OpenCulture

Wikipedia describes itself as a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. With over 14 million articles (of which some 3.1m are in English) it is used by people all over the world as a source of reference, a place to share knowledge, and sometimes as a source of amusement.

Anyone responsible for managing a public-facing website in the past 5 years will have watched the proportion of hits originating from Wikipedia gradually creep up alongside the all-encompassing Google clickthroughs. The reason for this is that Wikipedia has achieved that magical online double-whammy of combining breadth with market-share, and it shows no sign of diminishing (recent news stories notwithstanding!).

But breadth is not the only thing Wikipedia has in common with museums. At the most fundamental level, we share a common aim of bringing public content to the public (even given the recent challenging disagreement about the ethics and economics of this between Wikipedia and the National Portrait Gallery). As in museums, the majority of Wikipedians are only incidentally technologists - the majority are photographers, creators, and copyright-geeks, sharing a common belief in the power of decentralised collective action.

Wikipedia has in its sights a partnership with museums as curators, creators and most importantly collaborators. The result is a proposal for an initiative called ‘Britain Loves Wikipedia’, which is to be launched on the 31st January 2010, and which will run throughout February (see what they’ve done there - neatly encompassing Valentines Day!).

The idea of ‘Britain Loves Wikipedia’ is to get UK museums to throw open their doors (and ideally their stores) to Wikipedians (people who create Wikipedia records or provide photos for Wikimedia Commons) and allow them to take photographs of out-of-copyright works in their Collections. These photos will be uploaded to a staging server where the museum can review them, remove anything dodgy, and then approve them for upload to the commons.

Why would you do such a crazy thing? Well, several reasons, really/ The first is that it is an opportunity to enrich the photographic record of your collections (photos on Wikimedia Commons are also available to you under a Creative Commons license to re-use). The second is to be able to say to your funders, Local Authority and other important people that you are working with Wikipedia. The third is that the information created at ‘Britain Loves Wikipedia’ events will be used by Wikipedians to create articles on, you guessed it, Wikipedia - which in turn will drive more traffic to your site (and hopefully more people to your museum).

It’s a limited pilot in this first year - and Collections Trust has agreed to identify 10-20 UK museums who are willing to set up and run a ‘Britain Loves Wikipedia’ event during February 2010. The details of how you do it are up to you - but we’d suggest that if you’re planning an open stores event in February, you could think of some creative ways to welcome Wikimedians too (the Wikimedia Foundation and MLA will also be doing some promotion to ensure that people are aware of the events).

So, if you’d like a chance to partner up with Wikipedia, and are willing to run a ‘Britain Loves Wikipedia’ event in your museum, drop me a line at nick@collectionstrust.org.uk or DM me at @NickPoole1. More information will shortly be made available from the UK mediawiki website.

The ‘Britain Loves Wikipedia’ initiative follows on from the successful ‘Wikipedia Loves Art‘ and the brilliant ‘Wikipedia Takes Manhattan‘ events.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 26th, 2009 at 3:59 pm and is filed under Events, General, Nick Poole. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.