Museums and Wikipedia

[Seb Chan]

We all know the mere mention of the word 'wikipedia' sends people into conniptions and polarises an otherwise lovely dinner party.

Here's two very different museum experiences with Wikipedia -

Brooklyn Museum & Wikipedia Loves Art - http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/community/blogosphere/bloggers/2009/0...

and

http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/community/blogosphere/bloggers/2009/0...

(parts 3 & 4 yet to come from Shelley)

Powerhouse Museum & Wikipedia Backstage - http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog/index.php/2009/04/02/workin...

Discuss.

[Angelina Russo]

Try talking about the recession if you want some polarising dinner party experiences!!!

Thanks for this series of posts Seb. I'm still pondering what it means in the long term but in the short term what is seems to suggest is:
- community members are not going to record content in the same ways as institutions
- trying to establish a formal system of documentation in the community can cause enormous amounts of work
- working with wikipedia communities challenges both lay and expert curatorial knowledge - while the content will be documented in much more accurate ways, what message does it send to general community? Are we establishing another tier of expert knowledge?

I'm only asking these questions - I really don't know how this process would pan out in the long run. My 'production' brain says "of course you do it the way the Powerhouse did" while my desire to experiment with community engagement leads me to admire the Brooklyn approach (though the excess analogue data makes my heart sink)!

I suppose my largest fascination with the PHM approach is - what did the curators think?

[Liam Wyatt]

Indeed!

Let me start by pointing out that I'm the Liam Wyatt that Seb mentioned in his blog post (linked to from the post above) - so I clearly have a vested interest in this. Also, this is my first post in this forum having only just discovered it.

What I think the different approaches and outcomes from these two events that Seb has linked to demonstrates is that just like within the museum sector and within any given museum there is no uniform opinion about what should be done and how do go about doing it - so too it is within the Wikipedia community. Furthermore, as Wikipedia is only an 8 year old project, we are trying to learn as much as we can about a huge range of things - everything from international copyright law to which web-browser can display urdu correctly. So, whilst it is my personal mission within the community to get them to learn about and take on museum-standards of metadata capture, documentation (especially attribution and provenance), you must forgive us for not always being "up to scratch".

That being said - I do believe we're making a damn good go of bringing culture from disparate sources into a contextualised, engaging, relevant and accessible information platform. It's not the 4th most accessed website in the world (after yahoo, google, youtube) for nothing! :-) So, despite its idiocyncracies and often its inanities I would really hope that our two communities can work together and learn from each other. This was the principal reason for the "Backstage Pass" event at the Powerhouse - not to try to get as much new content for Wikipedia in 1 day, but to talk, learn and build a personal relationship with our respective communities.

As for your questions Angelina:
- community members are not going to record content in the same ways as institutions

I believe they will if they are shown why it is a good thing to do so. Wikipedians have the goal of freely sharing knowledge, plain and simple. So if they are shown why and how the particular types of record information that Museums like would be a good thing for Wikipedians to capture too, then the policies and practices will change. Not immediately - like any culture it takes some time - but they're pretty open to new ideas! For example, I'm currently advocating the position that we should be recording the aquisition/record number of objects from museums/galleries not just their names. This is not current practice principally through ignorance, and since they agree why it is significant people are starting to agree with me and add the aquisition numbers in.

- trying to establish a formal system of documentation in the community can cause enormous amounts of work

Yes, as I said above, it can be. But you don't have to do it alone. From Wikipedians' point of view there is little to no dialogue with professional organisations about what kind of standards are good to have. In those industries which have "joined the party" (for example molecular chemists) the Wikipedian editors who are interested in those articles have learnt about the contemprorary standards and tried to impliment them. So, even if you were just to say "these are the kinds of documentation that we wish Wikipedia had" that would be seen by the community and passed around. It would form the basis of a conversation that, currently, is barely begun.

- working with wikipedia communities challenges both lay and expert curatorial knowledge - while the content will be documented in much more accurate ways, what message does it send to general community? Are we establishing another tier of expert knowledge?

