User:Victuallers/DerbyBlog

WMUK's 1st collaboration was with the British Museum, why was Derby 2nd?
Almost a year ago I "came out". I had registered the name of Victuallers and I'd written hundreds of articles, become an admin and I had a fairly impressive wikipedia edit count, but I don't think I'd met another wikipedian. I "came out" when I decided to attend the "backstage pass" at the British Museum and realised that our contribution to free information and creating the world's largest encyclopedia was worth boasting about.

Derby was chosen to be the second English museum to collaborate with Wikimedia UK because I wanted to see what we could do to a smaller museum. I had been one of the editors who managed to create 100 articles in less than six months for the British Museum. This was impressive but I'm not sure we made much of a change as the British Museum was pretty impressive before we arrived. It was October last year when I naively imagined that I could create a "backstage pass" at my local museum in a month, actually it took six.

Was it better than the British Museum' "100 articles"?
The Derby museum collaboration has not created the number of featured and good articles that were were created for the British Museum and we haven't created the dozens of "Did You Knows" - although we have created much more in some ways. The key achievements:
 * We have written over a dozen "Did You Knows" and by themselves these 12 articles got the same traffic as Derby Museum's web site.
 * We installed the first set of QR Codes in a British Museum. These codes allowed visitors to scan these codes and access English Wikipedia articles.
 * We ripped out all the codes we had installed when we invented QRpedia codes that allowed visitors to scan codes and access the Wikipedia in the language of their choice.
 * We launched the Wright Challenge. This is the first multi-lingual challenge we know of for wikipedians. This challenge has been running for a week, in earnest, and we have 100 new articles!

The Wright Challenge
The Wright Challewnge is named after "Joseph Wright of Derby" as it his paintings which are the Crown Jewels of Derby Museum. The Challenge offers fifty pounds and some goodies signed by the Mayor and Jimmy Wales to the op five editors who create articles about Derby Museum articles.

=The National Railway Museum= Its quite a coup to find out that the UK's premier Railway museum is asking Wikimedia for help. Last month we met their web manager and he proposes that their staff should publish material using Wikipedia articles.