I’m the Wikimedian in Residence for the Science Museum and Natural History Museum. I’m not an in-house Wikipedia editor and don’t write about the museum or it’s collections, I help the museum to work with the Wikimedia volunteers, educate staff about Wikimedia projects including teaching museum staff how to edit Wikipedia to contribute their specialist knowledge and to help volunteers to work with the museum collections.
The Science Museum and Wikimedia working together edit
The Science Museum and the Wikimedia movement have joint aims, achieving them in different and complementary ways:
The Science Musuem Group’s mission is to make sense of the science which shapes our lives, help create a scientifically literate society and inspire the next generation
— The Science Museum Group’s Strategic Ambitions 2012 - 2022
Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing
— Jimmy Wales, Co Founder of Wikipedia
The Science Museum provides the unique experience of seeing objects that have led to massive scientific, social and environmental change and bring about an understanding I can only reach by seeing objects in “the flesh”.
Wikipedia offers a way of museums reaching a huge worldwide and multilingual audience with it’s educational content. Wikimedia projects including Wikipedia receive around 21 billion page views per month (this works out at around 1/2 million views a minute) and are available in 285 languages. Projects like Wikipedia Zero (Wikipedia on mobile phones in many developing countries with no data charges available to 330 million people) and the One Laptop Per Child project allow Wikipedia content to reach a wider audience than normal web content.
Wikipedia can also offer rich content to it’s foreign language visitors on their mobile devices in their own language which museums do not have the resources to do. I’m currently working with museum visitors and online volunteers to create a multilingual guide, taking people through to Wikipedia articles for each object in their own language using their smartphones or tablets.
The National Media Museum recently released around 400 images under a Creative Commons Attribution license which after two weeks are now being used on 87 articles on 10 different language Wikipedias. Open licensing is key to realising universal education, it allows multiple parties to work together to create educational content (like Wikipedia) and allows many people to distribute it.
The Science Museum has released 3 videos created for the Painless exhibition, currently the videos have been added to three articles by community members, the Wikipedia articles the videos are included in have a 10,000% higher viewership than the video have had on Youtube.
The Science Museum has a unique contribution to make to open knowledge and has agreed to release 50 images under a Creative Commons attribution license from it’s collection. If you would like to suggest educationally useful images from either the Science and Society Picture Library or Collections Online please email J.Cummings@nhm.ac.uk.
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