wikipedia in the archives: what why how [notes]

Presentation Notes: What Why How Wikipedia in the Archives Midwest Archives Conference: Fall Symposium 2013 | Jennifer Noffze & Lori Byrd Phillips

Things to queue up: - Commons: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Images_from_the_Children's_Museum_of_Indianapolis - Tyrannosaurus Rex (article) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrannosaurus - David Ferriero: min. 10:55 (video) http://youtu.be/47pEcmXjt8E?t=10m55s I’m Jennifer, the Children’s Museum’s Registrar and Archivist, and this is Lori Phillips, who began her time at the museum as our Wikipedian in Residence and is now our Digital Content Coordinator. We’ll be talking today about Wikipedia at the Children’s Museum, and while our perspective is very museum-heavy, we think you’ll still find a lot of relevant information for your institution. There’s no shortage of archives working with Wikipedia, including the National Archives itself, which you’ll learn about in a bit. To get started with two basic definitions--

Wikipedia is well known as the largest and most popular internet encyclopedia. It’s a collaboratively edited, multilingual, freely available, and supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation.

The GLAM-Wiki initiative helps Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums share their resources with the world through collaborative projects with Wikipedia editors around the world.

I will talk through much of the “What” – specifically sharing about the Children’s Museum’s journey with Wikipedia and what archives can learn from our experience.

Lori will share more of the Wikipedia nitty gritty and how the community works.

She’ll then share resources to help you get started with Wikipedia in your institution, including answering the ever-important “Why Wikipedia.” This includes a step-by-step guide to connecting with the GLAM-Wiki community.

We’ll have time for specific questions at the end. But please don’t hesitate to interrupt if you need something clarified.

So let’s get started with why the two of us are here talking about Wikipedia!

4th

oldest youth museum in the United States—founded in 1925

Largest collection of any youth museum with over 120,000 objects encompassing the American Experience, Natural Science and Cultural World domains

Collection strengths include: toy trains, children’s textiles, Cretaceous dinosaur fossils and the Caplan Collection of Folk, Fantasy & Play

My role as Registrar/Archivist—responsible for collections management duties and institutional history.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Images_from_the_Children's_Museum_of_Indianapolis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrannosaurus

http://youtu.be/47pEcmXjt8E?t=10m55s


First—what is a Wikipedian? A Wikipedian is anyone who edits a Wikipedia article. This can be a little or a lot of editing! The Wikipedia community sometimes defines an “active Wikipedian” as a person who has made five or more edits.

Our former Director of Websites and Emerging Media, Angie McNew, first heard about the Wikipedian in Residence position in 2010 from Australian Liam Wyatt, who was just about to begin his time at the British Museum as the first-ever Wikipedian in Residence.

Liam noted the need for Wikipedia to strengthen partnerships with museums to create the most up-to-date and accurate information.

Liam inspired us to have our own Wikipedian in Residence, Lori, the second and longest-running and first to be hired on full time.

Liam visited the museum a few months after Lori started to kick start our cooperation and help us host our first events.

He also helped Lori and Angie to help convince the museum and especially the Collections Department that a partnership with Wikipedia was a good thing!

In November 2010, we hosted our first Backstage Pass Event where Wikipedians toured the collection and met with the curators.

In this photo, Curator Tris Perkins is talking about artifacts that she pulled from the Ethnographic Collection.

One major bonus from this event was meeting a Wikipedian who returned later to take wonderful photos of objects in our collection which we uploaded to Wikipedia.


In January 2011, the Museum’s Executive Team approved going forward with sharing artifact images on Wikipedia. The ET was convinced it was the right thing to do because some of our images were already out there--so why not be a leader? We followed a model established by the Brooklyn Museum.

We started with a small batch of 32 existing high-res images from a previous collaborative digitization project.

My role in this was to assist our curators with assembling the metadata and providing the images to Lori. In March 2011, we uploaded this first batch.

(Commons walk through.)

Show subcategories > Click on Natural Science Collection.

Show all images > Click on full-body of Alaskan King Crab.

Note image and ability to download / reuse.

