How are Museums contributing to Wikipedia?

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Angelina Russo on July 27, 2009 at 4:31pm

Hi Joe
The Wikimedia group in Australia are holding a special conference next week to discuss this very issue! You can follow it at http://www.wikimedia.org.au/wiki/GLAM and twitter tag #GLAM-WIKI

Permalink Reply by Gerard Meijssen on July 27, 2009 at 6:35pm

Hoi, several GLAM have provided the WMF with collections of images that come complete with annotations. At this moment I am working with the Amsterdam Tropenmuseum and we are preparing first a small collection on Suriname, slavery and the Maroon. We hope to follow this up with a collection on Indonesia.

By having GLAM collaborate with the WMF (GLAM is galleries, libraries, archives and museums) we hope to drive home the point that illustrations need sources as much as citations do. We know that the annotations are looked at by the community and this is another benefit. Lastly we are exploring how we can involve Wikipedia in an exhibition that is planned for November of this year.

Important is that some of us in the WMF world want partnerships of GLAM and the WMF, this means that we want to have a presence of GLAM on the project and in this way provide a way to communicate with them directly. One of the benefits are the digital restorations that some of us do. We at the WMF need access to the really high resolution images and in return we aim to feature these on the Wikipedia and Commons main page. As we always name the GLAM we get the material from, it does provide attention to the GLAM and its collection.

This is very much something that is developing now. I am grateful for you post because it helps the argument that the WMF and GLAM are natural partners.
Thanks,
GerardM aka Gerard Meijssen

Permalink Reply by Lise Broer on July 28, 2009 at 2:31am

Echoing Gerard's response: wiki structures are pretty far outside the box of what museums are used to doing. So they need our help to see where the synergies are and how this can work for them.

Uploading individual images to illustrate particular articles is generous, but there's much more a museum can do (and gain) than acting in the role of an ordinary editor.

Permalink Reply by Joe Hoover on July 28, 2009 at 5:08pm

I will definitely be watching the Twitter feed!

Folks might find the paper "Collaborative History - Creating (and Fostering) a Wiki Community" that Tracey Baker, Rose Sherman and I presented at the Museum and the Web conference useful for community building around a museum created wiki.

I can tell you from a small museum perspective Wikipedia is invaluable. I am also on the board of the a tiny historical society in near Minneapolis, Minnesota. I helped them set up a wiki for them to collect and disseminate the history of our community. However, not only did no one contribute - no one bothered even to go to it. Instead, we found that putting our community's (fascinating) history on Wikipedia reached more eyeballs than we ever could if we left the information ghettoized on our own now defunct wiki.

Permalink Reply by Liam Wyatt on July 29, 2009 at 10:20pm

I was so taken by what you've said here that I went and wrote a blog post quoting your whole last paragraph. Hope you don't mind! http://www.wittylama.com/2009/07/local-history-and-wikipedia/
We definitely need more stories and examples like that one in Wikipedia. Well done!

Permalink Reply by Joe Hoover on August 3, 2009 at 5:03pm

Thanks, Great post! However, in response to "Editing in MediaWiki is just too damn hard for the majority of the population." I would like to steer you to the project I have been working on at the Minnesota Historical Society, - Placeography. Built with Mediawiki it is a wiki about place and unlike Wikipedia, which requires places added to it to be relevant Placeography allows for the adding of non-relevant places that have a more personal relevance. However the most significant things about Placeography are it's use of semantic Mediawiki to make it's data machine readable and it's use of forms. Even the smallest amount of wikicode is a barrier but we have found that most people can fill out the longest forms with little problem. Having a form based wiki has made the wiki much more user friendly and increased contributions.

Permalink Reply by Gerard Meijssen on September 22, 2009 at 5:16pm

One of the curators of the Tropenmuseum has been writing about his topic, Papua New Guinea on Wikipedia. He is thrilled that the Tropenmuseum will donate 100.000 images to Commons. This will allow him to use the pictures he is familiar with as an illustration.

There will also be a workshop on October 7 where Wikipedians are asked to work on the Subject of Suriname and the Maroon. Material of the upcoming exposition in November will be available to give this subject a place in Wikipedia.
Thanks,
Gerard

Permalink Reply by Jonathan Bowen on October 12, 2009 at 8:36pm

Museums, especially smaller museums, may be interested in the following paper giving some guidance on added a museum page to Wikipedia:

Museums and Wikipedia, Jonathan P. Bowen and Jim Angus. In David Bearman and Jennifer Trant (eds.), MW2006: Museums and the Web 2006, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 22-25 March 2006. Archives & Museum Informatics, 2006.
http://www.archimuse.com/mw2006/papers/bowen/bowen.html


Jonathan Bowen