This is a great foot in the door for working with museums - a lovely
high-visibility piece. Worth pursuing with both campus and regional
museums.
SJ
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Nothing novel for anyone who's followed GLAM activities in general,
but it did get notice elsewhere:
http://artmarketmonitor.com/2013/07/29/the-smithsonian-courts-wikipedia/
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/27/arts/design/museum-welcomes-wikipedia-edi…
Museum Welcomes Wikipedia Editors
By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: July 26, 2013
WASHINGTON — No one knows the components of dark matter, the mystery
of Mona Lisa’s smile or precisely how long it will take Kim Kardashian
to lose the 50 pounds she gained during her pregnancy.
Amid this vast ocean of bewilderment, however, a small group of
volunteers managed to expand the well of shared human knowledge last
week by joining a daylong group editing session sponsored by Wikipedia
and the Smithsonian Institution’s American Art Museum in Washington.
The gathering — called an edit-athon — was the latest collaboration
between the online encyclopedia and cathedrals of culture like the
Smithsonian to expand and improve Wikipedia entries, which are subject
to the vagaries of volunteer contributions. At the same time, the
Smithsonian is able to better publicize what’s in its extensive
collections.
“Wikipedia is driven by this desire to share knowledge freely with the
world, and that is in sync with our mission,” said Sara Snyder,
webmaster at the Archives of American Art, a Smithsonian research
center that held an editing session in March to beef up the digital
encyclopedia’s entries on female artists.
These amateur-professional collaborations began in 2010 as the
brainchild of Liam Wyatt, a former bartender, fire twirler, podcaster
and vice president of Wikimedia Australia, during an unpaid five-week
stint as Wikipedian in residence at the British Museum. The following
year, the Archives of American Art appointed its own Wikipedian in
residence and organized an edit-athon, enlisting local volunteers to
create new articles using the archives’ resources. Other institutions,
including the New York Public Library, the Children’s Museum of
Indianapolis and the Picasso Museum in Barcelona have joined what has
been called the GLAM-Wiki initiative. (GLAM stands for galleries,
libraries, archives and museums.)
Institutions like the British Museum and the Smithsonian recognize
that they cannot compete with Wikipedia’s popularity. Many more people
searching for information online about the Smithsonian go to Wikipedia
rather than the Smithsonian’s own Web site.
Several members of the Smithsonian’s social media staff joined the
dozen or so Wikipedia editors and novices who were lured to the
American Art Museum last Friday by the prospect of disseminating
knowledge, a behind-the-scenes tour and a free lunch.
While somebody could just as easily add Wikipedia entries while home
alone in skivvies, sitting around a conference table with a laptop and
fellow Wikipedians can be a great way to socialize “for people who
don’t like to meet,” said Gerald Shields, a Treasury Department tax
attorney who lives in Prince George’s County, Md., and is a member of
the local Wikipedia chapter.
Mr. Shields said he generally edited articles on North Korea and on
feminism, primarily because few other people do. He combs through the
English-language version of The Pyongyang Times for citations, and
last year, even spent part of a trip to China trying to track down a
photograph of Ri Sol-ju, the wife of the North Korean leader Kim
Jong-un. At the museum, Mr. Shields, camera in hand, took on the role
of the day’s official chronicler.
This was the first group editing session for Robert Greenwood, a
retired police dispatcher from Catlett, Va., who has been editing
Wikipedia entries, mostly on citizen science and ornithology, for more
than two years. What got him hooked on the Wiki world, he said, was
the 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed black teenager who
was killed by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer in
Sanford, Fla.
“I was a dispatcher myself, and I had listened to all of the
recordings of 911 calls,” he said. Rather than having access only to
snippets of conversations provided by the news media, Mr. Greenwood
said, citizens should be able to listen to the entire conversation and
come to their own conclusions. He formatted the recordings and
uploaded them to Wikipedia.
For the American Art Museum, Mr. Greenwood created an article on art
conservation, one of two dozen subjects — digital conservation and the
artists Paul Cadmus, Leo Friedlander and Margaret Boozer among them —
that the museum had listed as needing more information or new entries.
Making the museum’s list did not necessarily pass Wikipedia’s muster,
however. The online encyclopedia relies on citations to determine
whether someone is sufficiently notable to merit an entry.
Fran Rogers, who is on Wikipedia’s technical committee, decided to
write about Betty Spindler, a ceramist, after seeing one of her
creations — a clay hot dog with relish and mustard — in the museum’s
collection. Ms. Rogers said she hoped the inclusion of Ms. Spindler’s
work in a couple of other collections and a mention in a few newspaper
articles would get her past the notability hurdle. It seems to have
worked. No other Wikipedians have challenged the entry.
Ms. Rogers had come to the editing session primarily to help neophytes
with technical problems. Like most of the other participants not on
the Smithsonian’s staff, she had no particular interest in art.
Madilynn Garcia, a student at the University of Texas at Austin, and
her cousin, Chance Paglia, a student at Georgetown University, were
interested in learning how to use Wikipedia to disseminate information
— but not necessarily about art. “I know a lot about pre-Shamanistic
native cultures,” Mr. Paglia said, explaining why he was working on
entries for metallurgy in Japan and the pre-Roman Empire instead of
those related to art. Ms. Garcia, a summer intern at the American
Alliance for Theater and Education, was looking at the page for
Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatists.
When Wayne Clough, the secretary of the Smithsonian, stopped by for a
brief visit, he peeked over Ms. Garcia and Mr. Paglia’s shoulders and
asked “What are you working on?”
Before they could answer, another Smithsonian employee distracted Mr.
Clough. Ms. Garcia and Mr. Paglia flashed each other a quick smile.
Mr. Clough thanked the volunteers. As he spoke, Mr. Shields and
another veteran contributor, Jim Hayes, checked out Mr. Clough’s
Wikipedia page and decided that the accompanying picture could be
improved. So Mr. Shields snapped some photos and soon substituted a
shot of Mr. Clough with a couple of the volunteers at 2:21 p.m.
Fourteen minutes later, however, another editor somewhere in
cyberspace named Duckduckgo restored the original photograph and moved
the new image farther down because the Wikipedia community has agreed
that biographical pictures are generally portraits only of the
individual.
“This is part of the way Wikipedia works,” Mr. Shields said. “Everyone
can edit any article.”
A version of this article appeared in print on July 27, 2013, on page
C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Museum Welcomes
Wikipedia Editors.
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