Getting sustainable and wider engagement in NHM science

John Cummings, Wikimedian in Residence

Wikimedia and open knowledge

What I do

Educate people about Wikimedia projects

Teach people how to contribute to them

Find ways that I can help the museum to use open knowledge projects

Encourage the museum to open up it's content

A multilingual multiplatform guide to the museum using Wikipedia

What is Wikipedia?

Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia

An aggregator of open license resources (e.g NASA)

Peer reviewed

Keeps every previous version of an article

Not a primary source, everything should be referenced

Funded by donations and run by a charity; the Wikimedia Foundation, running costs $27m

Uses a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license

wikimedia foundation(Google employs 53,000 people)

Who makes Wikipedia?

Everyone can edit Wikipedia

100,000 regular contributors

Written collaboratively, peer reviewed

Some languages are very big like English, German and French, some languages are smaller like Welsh

The editors have control

Who writes Wikipedia

x200

What does Wikimedia do?

"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing."

Jimmy Wales, Cofounder of Wikipedia

“We have lived in this world where little things are done for love and big things for money. Now we have Wikipedia. Suddenly big things can be done for love.”

Clay Shirky

Our vision is to advance our knowledge of the natural world, inspiring better care of our planet.

Our mission is to maintain and develop our collections, and use them to promote the discovery, understanding, responsible use and enjoyment of the natural world.

Natural History Museum

Wikipedia's Reach

The largest encyclopedia ever written, available in 285 languages.

The 6th most visited website

Serves ≈500 million people each month, 21 billion page views a month (7 billion on English language Wikipedia),

Wikipedia Zero

Natural World

≈440,000,000 page views a month of species pages on English language Wikipedia.

e.g Blue whale article is viewed 1,700,000 times a year in English and is available in 76 languages

Ways organisations can engage with Wikimedia

Share images and other content under an open license with Wikimedia and others:

• specialist knowledge

• equipment

• skills

• access to specimens

Improve information on Wikipedia

• specialist knowledge

• access to academic journals for references

Editing Wikipedia articles

Learn how to edit Wikipedia

Don't edit the article for organisations you work for (conflict of interest)

Be honest about who you are

Benefits

A massively increased audience for the museum's content

Public awareness of the research being done by the museum

Reaches people in many languages

60% of the world don't have access to the internet, reaching them is mainly done through commercial means

Kudos from open knowledge community and the rest of the world

Possibilities for volunteers and citizen science projects

Ease of Understanding of the license, more reuse

How would releasing content work?

content always carries attribution

semiautomated

Wikipediaeditors

2700 images

Natural History Museum: Coleoptera Flickr account