikimedia Commons categories, which conform to the hierarchical categorization norms of the site. These categories allow the images contributed to be found by browsing, much like effective description allows them to be found by searching. All images in this collaboration include the "History of the University of Texas at Arlington" category, followed by the main topical categories (such as people, buildings, or events depicted), and then by temporal/geographical categories (such as "1980 in Texas"). At the very bottom are "hidden categories," which are used for administrative purposes on Wikimedia Commons, such as tracking metrics for either the whole collaboration project or specific aspects of it.

These photos have also been added, where appropriate, into Wikipedia articles. Most of these uses have been to articles directly related to the university and its history. For example, the Wikipedia articles on the University of Texas at Arlington itself, its history from 1917 to 1965, university presidents such as Jack Woolf and Wendell Nedderman, and UTA faculty such as Reby Cary and Sandra Myres have all been enhanced with photos from these two collections.

A substantial number of photos have also been added to Wikipedia articles on more general topics or topics not obviously related to UTA. Some of these topics are unsurprising, such as prominent Texas political figures such as former governor John Connally and former Arlington mayor Tom Vandergriff, the Reserve Officers' Training Corps, and library circulation. Others are much more surprising, such as apple bobbing, pesticide application, and egg drop competition. While the UTA Libraries Special Collections department did not set out trying to document apple bobbing or egg drop competitions in its collections, it has high-quality images of these events and Wikipedia has articles about them but previously insufficient illustration, which created an opportunity to fill gaps in Wikipedia's content while also providing a broader audience for our images.

Many photos have also been added to Wikipedia articles in languages other than English. For example, portraits from these two collections have been used to illustrate the French-language article on Liz Carpenter, the German-language article on James A. Michener, the Portuguese-language article on Tom Vandergriff, and the Arabic-language article on Scott Cross. Photos of the UTA campus have also been used in the Chinese-language and Japanese-language articles about UTA itself.

One of the principle advantages of uploading photographs to Wikimedia Commons is that it allows all its files to be used on every language Wikipedia as if they were uploaded locally. This greatly facilitates the ability to use photographs on multiple projects in multiple languages, while also helping all Wikipedias (especially the smaller ones) obtain quality illustrations for their articles.

Related to this is the development of Wikidata, another Wikimedia project that serves as a central repository for information such as statistics while also linking together articles about the same subject in different languages. Some UTA images are so good that they have been added to the Wikidata "image" parameter, which essentially designates them as a preferred image across projects and languages. While not implemented by every Wikipedia, some Wikipedias are already taking these preferred images from Wikidata and inserting them automatically into articles, especially biographies. For example, see how the Wikidata page for Emerson Emory and the Wikidata page on Scott Cross feature UTA photographs, and in the latter case Cross's portrait is now used automatically on his Arabic Wikipedia article, without the image ever being added to the article code itself.

In total, there are 426 photographs from these two collections that have been digitized and uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. Of these, 94 individual images have been used in Wikipedia articles in total, and the total number of uses (note that a single image can be used more than once) is 158. English Wikipedia is the clear leader in terms of use, as 104 different English Wikipedia articles are illustrated by photos from one of these two collections. Other Wikipedias with substantial use of these photos include Spanish Wikipedia (8 uses), German Wikipedia (7), and Arabic, French, and Welsh Wikipedias (3 each).

Viewership of these articles has been steadily increasing the total page views of all Wikipedia articles with UTA Libraries Special Collections images, which includes other collections, most notably maps that were shared with Wikimedia Commons last summer. Before the UTA Photograph Collection or UTA News Service Photograph Collection began being uploaded, as recently as March 2020, total page views for Wikipedia articles with UTA images were consistently between 710,000 and 860,000 every month between November 2019 and March 2020. Then, in April 2020, this number climbed to over 1.2 million page views, and by May 2020 (the last month for which data is available), it reached over 1.6 million. An analysis of the most-viewed pages in April revealed that approximately two-thirds of this increase was due to adding photographs from these two collections into Wikipedia articles, while the other one-third of the increase was caused by an essentially across-the-board increase in viewership of Wikipedia articles due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Because anything contributed to Wikimedia Commons will continue to be discovered by other Wikipedians and used in other Wikipedia articles (often in ways not anticipated by the uploader), the total viewership of entire collections generally increases as time progresses. However, articles do routinely see drops in their page views, not just increases.

Keep an eye out for future Special Collections contributions to Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. These 426 photographs from two UTA history-related photo collections are only the tip of the iceberg!