Note Metadata that we pulled together

Note “Institutional Tag” that shows it’s part of the Children’s Museum’s project.

Note “Licensing Tag” that shows what creative commons license it’s under. (Lori to talk about more.)

Note all of the languages the image is used in.

Click on Red King Crab link to show article.

In May 2011, we uploaded our second batch of 36 images. These were also selected from our high-res images that we had available.

There was some concern about using our highest resolution, largest sized images. It is best practice to provide the highest quality images, but we initially uploaded high quality images at a lower file size that are still usable on the web.

Now, we don’t care about shrinking our file size – we just give the highest available.





With a collection of 120,000 objects, we only had 1,500 high-res, print quality images. Lori and Angie provided money for a photo shoot in order to get more images—we had an all day photo shoot with 90 objects from all three areas. These images were ready for upload in October 2011.

Here’s our Alaskan King Crab, he was part of image donation 3.

Before we uploaded any of these images, we had to ease the fears of our curators and legal counsel, who were wondering “what are people going to do with our images?... are they going to put Bucky, our famous T.rex, on a packet of cigarettes?”

Three years out… these fears were unfounded.

In August 2011, we held our second Back Stage Pass event dubbed a “Caplan Edit-A-Thon.” Frank and Theresa Caplan were the founders of Creative Playthings, an educational toy company. In 1985, they donated their 50,000+ collection of toys and folk art from around the world to TCM.

Their Wikipedia articles were basically stubs (only a sentence or two long), and we wanted to add information to those articles. In preparation for the event, I scanned 15 documents from our archives (annual reports, newsletters) and uploaded them to our website so the Wikipedians would have access to these resources.

During the Edit-A-Thon, Lori and I gave a tour of the collection, with a particular emphasis on the Caplan objects.

After the tour, Lori worked with the Wikipedians on the article and I worked with a volunteer photographer who had attended our first Back Stage Pass event.

He took these two wonderful pictures of Creative Playthings toys (in addition to about 30 others). The Four-Way Blocks images is used in the Creative Playthings article.

During the summer of 2012, TCM had our first digital engagement project that used collections objects with social media. It was titled “100 Toys (and their Stories) that Define Childhood.” This exhibit was a huge success!

Our Curator selected 100 toys from our collection made roughly during the past 100 years that help define childhood. After this project, we chose toys from our wonderful new selection of photos to add to Wikipedia.

We were careful to not choose anything that would infringe on copyright or trademark. (Concern about trademark.)

Because many people don’t associate children’s museums with permanent collections, I love seeing our objects placed in articles. This Underwood typewriter is one example. When someone reads about this typewriter and then looks over at the image and sees it’s in our collection….well, it just doesn’t get better than that!

Wikipedia allows us to not only provide a better experience for our online visitors, but we are also able to reach new audiences! More people knowing about what you have and what resources you can provide is never a bad thing.


One of our Curators is keen on working with a Wikipedian to create a better Schoenhut article. We have many wonderful Schoenhut pieces in our collection (piano and circus set here) in addition to print resources. We also have the high-quality images ready and waiting!

Also, we recently received a donation of the Walker Edmiston Beany & Cecil Archive. In addition to 75 objects, we also received a large archival collection including letters, print materials and original scripts. It would be exciting to help make these materials become more widely available.

Wikipedia has now become part of our normal work flow. It isn’t seen as additional work—it complements all of our current digital initiatives.

This pangolin is an example. About a month ago, we had a photo shoot simply to get more images for our digital repository. Our Natural Science Curator wrote a blog post about this specimen and Lori then uploaded the image to the Commons so it could be placed in an article.

Now, anytime we have a photo shoot we always think about what we can upload to Wikipedia.

Perceptions have definitely changed around our museum, especially in my department. I’ll admit, there were some skeptics, but after realizing how easy it is and how much it benefits not only the museum but the collection, my colleagues are on board.

http://tools.wmflabs.org/glamtools/baglama.php?group=Images+from+the+Children%27s+Museum+of+Indianapolis&date=201305

Because, as Wikipedian in Residence, I’m the stats girl– I wanted to quickly share some of the fruits of our labor. Since August 2010…

We’ve donated 289 Images.

