A suggestion has come up at work (The Science Museum) to do some kind of wiki for museum objects, to coincide with an upcoming exhibition. So I’ve been starting to think about what form this might take. I’ve had a fair bit of experience with wikis, from being a participant in Wikipedia and Wikinews, and launching a student radio wiki whilst Chair of the Student Radio Association, so I’m well versed in the benefits that a wiki can have. However, I’m also very aware that you can’t just launch a wiki and expect it to be successful. It has to have a clear purpose, and a clear community of contributors, and be able to grow organically. Plus, if you’re doing a wiki that’s at all factual, there has to be a clear difference between it and Wikipedia, which has such a wide scope it can almost encompass anything.
I’ve been looking at the National Archives’ Your Archives project, which is being held up as an example. They seem to have fallen into the trap of creating lots and lots of ‘stub’ pages of content, however, with hundreds of references to particular documents, which just look empty, and make it very hard to find where there’s any genuine activity.
If anyone knows of any other museum-type institutions which have wiki projects that we can examine, please let me know. I do think that we may be able to produce a wiki project that makes sense, but it will certainly take some considered thought.
Ruth Selman said:
How interesting to hear about your proposed wiki project. I have been involved in developing Your Archives which has now been available on the web for 9 months and is receiving user contributions at a steady rate. Our purpose in developing the site was to allow users to share their in-depth knowledge of our archival holdings with others. With 10.7 million entries in our online Catalogue, initial contributions to our wiki were always only going to be a drop in the ocean. However, we have already had 1,800 contributions in addition to material we made available on the site at launch. The Catalogue reference stub pages that you mention are automatically generated when users search for them in order to make the process of linking to our Catalogue as simple as possible. They act as a hub – as well as a stub(!) – by linking to other articles which mention that Catalogue reference within Your Archives. It is true that they were getting in the way of real content until a few months ago when we removed reference to them from the Recent Changes page. Now, you should have no difficulty in finding genuine activity on either the Recent Changes page or by browsing by category.
Good luck with your project. Happy to help if I can.
Frankie Roberto said:
Hi Ruth, I didn’t realise that the stub pages were auto-generated, that’s interesting.
I found the content I stumbled across during a casual browse quite difficult to make sense of. But then I guess it is a more specialist audience, and is probably more useful if you have the relevant document in front of you.
Are most people contributing to the wiki from the National Archives directly, or are there many people contributing from their home computers?
Ruth Selman said:
I believe the majority are contributing from home. We don’t have statistics for the number of contributions from public terminals in our reading rooms, but the number of contributions submitted outside opening hours and the low usage of the system when we piloted it onsite prior to release on the web suggest that our users prefer to carry out research when they are here and write it up at home.
Rhiannon Looseley said:
Hi Frankie,
Nice to chat to you again last night about Wikis. Thought I might as well post on here if anyone’s interested to tell people about The British Postal Museum & Archive’s new Wiki http://www.postalheritage.org.uk/wiki
We only launched it a couple of weeks ago and haven’t made a big fuss about it so far.
I’m about to start researching for my Museums Studies MA by Distance Learning dissertation and I want to look at how Wikis are used by museums and how much they can be seen as a ‘museum experience’. This is particularly interesting in the context of the BPMA which doesn’t currently have a dedicated museum space. We’re reliant on touring exhibitions and visits to our museum store and our Archive Search Room.
Any information that might help with this or comments anyone has on our Wiki would be really helpful!
Rhiannon
Thomas Tunsch said:
Hi,
you might be interested in this article in the MuseumsWiki as well: Museums and Wikis. Museum professionals are encouraged to use the MuseumsWiki as a communication platform and collaborative tool.
Thomas Tunsch
Frankie Roberto said:
Thanks for the links Thomas!
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Jonathan Bowen said:
A mini-workshop on ” Wiki Software and Facilities for Museums” at the forthcoming MW2008 Museums and the Web conference in Montreal, to be held 12.30-1.30pm on Friday 11 April 2008, may be of interest.