JOSEPH SEDDON DIRECTOR Museums, sausages and encyclopaedias

Nearly every museum has an online team

Building a social media strategy?

Does it include Wikipedia?

Things to remember Wikipedia is not a "social network" It’s a social construct. Wikipedia is not User Generated Content It a collection of Community Curated Works

Don’t rule us out 5 th most visited group of websites in the world 375 million unique visitors Around 100,000 active contributors

We know its not easy....  The hurdles:  Conflict of interest  The behemoth of rules  Working in a turbulent community

We know its not easy.... The hurdles:  Conflict of interest  The behemoth of rules  Working in a turbulent community

We know its not easy.... The hurdles:  Conflict of interest  The behemoth of rules  Working in a turbulent community

We know its not easy.... The hurdles:  Conflict of interest  The behemoth of rules  Working in a turbulent community

Sausages To retain respect for sausages, and laws one must not watch them in the making.

Sausages To retain respect for sausages, and laws ENCYLOPEDIAS one must not watch them in the making.

Why should we help Wikipedians? The hurdles:  Conflict of interest  The behemoth of rules  Working in a turbulent community Wikipedians can help you achieve a successful, high quality presence without loosing ones sanity

A Case Study – British Museum Wikipedian in residence - Liam Wyatt  Bringing Wikipedia in-house to find ways of building a proactive relationship, of mutual benefit, without undermining the principles of either.

British Museum - Wikipedian in residence 5 weeks 1 resident £0 budget

What did he find? Museums responsibility for its collection does not stop at its website Receive ~500,000 page views a month 6000 clickthroughs a month. Images of BM collection items viewed 23,000,000 3 times more collection page views on Wikipedia than on the British Museum website

So what happened next?

What's better than one Wikipedian....

A whole bunch of Wikipedians

Backstage British Museum 30 Wikipedians Tours were given by Museum Curators An article creating spree Creation of 18 new articles Annoucement of the Featured Article Prizes

This was just the beginning!

Featured Article Competition First five to reach featured article status in any language

Hoxne Challenge

The Idea? How quickly can Wikipedians produce the best that Wikipedia can offer, if they are given access to some of the best resources in the world?

So far: 47 new articles show on the Main Page of Wikipedia:  244,000 page views 2 Featured articles on the Main Page:  Rosetta Stone recieved 100,000 page views in one day Similar in-residence programmes taking place in the Smithsonian and The Children's Museum, Indianapolis

Would you like to know more?

What’s the purpose? About improving content. Focus on personal relationships. About leveraging the communities. Does not erode the integrity of a museum and its collection Every institution has different needs but EVERY institution can do some version of this at home.

What I wish I could talk about too.... Metadata How to edit Free Licenses Wikipedia Policies Structure of Wikimedia Digital Restoration Photo Scavenging Image Donations AND THE LIST GOES ON....

GLAM-WIKI:UK Why and how cultural institutions could work with Wikimedia projects like Wikipedia? What Wikimedia needs to do to make collaboration easier and more effective This event is relevant to representatives of the licensing, web, sales and education departments as well as all curators in cultural instutions.