There is an issue within Wikipedia about whether all the "low hanging fruit" has been taken and people will no longer be able to contribute to things that they know about. As a result any new articles will increasingly need the input of experts (in whatever field) to contribute their time and expertise. This could indeed fracture the community into layers of expertise and respect. As much as I would like more experts to come on to Wikipedia I do not however believe this will create "tiers of expert knowledge" as the respect given to any individual user in Wikipedia is related to their work on the project - not the length of their CV. This irritates many professionals when they first sign up and give it a go because they are used to being able to lay down the law. But really, it's the same principle as blind peer review - you stand and fall on the quality of your content not your name. This is a great leveller and makes sure everyone focuses on the goal of sharing free knowledge to the world - not egos.

I hope this all helps. I am of course, very willing to discuss this ad nauseum and hope to become more and more involved in this sector and this specific topic. In fact, I've got some big plans for Wikipedia + Australian museums this year, watch this space!

Sincerely,
-Liam Wyatt
Wikimedia Australia

[Mary Harrsch]

I am an instructional technologist (recently retired from the University of Oregon), digital photographer, blogger, website designer, and database developer. I have been photographing museum collections and making my images available on Flickr with Creative Commons licensing since 2004. I also upload images to Wikimedia Commons for use in illustrating Wikipedia articles.

My work has also been used in programs produced for Public Broadcasting Systems, textbooks, bookcovers, websites, blogs, as references for original paintings, in fine art magazines, promotional posters, conference presentations and in classrooms around the world.

My goal when I started this activity was to provide quality (at least as good as can be obtained with restrictions on lighting and tripod use) images for free use by teachers and students in the classroom since so many schools had to cut back or eliminate art and history programs due to budget constraints in recent years. It has since evolved into providing images for use for just about any publicly available content (including Wikipedia) as a way to encourage the appreciation and study of art and history.

My Flickr archive now contains over 16,000 images taken at dozens of museums and educational venues worldwide. Unfortunately I was unable to participate in the recent Wikipedia Loves Art project because I do not live near any of the participating institutions and had already scheduled a photoshoot in Rome, Italy in March so didn't have the travel funds or time to fly to any of the listed museums in the time period required.

However, after reading about the experiences of the Brooklyn Museum managing the project, I would like to offer some suggestions for institutional collaboration with Wikipedia authors in the future. Over the years, I have developed a process to help me manage the information that needs to accompany images if they are to be useful to other authors. When I visit an institution and begin photographing objects, I use a shooting sequence to help me identify and describe objects at a later date. I photograph the object, usually from multiple angles if possible, then take a picture of the institution's identification information as the last shot in the sequence. Then I move on to the next object. When I am back in my production studio, I use the identification information to title the image, develop a list of tags for the image, and, if time permits, write a definitive description for the image since I know Flickr search engines search the title and description as well as the tags.

In addition to topical tags, I try to always include a tag for the civilization that created the object, the institution where the image was taken and its city and the state, the artist (if known), the location of origin (if known) and a century time indicator like 4th century BCE so images can be searched by general time period since I know this is particularly important to history scholars. I also try to remember to include European English spellings as well as US English terms (armor and armour), synonyms and related categories (Apollo, deity, god, religion, mythology, etc.). I smiled when I read how tiring the tagging process has been for the Brooklyn museum folks because I have certainly been there although my normal number of tags is closer to 10 than the 3 they mentioned as the average. I have even tried geotagging images although my cameras do not presently provide geo coordinates automatically and using Google maps is very time consuming. I think there is also a bit of a conundrum involved with the use of geotags. You need at least two geographical references to properly tag a historical item - the point of origin and the current location. I have run into a similar conundrum with date tags. If an item's date of origin spans several centuries, the proper way to tag it would be to tag each century. Due to sheer time constraints, I have opted for the earliest century and plan to go back when time permits and add the others.

