Wikipedia:WikiProject Museums/Working with museums

How can museums work better with Wikipedia? This is a subproject dedicated to answering that question, and to engaging museums and inviting them to become productive editors and contributors to the project.

Ideas for working with museums

Some thoughts (–SJ + 17:50, 18 March 2010 (UTC)):[reply]

Have curators write about the individual objects in their collections. Each notable object is worthy of its own page; most major masters are missing articles about half of their works, and almost all works by minor masters are likewise missing. This is partly because it is difficult to turn up any depth of detail on the individual works on the web; but a curator with access to the provenance and historical records about each piece, and the background on how its current museum found and selected it (including its chain of former owners) could provide excellent background as well as their item/label descriptions. For modern museums, this could even be automated to quickly create pages about all of the works in an important collection.
Have curators and museum administrators write sections about major collections. Right now we don't have clear standards on what makes a collection notable enough for its own article; but it should either have a section in the article about the museum, a section in a detailed article about "collections of <MUSEUM>", or its own article.
- This WikiProject needs to suggest summary/notability guidelines for when each of those options is appropriate.
Have museum administrators, registrars, or publishers publish historical information about the museum and images of the building here, on the museum's talk page (or an other suitable page). Then the material will be available under a free license for use in making a more thorough excellent article.
- By publishing on talk pages, they can publish raw unwikified text, which other editors will come and modify before inclusion in articles; this lowers their barrier to contribution and makes it less likely that they will be challenged for any POV inherent in their available text. Their publishers may nee to learn something about using an image uploading client for Commons, to simplify that step.
Have museums provide medium-resolution images of their full collections, along with any categorization metadata, to illustrate related articles. This is similar to work done with European photo galleries.
- This Project can help them find ways to visualize traffic driven to the museum from articles mentioning their works, and new traffic driven to the Wikipedia articles about them and their collections.

Thoughts from a conversation with a museum director

Liam is jointly organizing a workshop for museum directors and wikipedians in early April. I spoke recently with one of the attendees from the museum sector about how to make the day productive and come out of it with specific suggestions for working together. I've included some of his thoughts below.

Set expectations, and invite contribution
- Let museum administrators know this sort of collaboration request is coming before popping the question (re: directly editing/contributing). Invite them to read some examples of good institutional articles.
- Work on style guidelines for museum articles that all articles can be improved to fit. Museums can provide data/details matching a template more easily than they can figure out the best way to edit a wiki.
- Museums understand the importance of language color/tone, if not our specific stance on NPOV. They have issues with label text over time, as mores and standards change (consider the bias obvious in Britannica articles from the early 20th century, when read today!) Explain our issues with encyclopedic style in this context.
- Ask curators to contribute directly and in detail. They are the ones who work with art history and the heady details of items and collections. (Notably, we have three current or former curators in this wikiproject already)

Don't bite newbies; welcome them and help them deal with setbacks
- Define norms for requesting redaction / review of an article that seems unbalanced. Address the issue of criticism sections in articles — why critics are more likely to edit an institution's article, how to improve the balance of a stub with a long criticism section. Many people look in the mirror when they first visit Wikipedia, before really seeing the project -- help them learn about the project by learning how to constructively point out gaps in articles about themselves / the projects they know best. [In this case, providing a welcome tutorial that shows how to leave comments on talk pages, follow them on a watchlist, and provide data/text for improving them]
- Show visitors how they can write about areas where they know a great deal — how to look for articles on the subject, how to create a new one if it doesn't exist (and link to it from others). Give examples of good edits, and leave reminders about the five pillars and about not feeling ownership of text.
- Create a workspace in this wikiproject where they can post links and ask for help or review.

–SJ + 18:02, 18 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

On guidelines for museums

The closest existing style guide:

Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dermatology-related_articles)

Examples to include/follow:

General background & style:

Other: (surf by category: it's the most effective way to find related material)

Category:Wikipedia style guidelines

There is already a WikiProject for Museums. And, like many such projects (we have roughly a thousand), it does have a draft style guide for how to write a Museum article; though it isn't yet categorized isn't part of the overall Style Guide. If you wanted to take a stab at a proper guideline, I would begin by editing this existing page.

The WikiProject hasn't been active enough to try implementing this guideline on the roughly 2000 museum articles (most in the US).

Survey of museum reactions?

I still don't know what the tenor of expectation will be in advance. I'd be interesting in a quick survey of a dozen museum directors, from event attendees to those who 'would never' come to such an event, to find out

their initial reaction to Wikipedia
what direct experience they've had with it if any

We have some museum volunteers (diverscout, mracer), curators and staff (wiltshireHeritage, danny), and administrators (fact-of-the-matter) in that group... I can see about polling the wikipedian museum-folk.

Example: Art Institute of Chicago

Their anon contributed section on the African Art exhibit is wordy and positive; it needs editing, but other than that I wonder what the concern was.

This is an example of details about a collection that someone at the museum would be welcome to improve.