With 538 uses of images in articles.

Across 80 languages

We’ve had over 41 million page views of articles with our images in them since 2010.

(23.6 million are English, all the rest are other languages.)

That’s an average of 2 million views (each month!) - These stats are nothing compared to places like the National Archives and the Smithsonian Institution Archives, who’ve completed bulk uploads (thousands of images uploaded automatically by bots, rather than by hand like I did.) - So this is just the tip of the iceberg. These stats are simply the result of the vastness of Wikipedia, both in its use and in its constant need for content.

Now that Jennifer has shared her perspective on our museum’s journey, I’m going to talk a bit more about how Wikipedia works and the resources that can help you in the broader GLAM-Wiki community. We’re shared our perspective, which is pretty object and photo heavy. However, this definitely isn’t the only way to go about a partnership with Wikimedia. So as we continue, you can begin to ask yourself “what unique resources does my institution have that make sense for Wikipedia?”

A partnership will look different for each institution, because everyone will have very different resources to share.

Maybe it’s archival holdings…or records pertaining to a specific topic (like the NYPL’s theatrical edit a thon), or maybe it’s images like this classic provided by the National Archives

Earlier when we began the GLAM-Wiki initiative, it was all about art museums sharing photos. This was the low hanging fruit. But now the deeper interest is in the research that’s held within cultural institutions—all of that content that’s hiding away in filing cabinets waiting to help flesh out Wikipedia articles.

This content isn’t as easy to share as a photo – but it can be far more valuable.






Jennifer talked about all of the different types of events we ran at the museum. We in fact piloted a lot of the programs that have now become best practice within the GLAM-Wiki initiative around the world. These include Backstage Passes and Edit-a-Thons, which are a chance for Wikipedians to come on-site to the archives and work directly with your records. This is by far the best way to get your research literally out of the filing cabinets and into Wikipedia.

Together your staff work with Wikipedians to have a focused effort on a specific topic.

The Backstage Pass component is often easier for a museum collection, but the main point is to offer something unique and different to draw Wikipedians in to the building.

Often, though, simply having a place to gather with other Wikipedians is enough of a motivation. It depends on how strong your local Wikipedia community is.

Don’t forget about the hidden value in archival holdings – like finding aids. Research-generated material and descriptive metadata can be valuable sources for improving Wikipedia articles.

It doesn’t stop with Edit-a-Thons!

The museum carried out a Translate a Thon in 2011 with a class of students in Mexico. We Skyped in with them live as they translated articles that our Wikipedians were working on during the Edit-a-Thon.

Try a Scan-a-Thon! This may be something you’re very interested in. Digitizing records is a never-ending need. Scanning documents and also uploading them to WikiSource, Wikipedia’s transcription tool, can increase visibility of the records in a whole new way.

You can also consider multimedia donations, such as video or audio files. Wikipedia is in desperate need of both of these mediums to illustrate basic topics throughout articles.

One of our multimedia donations was this animation of Electrolytic Reduction. Being a Children’s Museum, we put an immense amount of resources into making this process as simple to understand as possible for our Captain Kidd cannon which is on display. This is a valuable addition to the encyclopedia.

Another type of project that we carried out was a collaboration with a particular Wikipedian who helped us achieve “Featured Article” status on the article for our Historic Landmark, the Broad Ripple Park Carousel, which happens to be on our fifth floor.

.01% of Wikipedia articles are featured, because they go through such a rigorous review process and have the highest of standards. The bronze star in the righthand corner denotes a Featured Article. When you see one you know that you’re reading the best of the best on Wikipedia.

Now that we’ve talked through some of the possibilities, we’re going to dive in more to how the Wikipedia community actually works.


Wikipedia is the most popular/well-known project that is maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation, which is a non-profit based in the US. Articles are written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Sister projects include Wikisource (the transcription community), Wiktionary (a wiki dictionary), WikiNews (a collaborative newspaper), and Wikimedia Commons (the media and image repository for all images that are used in Wikipedia.)

