Wikipedia:WikiAfrica/Share Your Knowledge/Fondazione Cariplo

A guiding path that makes the collaboration among cultural institutions and Wikipedia easier. It has been created for WikiAfrica and gives its contribution to the GLAM project.

Collaboration between Fondazione Cariplo and Wikipedia

This page aims at presenting a results' synthesis of one collaboration with Wikipedia, the one developed with Fondazione Cariplo, as an example of collaboration among Italian cultural institutions and the free encyclopedia.

In particular, this page shows the results of the pilot initiative Share Your Knowledge (or SYK) 2011, which gives its contribution to WikiAfrica Project with the involvement of research and documentation centers, international cooperation institutes and archives.

(in Italian) Leggi la versione italiana di questo caso studio

The institute

Fondazione Cariplo develops philanthropic activities in various fields, among which those related to arts and culture. The basic lines of the action plans are the increase of the human resources and the development of the research, the enhancement and the use of the cultural heritage, the creation of the largest autonomy for weak subjects, the environmental-friendly development.

Collaboration history

The collaboration between Fondazione Cariplo and Wikipedia starts in June 2011, after the Foundation joined Share Your Knowledge initiative promoted by lettera27 within WikiAfrica project. Fondazione Cariplo co-finances Share Your Knowledge and has provided the texts of some of its website section with the CC BY-SA license (the same used by Wikipedia): the Foundation, the strategy (apart from some pages), projects, artgate. Moreover, since August 2011 it has provided^[1] the images (in low resolution) and the cards of artworks and authors of the online artwork gallery belonging to Fondazione Cariplo, shown on Artgate website. These images are precious to improve Wikipedia articles about ancient, modern and contemporary art (18th and 19th centuries).

The low resolution images, the cards of authors and artworks of the online collection Artgate with Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported are available thanks to Fondazione Cariplo, as described on the collection page.

Uploading contents on Wikimedia sites and reactions

Uploads were performed semi-automatically by the project tutor Michele Casanova, who also took care of the creation of categories and templates. The images were uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, in order to make them available to any other project of the Wikimedia Foundation via a simple link. The collaboration of Fondazione Cariplo generates some discussion by volunteers in the discussion pages of Commons itself ^[2] and by email, disagreements which are quickly overcome.

Content analysis

The DensityDesign Research Lab - Dipartimento INDACO del Politecnico di Milano creates this infographic in 2011; among other things, the size of articles, number of visits, number of images, the ratio of the contributions of users involved in the project and external users and comparison with the size of other donations of content can be inferred from the picture. There are other two infographics (1 - 2) which help representing the impact of the Cariplo donation within SYK.

In May 2012, the results of the donation were significant also from a quantitative point of view, as summing up new and improved entries and uploaded pictures, 1,500 wiki pages are affected.

Two articles help us frame and understand the scope of this collaboration. it:Collezioni d'arte della Fondazione Cariplo provides data, description, history and a large list of involved artists. it:Gallerie di piazza Scala reveals more about this museum dedicated to the nineteenth century and founded by Intesa Sanpaolo and Fondazione Cariplo which exhibits 197 works from the collections of both parties and which we can almost virtually "tour": for each section the subject and the present works are briefly shown, and those from Cariplo are displayed. The recent opening of the museum complex is also an article on the Italian Wikinews.

Among the hundreds of entries created from scratch from the contents provided by Cariplo we find singular ones, like the one that refers to a mysterious anonymous artist known as the it:Maestro dei fiori guardeschi, or others which were inexplicably missing from the encyclopedia, like it:Luca Alinari, a contemporary artist of international caliber.

The project does not only add new contents, but improves dramatically the quality of existing articles; see the added value of bibliographic information, or how the paintings' reproductions dignify the pages about Giovanni Segantini, Francesco Hayez, Telemaco Signorini or Ardengo Soffici.

The most popular files are "Battello sul Lago Maggiore" by Angelo Morbelli and "Ritratto di Pietro Ronzoni" by Giovanni Carnovali.

The first one is used on it.wiki as an example of Divisionism and in the article about the Lago Maggiore; on en.wiki as well, it can be found in the articles about the painter and about the galleries of Piazza Scala where it is on display, whilst on nl.wiki it is included in a list of pointillist artists.

The second one can be found in the articles about the author (it, fr.), his colleague the painter Ronzoni who is the subject of the painting, and the hosting museum (it., en.).

The German Wikipedia instead uses the portrait of the lawyer Cesare Sarfatti to document the usage of a blotter, a now old-fashioned item for the desktop; the Spanish encyclopedia displays the Ritorno di Telemaco by Antonio Canova in the article of the Homeric character; uk.wiki includes a work by Odoardo Borrani in the page regarding the Macchiaioli painters. More examples in the gallery below.

Used in the author's article, Dudreville, on Russian Wikipedia
Used in the author's article, Biasi, on Russian Wikipedia
Used in the author's article, Minerbi, on Swedish Wikipedia
Used in the author's article, Sironi, on Galician Wikipedia
Used in the author's article, Guttuso, on Basque Wikipedia

In May 2012 almost half of the images in the category Artgate is already somewhere in a project of the Wikimedia Foundation, and the number of visits to the pages containing these files is impressive. For example, only between January and April 2012 the number of hits reaches about 1,530,000, of which nearly 260,000 outside it.wiki!

Over 90,000 of these visits are for the aforementioned Morbelli's painting, while the "silver medal" (48,000 hits approx.) goes to "La partenza del garibaldino" by Induno, as it is included in it:Spedizione dei Mille; it is followed by the aforementioned "La morte di Abradate" by Hayez (about 38,000).

Good news for the Cariplo's collection in June 2012: the painting La Confessione, by Giuseppe Molteni, nominated by the tutor of SYK, is selected as Picture of the Day on Wikimedia Commons, and gets added, like other important works of art, to the category for featured non-photographic media. At the end of June the same recognition is obtained for a bas-relief depicting Canova's Justice, which is included in the category reserved for sculptures. On July 6, Molteni's picture hits many Wikipedias'home pages as Picture Of The Day: this results in an immediate international interest both for the author and for the collection, as new entries prove, for example, in Chinese, in Vietnamese and in Dutch.

These flattering results would be enough to judge Cariplo's move as a successful one, yet the Foundation already plans releasing further new contents in BY-SA, contributing more actively to Wikimedia projects, adopting new procedures and last but not least, promoting the use of Creative Commons licenses not only among their own staff but also between the project partners and within their own network.

Main activities

it:Progetto:WikiAfrica/Share Your Knowledge/Maratona 2011 – a marathon to create and widen the entries about Africa that took place (on Wikipedia in Italian) between the 2nd and the 14th June 2011.

New articles on en.wiki

Expanded articles on en.wiki

New and expandend articles on it.wikipedia

See it:Progetto:WikiAfrica/Share Your Knowledge/Fondazione Cariplo#Voci prodotte

Contributions to other Wikimedia projects

L'amministratore di sostegno on Italian Wikiversity
Apertura ufficiale di Gallerie d'Italia - Piazza Scala on Italian Wikinews
Artgate Fondazione Cariplo gallery, 851 files on Wikimedia Commons

In the press

Patrìcia Frias, Share Your Knowledge: Creative Commons e Wikipedia per le istituzioni culturali. L'esperienza della Fondazione Cariplo (CC Project Showcase), 2011 slideshow - Slides
Search for Fondazione Cariplo in GLAM's monthly reports on outreach.wikimedia

References

[1] CC BY-SA License

[2] Talk page commons:Commons:Deletion requests/File:Pratella Attilio, Pescatori sul molo.jpg.

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