As you can see, using Flickr as a scholarly archive requires a lot of work on the part of the contributor. A photographer who chooses to do this also must work under the most challenging circumstances in the museum environment as well since most museums with the exception of the V&A in London and the Oriental Institute in Chicago prohibit the use of supplementary lighting. These constraints also mean extra time in post production to try to clean up reflections, since objects are shot in situ usually behind glass, remove distracting backgrounds or body parts of other visitors. Because the images are taken in such low light, a conscientious photographer will try to reduce noise that invariably is introduced even by special high ISO cameras and improve the sharpness and clarity as much as possible since the depth of field is usually quite shallow because of the low light conditions.

One of the things that was emphasized in the Wikipedia loves Art competition that I have never done before is refer to the accession number. This may be helpful to the institution but has little meaning for anyone else. I always group my images in sets so objects from a particular institution are always in a separate set labeled with the institution's name. I would think that most institutions are so intimately familiar with their own collections that they would easily recognize the objects and could find them in their own archival databases.

Recently, I was upbraided by a museum image archivist for even creating my archive of images on Flickr, pointing out that they were not the quality of professional photographs available from the museum. I pointed out that the images were taken under very demanding restrictions and provided freely through Creative Commons licensing for content creators like teachers, students and volunteer Wikipedia editors that could not afford to pay for commercially produced images.

They obviously had no comprehension of the promotional power of social networking through sites such as Flickr. The problem with institutional image archives is that they are often stored in databases that are not readily searchable by web crawlers or search engines like Yahoo or Google. Therefore many individuals working on projects that require illustration of specific items may not even be aware that the items are part of a particular institution's collection. That is why I try to always include a link to the institution's own website in my image descriptions, so people may be encouraged to visit the website and/or hopefully the museum itself and have the information they need to contact the appropriate source if they do wish to purchase commercially produced images of the item.

Commercial production companies are well aware that museums have professionally photographed image archives available but they may not be aware of just which objects are included in the museum's collection. This archivist may have actually profited from a number of referrals because of my exposure of the institution's collection without even realizing it. I hope you will all keep the promotional aspects of such archives on Flickr in mind when you consider revising your public photography policies.

[Mia]

Wow, that's a great insight into the amount of work it can take to create images for public use. And after all that, to be told off.

"They obviously had no comprehension of the promotional power of social networking through sites such as Flickr."

Obviously!

[Penny Wheeler]

Parts 3 and 4 of Brooklyn Museum & Wikipedia Loves Art now available:

Wikipedia Loves Art: Lesson 3 - Almost done
http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/community/blogosphere/bloggers/2009/0...
- next time Shelley Bernstein undertakes a project involving 2 different communities, she wants to K.I.S.S.

Wikipedia Loves Art: Lesson 4 - The stats
http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/community/blogosphere/bloggers/2009/0...
- Erin Sweeney came in when the contest was complete to process the data, selecting from more than 13,000 Flickr images, and adding more than 30,000 tags

[Lars J Alvik]

I could relate to these articles, especially the one about powderhouse museum, both as a wikipedia administrator (for the Norwegian (bokmål) version) and a museum studies student. However I feel that there wasn't enough emphasis on what's the strength of the Wiki model. The effort made by peer review and collabratory effort, and easy way to create interlinked entries. The way I see it museums could really gain by adopting their own internal wiki with frequent links to wikipedia. For use as a backbone for content managment and for the information front of house (for example for touchscreens or "do it yourself" tours by PDA or mobile phone).

[Seb Chan]

hi lars

actually at the powerhouse we do use an internal wiki - Atlassian's Confluence. (see my post over here - http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog/index.php/2008/12/23/implem...)

the issue with "frequent links to wikipedia" gets back to perceptions of 'authority'. research staff n most institutions and universities are actively discouraged from referencing wikipedia in academic papers.

[Paul Reynolds]

I love Wikipedia - but I also can see the issues.
I like this video which manages to say all this in 5 minutes.
http://www.peoplepoints.co.nz/2009/06/friday-moment-wikipedia.html