Wikipedia and galleries, libraries, archives, & museums (GLAMs) ought to do more together: they have shared interests in presenting and making historical and cultural information available to the public. This page is intended to help coordinate some experimental metrics systems from Wikipedia that can be useful to GLAMs. In particular, this page shows the outcomes from the British Museum's pilot "Wikipedian in Residence" program in June 2010. Witty lama was the inaugural resident.
We have been offered a tour of the critically acclaimed major BM exhibition Shakespeare: staging the world on September 13th at 9 a.m, followed by a meeting with a curator. Dora Thornton, the lead curator for the exhibition was able to collect the group after the tour for the editing session.
One of the aims of the tour was to take pictures of the objects that are poorly represented on Wikipedia/Wikimedia Commons. The list of target objects was prepared. Some objects where we either have several good photos already, or which are unlikely to ever have their own articles, were omitted. Of course this excludes loaned objects & those not normally on display & is only a fraction of the total number of objects in the exhibition.
Shakespeare photos needed
This list was originally prepared, although when the objects went into the public exhibition it was not possible to photograph them any more.
Object
Inventory
Room#
Done, link
Musical Chamber Clock
1958, 1006.2139
38
Nigerian Horn
P&E SLMisc.2021
46
Iznik Ewer with English Silvermounts, c.1585
P&E AF 3132
46
The Lennard Cup: Chinese porcelain dish, London mounts 1569-70
Asia PDF.695
95
The Phoenix Jewel
P&E SLMisc.1778
46
Head of a Woman resembling Cleopatra VII, C1stBC
GR 1879.0712.15
70
Venetian glass ewer 1550-1600
1869, 0624.45
46
Venetian glass with woman and fan, 1590-1600
S.853
46
Venetian glass with Pantaloon from Commedia dell'arte, c.1600
S.852
46
Supremacy Medal of Henry VIII, 1545
M. 6802
46
Stonyhurst Salt Cellar
P&E 1958,1004.1
46
Lyte Jewel, miniature of James 1 of England
WB 167
45
The Blacas Cameo, engraved gem of Augustus wearing aegis of Minerva and sword- belt (new article)
There didn't seem to be enough time to fully digest the exhibition but the excellent breakfast in the staff canteen certainly hit the spot. I plan to have a go at some particular exhibits but, for now, have made a start on umbrella articles for the main topic:
Feature Article Prize - 5x£100 giftshop voucher prize for new Featured Articles related to BM collection in any language. See link for details, including the winners.
One on one collaborations - for where individual Wikipedians are working with curators on a particular topic.
"Hoxne challenge" - project to focus effort on one article with all resources made available
School translations project - project to have high school students in France translate the opening section of high importance articles, before coming to visit the museum
A History of the World in 100 Objects - crowdsourcing the creation of articles about each object in the list before its appearance on the BBC radio series of the same name.
In-house presentations/training (ongoing):
Wikimedia presentations given to departments of: Asia; Greece & Rome; Prints & Drawings; Prehistory & Europe; Portable Antiquities;...
Other discussions held with: Legal department (re. copyright); British Museum Company (image sales & shop) (re.commercial re-use of WP content); Community outreach department (re. engagement with digital visitors); IT department (re. MediaWiki)...
One goal of this experimental project is to use a WikiProject-tag-like system via the template {{BM-related}} to generate an assessment matrix for British Museum-related articles as known through Wikipedia's category for the British Museum. To prevent problems associated with conflict of interest (since these metrics are intended for people at the museum), subcategories for people employed at the museum are excluded.
Quantitative
Note: To make a more readable graph, "pageviews" have been dropped down by two orders of magnitude. This now clearly shows an average ratio of pageviews to clickthroughs of 100:1.
This data is generated using the Treeview tool. This combines the pageviews for articles in any given category/categories into a total number. For some months the data did not fully compile and has been extrapolated. The specific search criteria being tracked as the main measurement is listed as one of the two example searches for the tool. Specifically, this is en.wp only, searching Category:British Museum with all subcategories, but excluding the subcategories "British Museum directors", "Employees of the British Museum" and "Trustees of the British Museum". This matches the criteria used in the qualitative measurement. When running the same script across all languages the numbers for May increase to 586 919 [29].
Before the assessment of all British Museum related articles (see "qualitative") many articles were not listed in British Museum categories. As a result of this comprehensive assessment many new BM related articles were discovered, added to the categories and therefore counted in the quantitative survey. The results gave a significant increase in pageviews reported. For example, under the initial schema the combined pageviews for March 2010 were thought to be 350,340. After the comprehensive survey this figure increased to 513,049 - an increase of 32%
June 2010
June 2010 is the month during which the "Wikipedian in Residence" project took place. Due to continued focus on many BM-related articles and the creation and DYK featuring of a dozen new articles, this month represents the single largest month of organically generated pageviews and clickthroughs (only beaten by the abberation of the release of the Crystal Skull Indiana Jones film in July 2008). No new Feature Articles were created in this month but several will appear in the subsequent months increasing this total further.
September 2010
The Treeview figures have been typically of the order of 500,000 each month although Augusts is missing. The figure for September (on the 28th) was 789 808. That is 50% or so up on the summer figures. (It could be seen as double the March figure previously reported, but if that is remeasured using today's categories then its figure is also now c. 500,000) Victuallers (talk) 08:46, 28 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]
These images are used in 1,114 pages in the English language edition of which the most viewed is "England" (which uses two images). All pages with BM related images were viewed 14,617,720 times on the English language edition in May 2010 and 23,083,071 over all languages.[31]
{{British-Museum-stub}} was deleted after discussion at Wikipedia:Stub types for deletion/Log/2011/January/3, follow-up may be needed to check on any tidy-up or to challenge the deletion discussion (which only had one opinion expressed).
Assess for quality/importance the "unassessed articles in the qualitative matrix (above) adding category:British Museum (or sub-category where needed) and the {{BM-related}} template.
Ensure all articles about objects are linked to from their department description page (or similar) - perh. using collapsible box?) e.g. El-Amra clay model of cattle and Farnese Diadumenos not currently linked.
