hi,
For the past few days, Liam Wyatt has been going around cultural institutions in Mumbai. He will be going to a few on Monday morning as well. This is a small report for the benefit of the group and for those interested and who could not make it for the meetup today at the Pinstorm offices in Santacruz. Our thanks to Netra there who offered and allowed us use of space on such short notice.
We had a nice turn up today of around 20-25 people.
We started off with directly with Liam's talk on his work with the British Museum. His work/documentation of his work here can be found at
http://enwp.org/WP:GLAM/BM. He then talked about his idea behind doing a project with the British Museum after a controversy the year before with the British National Archives. He said that the relationship was mutually beneficial to both and did not compromise on the principles of either Wikipedia or the British Museum. He talked about the series of conferences called GLAMWIKI that have already happened in London and Paris and are planned in Washington DC and Barcelona.
He then went on to talk about five of the events that he conducted during his 5 month stint as the Wikipedian-in-Residence at the British Museum. These included the Backstage Pass, One on One Collaborations/Photos Requested, Feature Article Prize, the Hoxne Challenge and the School Translations.
Backstage Pass involves a free tour of Museum objects in display and out of display by curators of the Museum for Wikipedians working on an article. The One-on-One Collaborations was an exchange of requests between Curators and Wikipedians who needed each others help - curators to improve articles on Wikipedia and Wikipedians for expert advice on articles in Wikipedia. Photos Requested requested for photos in different parts of the museum. Feature Article Prize was an interesting if controversial experiment. The British Museum offered 100 pounds for the 5 articles in Featured Article in Wikipedia related to an item in the British Museum. This became similar to the pay-for-edit idea. However, the rationale was that since the prize money was not for an article on the British Museum and was for an object/topic related article, it was okay. The Hoxne Challenge was an effort to see how Wikipedians could improve an article on one subject given access to subject experts etc.The subject given was that of the Hoxne Hoard discovered in England in 1992. I think it goes without saying that the article reached Featured Article rating pretty quickly. The last was the School Translations project where a group of French school children that Liam knew translated the articles on certain items in the British Museum from English into French as part of their English class homework. The students later visited London (like they regularly apparently did) and visited the Museum to see the objects they had written about as part of class.
These were some of the implementations possible in the 5 week period whilst Liam was with British Museum.
Bishaka and Liam reported on their visits to The Museum (Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalay) and Jnanapravaha. I accompanied Liam and Bishaka to The Museum. I am pleasantly surprised by the way they have transformed it! We've reported on positive responses from these cultural institutions. Liam and Bishaka will be visiting one more institution tomorrow.
We then had a brief introduction to
pad.ma. The part that relates to Wikimedia Commons was a demo on how a plugin for Firefox developed by the same team helped in uploading files in the .ogg format to Wikimedia Commons.
We had a small reference to the Workshop for Women on Wikipedia (an idea suggested by Tinu Cherian) and we suggested the idea to two students who had come from SNDT Women's University to the meetup today. We've requested them to check on the possibility of using their labs to conduct the Workshop in Mumbai on or around March 8, 2011 (to re-iterate: the centenary celebrations of Women's Day).
warm regards,
Pradeep Mohandas