Dear WM-UK,
At the suggestion of Mike Peel, I'm forwarding this mailout to the UK list
too in the hope that you might find it interesting. I have only been sending
these mailouts to people who have actively expressed interest in following
the British Museum - Wikipedia project but I can send them here too if you'd
like. You can read about the project itself here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/BM
Best,
Liam Wyatt/Witty Lama
Volunteer Wikipedian in Residence, British Museum
wittylama.com/blog
Peace, love & metadata
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Liam Wyatt <liamwyatt(a)gmail.com>
Date: 23 June 2010 18:28
Subject: Wikipedia - British Museum: Bits and pieces
To:
*you are receiving this because you have expressed interest in the British
Museum - Wikipedia collaboration project. If you do not wish to receive
these emails please tell me. Otherwise, please do pass them on to others.*
Dear all,
Just a couple of little things to mention about the ongoing collaboration
with the British Museum:
The combined pageviews for all articles related to the History of the World
project (using category:A history of the world in 100 objects) is just under
100,000 this month so far. This will continue to increase as the month goes
on and it does not include articles about generic subjects - only articles
that are specifically about the individual object in question. You can see
this here:
http://toolserver.org/~magnus/treeviews.php?depth=9&date=2010-06&ca…
a fair few of these didn't exist before last week.
- Several other libraries have expressed interest to me personally, or I've
heard through the grapevine that they too now want to do something
"in-house" with Wikipedia. This is not just in London (although several are)
but in the US, Australia and Spain. Nice :-) For example yesterday I met
with the V&A and today with the British Library to fly the flag. Equally the
Wikimedia-New York City and D.C. team have put a notice up saying that
they're going to have a meeting with the Smithsonian soon.
- The total pageviews so far this month for all articles related to the
British Museum (ignoring articles about staff) is 336,000
http://toolserver.org/~magnus/treeviews.php?depth=9&date=2010-06&ca…
This is compared to last month's total of 500,000 which we'll probably
reach.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/BM#Quantitative Of all
the articles 16 are newly created since the backstage pass.
- The Hoxne Challenge is on TOMORROW.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/BM/Hoxne_challenge. The fact of
this event is top story in this week's Wikipedia Signpost
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2010-06-21/News_a….
Even though we've not actually had the event yet - the mere fact of people's
willingness to get involved has *already* taken this article from 2kb in
length to 20kb! Here's the diff:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hoxne_hoard&action=historysub…
obviously a long way to go yet, but it's significantly better
already which is a fantastic achievement. Note that someone's even begun a
stub in French
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tr%C3%A9sor_de_Hoxne
If you can help out with this, please do. This article is already the 6th
most common source of inbound traffic to the BM site from Wikipedia (see
below).
- As you may have also noticed in that "signpost" article, the British
Museum have changed their collection website's frontpage to feature the most
prominent item from the Hoxne Hoard in quiet recognition of our event.
http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/explore_introduction.aspx They've also
been working away in the web team to make the records about the Hoard more
citable, findable and collated in one spot:
http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/article_index/h/the_hoxne_h…
of the things to come out of the backstage pass day was the
realisation
that it is very hard to reference the BM website if we're talking about a
collection of items. This link now compiles all of the links to the
individual sub-sections on one page.
- As you may have also noticed in the "Signpost" article - the BM has
started linking out to Wikipedia articles that are a) about objects in the
collection and b) Feature articles. The two examples so far are "Disasters
of War" and "Durer's Rhinoceros". See the bottom of the page:
http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/pd/a/albr…
http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/pd/f/goya…
that the link to Wikipedia specifies that it's a Featured Quality
article which I think is a nice endorsement of WP's internal quality
assessments.
- We now have two projects that have grown out of the "one on one"
collaborations project. One with the Asia department and one with Prints and
Drawings department where the Wikipedian will come onsite every now and then
to be given access to the research libraries.
- Cyrus Cylinder is actively being reviewed as a FA candidate. Please
comment here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_article_candidates/Cyrus_Cy…
indeed, if you're a curator reading this - peer reviews for any
article
related to your expertise are welcome. Bullet point lists are preferred as
this makes them easier to divide up amongst a group.
- Last night "Royal Gold Cup" featured in the "Did you know" section
of the
mainpage
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Gold_Cup bringing the total
number of mainpage appearances for BM objects in the last two weeks to 11!
Since then Royal Gold Cup has also been listed at FAC. Please help review it
too if you can.
- In terms of Wikipedia sending traffic to the BM website, Wikipedia remains
the single largest source of non-search engine traffic to the BM. The
articles that have sent the most number of people so far this month are (in
order): British Museum; Hedwig Glass; Lothair Crystal; Rosetta Stone; A
History of the World in 100 Objects; Hoxne Hoard; Lewis Chessmen; First
Jewish Revolt Coinage; and Ginger (mummy).
Whilst pageviews and reader-engagement on Wikipedia is a goal in its own
right, it's nevertheless interesting to see these stats as I think you can
see that we're having a direct influence on who visits the BM website and
where they go. I'm particularly interested to see the Coins one in that list
as it's the one BM department that we don't currently have an article about
any of their specific objects.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Jewish_Revolt_coinage
Please do get in touch if you have any questions, queries, offers to help
etc.
Liam Wyatt
Volunteer Wikipedian in Residence, British Museum
wittylama.com/blog
Peace, love & metadata