Wikipedia established in 2001

Wikipedia includes 30 million articles in 287 languages

Over 4.3 million in the English Wikipedia alone.

12 million edits a month // Around 1,000 new articles a day in English Wikipedia.

The Wikipedia community is self-governed, and over time has established five pillars and associated policies that it abides by to successfully collaborate.

The first pillar: Wikipedia is Encyclopedic.

It is not a soap box, a blog, a directory, a newspaper, or dictionary. (Some other WikiProjects are dictionaries or newspapers!)

Content on Wikipedia must be Notable, meaning that to be a standalone Wikipedia article, a topic must have significant representation in third party sources not produced by direct stakeholders of the topic.

Rainbow cookies can’t use just a blog they wrote about themselves, only if NYT writes an article (even then it may get push back from some Wikipedians.)

Wikipedia is Neutral. To ensure this, No Original Research is permitted, and all sources must be verifiable.

Wikipedia does not accept facts, allegations, ideas and stories for which no reliable published source exists.

Remember that your finding aids, website, collections records, and blogs are authoritative sources!

My general rule of thumb is that I would not encourage you write an entire article just based on a blog written by a staff member, but that blog could be a single source among others that serves to fill in the gaps in information –from an expert who has this nuanced information to share.

Because Wikipedia takes neutrality so seriously, the methods for citing facts in Wikipedia are a little more extreme than in other publications. Literally any fact that can be challenged should have a citation associated with it. This is what we mean by “Wikipedia outsourcing truth.” Sometimes there can be 5, 8, 10 citations after a single statement that may be challenged frequently.

Assume that a Wikipedian will come and challenge your statement, so always include a citation after that information. This more often comes in the form of a citation after every sentence, but sometimes a paragraph is OK.

When I’m reviewing articles, it’s a red light for me if an entire paragraph goes without a citation.

Neutral, secondary sources are preferred, but primary sources are OK to fill in gaps. We know that primary sources are often what cultural organizations are working with.


In order to maintain neutrality, conflict of interest is a major concern in Wikipedia. As much as you may try, it’s really hard to not sound promotional and to remain neutral about a topic that’s directly related to you. This includes your institution’s Wikipedia article. We understand that the improvement of your own Wikipedia article is usually a high need, but we discourage you from directly editing your own article.

However, don’t let this discourage you from editing in other articles! Subject areas for which your staff are experts are fair game – this is exactly where your institution’s expertise and content will be most valuable.

I’m happy to answer more questions at the end on Conflict of Interest. There usually are many!

Back to the pillars! The 3

rd pillar is:

Wikipedia is free, in every way.

Wikipedia was an outgrowth of the free and open source software movement in the 1990s.

Everything in any of the Wikimedia projects is freely available to reuse and remix.

Wikipedia uses the Creative Commons licensing scheme, but only allows for specific licenses that allow for content to be freely reused.

This means that non-commercial and no-derivatives licenses are not allowed.

It’s of course also not appreciated when content that should be in the public domain is erroneously given a license. CC0 is often used in these circumstances.

This happens most often with bulk uploads, where a well-meaning organization gives a blanket license to all of their automatically uploaded content, which includes public domain work. You just have to be careful.

The fourth pillar is that Wikipedia (should be) Civil.

Don’t Bite the Newbies is a for real policy. This is because biting newbies is so pervasive.

Biting happens because Wikipedians patrol all new changes and are quick to revert incorrect edits by well-intentioned new editors. These new editors then feel discouraged and don’t come back.

Many Wikimedia Foundation resources have been put into upholding this pillar, including the implementation of Wiki Love. Sharing icons (barnstars) and other bits of encouragement to show thanks and appreciation.

In general, being civil means working towards consensus in all things and assume good faith of editors.

The final pillar of Wikipedia is that there are no rules. (And yes, that’s a real pillar.) You should be bold – if there’s reason to make an exception to the rule, then do it.


Now I’m going to dive in a little more to how the GLAM-Wiki community fits into the larger Wikipedia community.

