Wikipedia:WikiAfrica/Share Your Knowledge/Tropenmuseum

(in Italian) Read the Italian version of this article

The institution

The Tropenmuseum (in English: Museum of the Tropics) is an anthropological museum located in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and established in 1864. It is owned and operated by the Royal Tropical Institute, a foundation that sponsors the study of tropical cultures around the world. Following the independence of Indonesia in 1945, the scope of the museum changed from just the colonial possessions of the Netherlands, to that of many undeveloped colonial states in South America, Africa, and Asia; later the scope of the collections was widened to more social issues such as poverty and hunger.

Overview of the partnership

Like The National Archives UK and the Brooklyn Museum, the Tropenmuseum is not new to cooperating with Wikimedia. The museum was involved bak in 2009 by the Dutch chapter and had made available thousand of high-res, uncompressed pictures about Suriname and Indonesia, and the Indonesian chapter had helped with translations in their language. Many images were digitally restored and some were even featured on Wikimedia Commons. In 2012 the museum was contacted again by the WikiAfrica/Share Your Knowledge project, hoping they would agree to release some of their African pictures. The museum liked the idea and, after a selection stage, released over 4,000 files.

The pictures are from the 1970's (although the oldest ones were taken in 1865) and were uploaded on Commons by the project tutor Michele Casanova.

Half of them are archive pictures whilst the others are images of artefacts created after 1850 and until now, spanning from tools to musical instruments, from toys to jewels, from artworks to religious and ritual items. The community, which is well aware of the Museum contributions, immediately started categorizing the files: Judithcomm, DenghiùComm, JMK, ‎Avron, Svajcr ‎and Notafly were particularly active in this field. Data collected at the beginning of December 2012 reveal that 2.5% (about 100 files) were used in a Wikimedia wiki page; in particular, they can be found on 11 different Wikipedias, on the Polish Wiktionary and on the English Wikibooks. The 4211 pictures got at least 70,000 hits from the end of July to the end of November 2012; the most visualized, in addition to the ones in this page, are about ancient practices like scarification, or the skulls deformity due to tight bandaging in use among some nations.