As an exception to the "generally", I consider an experienced WP
editor perfectly responsible and neutral enough to add appropriate
links, even if they are being paid as a Wikipedian in Residence by the
organization. I regard the WIR in such a case as the person to
supervise the links--subject in the end to being responsible to the
community. (as COI for what I am saying here, I am a WIR at NYPL-PA,
though an unpaid volunteer, and I do intend to add links as
appropriate. I would do just the same if I were paid. )
I would regard as a further exception regard in somer cases a
trusted member of our community to add such links, even one paid on
a permanent basis as a staff member. In both cases, the test is
whether the particular work they do as an individual is acceptable to
the community. If not, the community will tell them, and I would
expect them to be sensitive to its concerns.
The test is the work. As with any project doing large amounts of
anything, I 'd think a responsible editor would know to go slowly at
first, and encourage feedback before doing large amounts of link
adding or mass article creation--paid or unpaid.
On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 3:14 PM, John Byrne <john(a)bodkinprints.co.uk> wrote:
To reply to Lar, in my UK experience big national
museums with well-staffed
web departments are very interested in and conscious of their web traffic,
and the web departments use the figures in their reports to management, to
justify their existence and budgets among other things. Of course these are
the ones with big numbers to point at. As soon as you move to smaller
museums, staff levels and interest decline very rapidly (as do web traffic
figures), and some museums have very few staff & little general awareness.
On the related matter of the Ball case study, I agree with Smallbones that
this is not an approach to recommend, although 47 links is a tolerable
number. I don't think it says how many are still there, which would be
interesting. We have had bad experiences in the past with the European
Library, which some will remember, and various others adding links to little
archival deposits only likely to interest authors of a full-length book
biography. Generally COI people should not add links themselves, as per the
policy. I have advocated here the "supervised linking" approach which has
worked well with the Victoria & Albert Museum (actual articles, and also
links to museum web pages) and now the Metropolitan Museum of Art (links to
full PDFs of their huge catalogues - I am trying to get some figures out of
them for a small case study). The GLAM person suggests links on a special
user sub-page, and one or more independent volunteer scrutinizes them &
comments, before the GLAM person adds them. This is a very efficient
approach making little demand on volunteer time, and giving an "audit trail"
for the GLAM confirming they took appropriate precautions before adding the
link.
The MMA additions in particular are a fabulous resource, & the V&A ones have
in the great majority of cases stood the test of time, as they were added
about 5 years ago. To see the process, look at:
*V&A:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:VAwebteam/Sandbox
*MMA:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WilliamDigiCol/Archive
John
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