GLAM-Wiki is a global community of volunteer Wikipedians who help cultural institutions share resources on Wikipedia.

This includes hundreds of Wikipedians around the world who are working alongside the formally titled Wikipedians in Residence. We are not a formal entity, but the Wikimedia Foundation has supported our work through a number of grants and events.

This all started two years ago, when Wikipedia would not have been considered a core part of any institution’s mission. Most didn’t really take GLAM-Wikimedia collaboration seriously until institutions like the British Museum and the Smithsonian began to legitimize the concept.

This image is of our first GLAMcamp (which is an inwardly-focused event where we develop documentation and tools to support our work). It was held in April 2011 in New York City. We’ve now had multiple GLAMcamps where we develop tools, documentation, and broad strategy for outreach.

At this time I was still the only Wikipedian in Residence in the US (but not for long).

Things started to really pick up steam in the summer of 2011, when the National Archives took on Wikipedian in Residence Dominic McDevitt-Parks.

Sarah Stierch also started at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art that summer.

The big turning point in the way of “acceptance” of Wikipedia came in the spring of 2012 at the American Association of Museums.

AAM invited us to present about GLAM in a Panel of five Wikipedians in Residence.

This was the first time that it became clear that museums were embracing Wikipedia as a serious tool for furthering their missions.

We went in expecting to do a lot of convincing – but no one needed to know “why” anymore. They all just wanted to know “how.”

Huge strides were also made at the National Archive, thanks much to Archivist of the United States himself, David Ferriero.

The National Archives’ outspoken support was made even more explicit when Wikimedia was repeatedly mentioned in the National Archives' Open Government Plan for 2012-14.


Just last week, after a year hiatus, Dominic was brought back on formally as a full-time employee focusing on Wikipedia at the National Archives.

This shows how seriously Ferriero is taking Wikipedia as he strategizes for the future.

Throughout much of this time, during 2012, I was serving as the US Cultural Partnerships Coordinator for the Wikimedia Foundation.

The interest had become so great that there needed to be a point person to connect institutions to Wikipedians, and to establish a more robust self-service model for getting started with a partnership. I’ll share more about that in a minute.

And this was happening all over the world. This photo shows GLAM Coordinators, those who facilitate Wikipedia partnerships at a national level, from Israel, India, Germany, the UK, Sweden, Australia, and France.

In less than three years, the amount of Wikipedians in Residence grew from three to over fifty around the world.

Wikipedians in Residence are now found in Italy, South Africa, Denmark, and Spain And in organizations as diverse as Consumer Reports, OCLC, and METRO, The Metropolitan New York Library Council.

While most of you may already be convinced of Wikipedia’s value, we know that you’ll have to go back and make the sell to your organization. And that’s not easy. So I’ll share a few resources and talking points that can make a difference.

First of all, we all know that our missions are central to our work.

The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation aligns closely with the missions of most cultural institutions.

The mission of Wikipedia is to share the sum of all human knowledge, freely, and on a global scale.

They want to share knowledge just like we do – they’re just doing it globally, and on one of the most visible online platforms.

Institutions are increasingly expected to make their content and resources available online. We like to argue that Wikipedia is one of the most cost-efficient ways to do this.

But not only does Wikipedia allow you to digitize your collections and share your resources, it also naturally places your content on the most globally accessible platform available.

Content often is translated organically by the community, who wants to see new information available for as many as possible.

Catalan, Spanish, Turkish, French, Korean, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Finnish.

Again, we don’t edit our own article. These translations came out of the fact that we’d gained attention from Wikipedians all over the world, and they translate our article as thank you to us.


One question that may come up is: How do you know your contribution won’t be changed negatively?

The answer is that “your brilliant contributions will be made better, not worse.”

Vandalism is much lower than many believe. Wikipedians patrol recent changes and many bots revert obvious vandalism.

Concerns over the reliability of Wikipedia usually stem from outdated misconceptions.

Another thing we like to say is,

“We’re doing the same thing, for the same people, for the same reason, in the same medium… let’s do it together.”

This is a well-loved Liam quote, probably because it’s true.


