---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Liam Wyatt <liamwyatt@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, Jun 6, 2010 at 6:27 PM
Subject: [cultural-partners] Featured article prize from the British Museum in any language
To: chapters-cultural-partners@wikimedia.ch, chapters@wikimedia.ch
Cc: Matthew Cock <MCOCK@thebritishmuseum.ac.uk>

Dear Chapters and Cultural-partnerships lists,

As some of you are probably aware, I'm currently away from my Home-Chapter (Wikimedia Australia) working in Wikimedia UK's territory :-)
I'm over here in London volunteering with the British Museum as their "Wikipedian in Residence". Two days ago we had a highly successful event - a "backstage pass tour" where curators showed local Wikipedians around the building and some of their collection behind the scenes. This was a good way of breaking down some of the barriers between our two communities and we learned a lot from each other. You can read more about the outcomes of the day here: http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Backstage_Pass#Results_of_the_day

However - I'm writing specifically to inform you of an announcement made by my supervisor Matthew Cock - the head of the Web department - during the day:

The British Museum is offering 5 prizes of £100 (approx. $140USD/120Euro) at their shop/bookshop for featured articles on British Museum related topics - in any language edition. Ideally the subjects will be articles about collection items. (maximum 1 prize per person, 1 prize per article - people can chose to share a prize if they collaborated on it).

As far as I know, this is the first time an organisation has actually put out a prize for Wikipedia work to recognise that it is valuable in its own right. This is a recognition that Wikipedia-work is not only good quality but meets the outreach aspect of the Museum's mission to engage the public. It also has a positive effect for the institution in terms of usage of the deeper resources and links back to their research material. A win-win for free-culture and for the cultural sector. (And yes - before you ask - the British Museum knows it does not have any editorial control over Wikipedia and will not be trying to "own" articles).

I would especially like to reach out to those chapters who have a language edition of Wikipedia that is closely tied to their chapter and those smaller/newer chapters that don't have much money to offer in the way of project-funding. I would be thrilled if a smaller/newer chapter would take this offer from the British Museum and make it into a project of your own in your language edition of Wikipedia.

Please, do get in contact with me if you would like to do something. You might want to start by having a look at the British Museum's "highlights" page and sort "by culture" or "by place" relevant to your own country's culture/history/language - http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights.aspx Equally, you could look at the current major project at the museum "A history of the world in 100 objects" or the existing English Wikipedia articles about collection objects and see if there's something that is relevant to your culture there.

Most Wikipedians probably don't know that the museum has curators dedicated to answering phone/email questions about their specialist areas and they recognise that editing Wikipedia articles, especially about items in the BM's collections, counts for those purposes. Part of my role at the British Museum is to put Wikipedians in touch with the relevant curator so they can help each other so please do contact me if you would like to get assistance from the experts.

The English-Wikipedia page: WP:GLAM/BM is the clearing house for the BM's involvement with Wikipedia and you can get further information about the project there or by simply emailing me.

Please forward this to anyone who you think would be interested and contact me if you have any questions.

Sincerely,
-Liam [[witty lama]]

wittylama.com/blog
Peace, love & metadata

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