User:Giantflightlessbirds/How Curators Can Work With Wikipedia

Examples

 * The Dowse's New Zealand Craft Artists project: A good example of an GLAM-institution-initiated project, this ran over the summer of 2014–2015, and succeeded in adding nearly 100 NZ artists to Wikipedia. The Dowse had a small amount of funding and two contract workers, all relative beginners to Wikipedia.
 * One thing that became clear was the importance of digitising "grey literature" like exhibition catalogues and small-circulation magazines; the Dowse uploaded numerous craft articles, books, and exhibition catalogues to DigitalNZ. The project also highlighted to me the dearth of photos of artists or their work available under a CC license. The Dowse have written a series of blog posts about their Wikipedia projects: worth reading.
 * The 2016 #NZSpecies Edit-a-thon, run at Te Papa but not organised by them. A good turnout (14 local, 7 remote) including several graduate students and a high proportion of women. Keeping in touch with remote participants was a problem, and they made several mistakes that would have been caught with better communication. The difficulty with edit-a-thons is encouraging continued editing and building an editing community.
 * The Dowse's follow-up events: an Art+Feminism Edit-a-thon (March 2015) and a Māori and Pacific Artists Edit-a-thon (June 2015). There's lots of scope for GLAM institutions to target subjects underrepresented in Wikipedia, and ultimately this has to be done by fostering a culture of regular editing by underrepresented groups. What are ways an institution can support that?
 * The Critter of the Week project, started by Radio NZ and the Department of Conservation, but now supported by the Whanganui Regional Museum and other volunteer editors. The Museum has been able to supply expertise and occasional collection object photos to create or improve a Wikipedia page for each NZ species talked about on this weekly time slot. The model would be equally applicable to arts, history, or Māoritanga, especially in conjunction with any outreach activity the GLAM institution is already doing,