And if all of those “Why’s” aren’t enough for you—there’s always this great quote from David Ferriero:

“If Wikipedia is good enough for the Archivist of the United States then it’s good enough for you.”

Being such a huge advocate for Wikipedia, David was the closing plenary keynote for our Wikimania conference in DC in 2012. 1400 Wikipedians (not just GLAM-Wikipedians!) gave him a standing ovation. Here’s a clip from that talk…

10:55 – 13:47

And now for the HOW!

No matter what kind of Wikipedia partnership you pursue, it’s important that you connect with the GLAM-Wiki community.

You’ll have hundreds of volunteers from around the globe at your back. They have specific skills ranging from copyright and image donations, to mass metadata uploads, to events coordination, training, education and outreach.

As a group, we help advocate for your institution and make sure that you don’t get stuck as you navigate Wikipedia.

We also can help with the crowdsourcing aspects of certain projects. GLAM-Wiki can connect you with a global community of volunteers who want to share knowledge, just like you.



When thinking through what project you’d like to carry out, it’s useful to look through our current best practices and case studies.

We have centralized all of our documentation on our global GLAM-Wiki webpage, glamwiki.org. (I’ll note that this is different from the GLAM:US portal I’m about to tell you about.)

On glamwiki.org you can review our best practices, types of events, and case studies from all different types of projects from all over the world. Some include Wikipedians in Residence, some do not.

This screenshot shows the case studies landing page for The Children’s Museum, which includes specific case studies on our image donation, our Featured Article collaboration, staff outreach, and more.

During 2012 a group of volunteers & I created the GLAM/US Portal. This page links out to the global glamwiki page and the resources there, but it also offers its own structure that is unique to the US community.

The goal of this space is to allow cultural professionals to be more self-sufficient in finding information about GLAM and finding resources to get started with a partnership.

It includes a Connect page, a Contribute page, and the GLAM Bookshelf.

The GLAM/US/Connect page has a number of lists of individuals who can assist you.

We suggest that you create a personal username (there are instructions for how to do this) and post a note on the talk page of a Wikipedian who is listed here.

Depending on the type of project you want to pursue, you can get in touch with either an Outreach Volunteer or just an Online Volunteer.

There is also a list of cultural professionals who have already carried out partnerships and are willing to answer questions.

One of the best ways to connect with a specific Wikipedian is through our new State Connect pages. This is the example for Indiana.

Each one has local contacts and associated WikiProjects made up of Wikipedians who are interested in your state or region.

It also includes current or past GLAM partnerships and any press for these projects. It’s a great way to get a lay of the land for GLAM in your area.

The GLAM: US Portal offers a GLAM Bookshelf that lists powerpoints, handouts, and project plans that we have created. You can use and distribute any of them freely.

Included on the Bookshelf is the GLAM One-Pager, the handout that you also received today.

This is a great overview to help you get started with sharing about GLAM-Wiki.

The goal is to not have you reinvent the wheel.


We’re at a point where cultural professionals themselves are becoming highly experienced in Wikimedia partnerships! GLAMs are now helping GLAMs.

So we’ve developed a centralized space where GLAM professionals and Wikipedians can come together to discuss ideas, share resources, and generally support one another.

It’s called the GLAM-Wiki US Consortium, and it’s a recognized Wikimedia Foundation User Group with an Advisory Board of cultural professionals and Wikipedians, as well as a broader email list. We host a monthly Google Hangout On Air, called a GLAM Out, the first Friday of each month, where you can catch up on all of the latest news and also share your own thoughts and ask questions directly or live on Twitter.

Our goal for the future is for the experts in cultural institutions to become a part of the Wikipedia community. Not just be on the sidelines. And the Consortium is helping to make that happen.

So now I’m going to quickly walk you through the anatomy of an article. Feel free to ask questions as I go… and afterward we can dive into any additional questions you may have.

That wraps the presentation portion of our time.

This is how you can find the GLAM-Wiki community, and if you have any specific requests for resources or case studies just let me know.

We’ll now open it up to questions.

wikipedia in the archives: what why how [notes]

Education