Hereby I like to announce the project Wiki
Loves Art in Belgium.
In November we had a meeting with a museum and
we noticed that they were very enthusiastic
about Wikipedia/Wikimedia, but they experienced
it as difficult and maybe dangerous to open up
their collection. This relatively closed
attitude appears to be not unique, but often
occurring among Belgian cultural institutions,
compared with other countries, as we understood
from various organisations in the open knowledge
sector.
Therefore we have thought about how to work
together with cultural institutions and we came up
with Wiki Loves Art. This project has been
organised earlier in various countries, and in
2009 also in the Netherlands. A Dutch team is
currently working on organising Wiki Loves Art in
2016 again, and that gave us the inspiration to
start with the organisation in Belgium as well.
Wiki Loves Art is a photo contest in what
participants visit the museums, galleries, archives
and libraries which have determined a part of their
collection to be photographed and published under a
free license. Wiki Loves Art gives participating
photographers often a unique possibility to take
photos in a cultural institution and/or to visit an
organisation behind the scenes. This has resulted in
other Wiki Loves Art projects in many photos that
are widely used on various Wikipedias. For cultural
institutions this project gives the opportunity to
collaborate with Wikipedia/Wikimedia in a save way,
without having opening the doors of their entire
collections, and show a part of their collection
with relatively little costs.
In an organisational point of view the project is
intended to make the Belgiumgap less wide and the
availability will increase the coverage of Belgian
art on Wikipedia. In comparison with other
countries, relatively less articles have been
written about subjects in Belgium in the various
language versions of Wikipedia. This project tries
to stimulate to fill this gap and that Belgian art
and more is better visible and described on
Wikipedia.
Wiki Loves Art is a project under the flag of
Wikimedia Belgium, but is a joint project in what we
work together with several organisations with a
long-term expertise in working with cultural
institutions and/or open knowledge projects.
Together with them we had last week a meeting and
agreed on how we want to organise Wiki Loves Art in
Belgium.
We need to start in time as the project is very
labour intensive with much time spend on communication
with the various cultural institutions. The Dutch team
has therefore highly recommended to hire someone for
one or two days a week during the project to be able
to manage all the communication and organisational
needs. We are also going to set up a website, print
flyers and leaflets, and after the contest we organise
a jury to judge the photos and organise a prize giving
ceremony.
If there are any suggestions or feedback, please
let us know.
The project will be brought in at the General
Assembly coming Saturday.
If you are interested in volunteering as part of
the organisational team, let us know!