On Tuesday afternoon, RonaldV, organizer of the WikiUilen, presented the 2024 ProjectUil on behalf of the Dutch Wikipedia community to Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive.
The WikiUilen have been awarded since 2015 as a token of appreciation for valuable contributions to Wikipedia. This was inspired by the WikiEulen project, which the German Wikipedia community had started the year before. Volunteers and projects that have made an outstanding contribution to the Dutch-language Wikipedia in the previous year are eligible for the award. Both nominations and voting are done by the volunteers who make this language version of Wikipedia possible.
During the New Year’s gathering of Wikimedia Nederland, the 2024 winners had already been announced. The fact that the ProjectUil was awarded to the Internet Archive posed a small problem, as it was not immediately clear how the stone statuette would make its way to San Francisco. Fortunately, this had not yet been arranged, as Kahle happened to be in the Netherlands this week for a lecture at Leiden University.
In his acceptance speech, Kahle emphasized the strong connection between Wikipedia and the Internet Archive within the global information ecosystem. He recounted how, after the election of Donald Trump in 2016, a gathering was held with key figures from the open knowledge movement to discuss the vulnerabilities of the information landscape. During this meeting, Katherine Maher, then executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, stressed the importance of having reliable sources directly accessible from Wikipedia. This led to Kahle’s commitment that the Internet Archive would work to archive all Wikipedia references. Since then, the InternetArchiveBot has repaired millions of dead links on Wikipedia by adding references to the Wayback Machine, and a large-scale project has been launched to make books cited on Wikipedia digitally available.1
In his lecture, Kahle outlined the history of the Internet Archive, which was founded in 1996 as a digital library and began archiving the early world wide web. Some applications of this archive were highlighted, such as GifCities, where you can search for GIFs from archived GeoCities pages. The archive also plays an important role in the development of artificial intelligence. All major tech companies would love to use the archive’s petabytes of data to train their models. These models also offer opportunities to improve the discoverability of archival material. A previous version of this lecture, given a year ago, can be viewed on YouTube:
A positive example of AI applications discussed in both presentations is ClimateGPT, an AI model designed to support policymakers in combating climate change. The founder, Daniel Erasmus, is based in Amsterdam and was present to deliver that part of the presentation. Afterwards, I created a Wikidata item about him (Q133419112). This is not only useful for cataloging my photo of him but also ensures that AI models correctly distinguish him from other people with the same name. A Paralympic athlete (Q5217077), cricketer (Q28819600), Rhodes Scholar (Q125469239), and pedagogue (Q112514430) were already in Wikidata; I also added an economist (Q133421369).
Many prominent figures from the Dutch open knowledge movement attended the lecture. In the photo above, from left to right, you can see Camille Françoise, board of trustees member of Wikimedia France, Jane Darnell, who has nearly one million Wikimedia edits, Hay Kranen, the first Wikipedian-in-Residence in the Netherlands in 2013, Maarten Zeinstra, chair of Open Nederland, and Doug McCarthy of the Open Future Foundation. In the foreground, Olaf Janssen is barely visible; he has been the Wikipedia community liaison at the Royal Library of the Netherlands for many years. Representatives from other cultural institutions, such as the National Archives, were also present.
I myself have won the IllustratieUil twice for my work in Wikipedia’s image curation, for 2019 and 2023. Last Tuesday, I was also the volunteer who provided the photo coverage of this lecture. The images are now available for everyone to use under the condition of attribution. Is there a Wikipedia article about you? Does it still lack a good photo? Hire me as a Wikipedia photographer!
Footnotes
Photos: Vera de Kok, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0
- Finley, Klint The Internet Archive Is Making Wikipedia More Reliable Wired Magazine (3 November 2019) ↩︎
Thanks Vera! Great information, this community is humble but essential.
you’re welcome 🙂