Wikipedia:WikiAfrica/Share Your Knowledge/Step/1

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.

Share Your Knowledge

Fase 1

Fase 2

Fase 3

first step: authorize the contents use

It takes 1 week

1 - choose the contents you want to share

1 day

Not each institution content may be immediately available with a free license, depending on various grounds, among which the first one is the copyright respect.

Not each content is fit for being added to an encyclopaedia, and some contents need first a considerable revision.

The first thing to do is to make available those contents of which your institution is sure to have the commercial rights and that can easily enrich Wikipedia articles:

Biographies. Authors, directors, artists, intellectuals' biographies can be used to create short biographical articles or to enrich existing texts (example).

Films. Film reviews presented at cinema festivals can be used to create articles on films (example).

Artworks. The synthetic description and the images of artworks produced by or belonging to the institutions can enrich the biographies of their artists and become autonomous articles (example).

Institution documentation. The article can be enriched with documentation from the institution website: institution history, synthetic description of the major fulfilled projects, bibliographies and reviews.

Festivals, big exhibitions, projects. This documentation can be used to update the articles of the institutions that promote these initiatives or to produce autonomous entries (example).

Illustrations and didactic images (such as photographic archives, photos of historical events, art collections) can be uploaded on Wikimedia Commons and used – even later – to enrich the entries on Wikipedia and of other projects (example). You can do the same with videos or audio tracks for didactic purposes.

Articles and essays already published can be wholly uploaded on Wikisource (example) and therefore linked to Wikipedia corresponding entries.

Didactic material can be uploaded on Wikiversity. The one at a university level in the relative faculty. The one related to high school in the corresponding section (example).

Am I obliged to share all the contents with a free license?

No, you aren't. The institution is free to adopt the license just for some contents.

Am I obliged to use the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) license ?

No, you aren't. You can adopt CC BY or CC-0 ("CC zero") license instead of the CC BY-SA; finally you can release the contents in the public domain. Commercial use and derivative works must be always authorized.

Any questions?: If you want to choose among the contents respecting the copyright, read the FAQs about copyright and free license; If you want to know which are Wikipedia allowed contents, see Wikipedia:Notability and Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not.

2 - tell your colleagues what you are doing

5 hours

Let your colleagues know what are you doing and why.

Get your webmaster involved; he/she will check out the website statistics and put the licenses details online, (read “add the license to your contents”).
Get the press office and those in charge of communication involved; he/she will help you involving colleagues, collaborators, networks and audience.
Get the administration staff or those in charge of contracts and partnerships involved; they will have the chance to use new procedures that make rights managing easier and clearer.

3 - add the license to your contents

from 1 to 3 days

Licenses are adopted in order to use contents safeguarded by copyright. Licenses clearly state which authorizations are allowed and which rights are reserved. In some cases it is not necessary to specify the licenses because the contents are already free by law; however also in these cases the license indication is useful so that users easily and immediately know what to do. The license has to be clearly readable by the user and easily acknowledged by search engines or content management systems. Wikipedia:WikiAfrica/Share Your Knowledge/Creative Commons

Any questions?

Any question about licenses? See the FAQs.

take the second step share contents on Wikipedia