Hello Nice People,
Am putting my pen to purpose to enlighten you of what conspired in the
Museum collaboration follow up meeting on 19th March 2012. We had an
inordinate meet up with the Railways Museum boss over lunch a day gone
by in Nairobi. It is good to learn that there are some guys who know about
Wikipedia and telling them that they can edit is a spark!
As all of you know Wikipedia is the best way to get Kenya and this Dark
Continent onto the digital map. If your subject is notable then we are good
to go on Wikipedia and rest assured that anyone searching for that matter
will definitely get it whenever they do a search on Google, if not the first search
result, then it will be on the top 5.
Of course the museum boss had worries about releasing the museum content
online for use for free. We advised him this is the best step to get known all over
the world of what they have to offer to guests. Having the eye catchers on Wikicommons
will only attract more visitors and share information. We cited examples of other
Museums in Britain and elsewhere in the World that are doing such fruitful partnerships.
We also told him keeping the information there is kind of ‘selfish’ since even most citizens
of this nation do not know about the artifacts in this museum. He was quick to note that
schools come from all over Kenya to learn about the Kenya-Uganda railway that was formally
known as East African Railway since the information is available nowhere else- either online
or offline (except the museum). The article about this on Wikipedia is just but a stub [1] ;(
We definitely talked about how the museum benefits from this to get him on-board - His staff
will learn to edit Wikipedia since we will not have a Wikipedian there to stay but maybe for a
short while. Sharing free knowledge is also a great feeling!
He told us he has volumes of documentation/tapes that bear such facts lying at the Museum.
After lunch we ensued to the Museum where he showed us around for a tip-off of what we could
get valuable from the Museum. The largest working locomotive steam engine is preserved at this
museum and guys fly in to come and view this magnanimous machine and even engineers fly in
to repair it. The plans/drawings of the outlook of the engine are also well-kept there which I
presume should be on commons.
All in all it was a fruitful meeting and he told us to draft a proposal explicitly elucidating each
bit and piece of what we need-except dough;) , what we expect from the museum, how the
museum shall benefit and how Wikipedia shall gain. Abbas and Alex by now have volunteered
to get this document and hopefully deliver it next week at the Museum. Anyone else who would
like to do so is welcome to do this – I will post the link to Meta once we start this. We told him
we can have Wikipedians coming by with backdoor passes to come and edit stuff about the
museum once in a while and so on……
I am happy this far of the enthusiasm to have this content on line and I have faith that other museums
in Kenya shall follow suit. A map of all museums that we have in Kenya [2]
Regards,
Stephen.
1. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_African_Railways_and_Harbours_Corporation
2. 2. http://kenyaplaces.info/