---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Liam Wyatt <liamwyatt <at> gmail.com>
Date: 23 June 2010 18:28
Subject: Wikipedia - British Museum: Bits and pieces
To:


you are receiving this because you have expressed interest in the British Museum - Wikipedia collaboration project. If you do not wish to receive these emails please tell me. Otherwise, please do pass them on to others.

Dear all,

Just a couple of little things to mention about the ongoing collaboration with the British Museum:

The combined pageviews for all articles related to the History of the World project (using category:A history of the world in 100 objects) is just under 100,000 this month so far. This will continue to increase as the month goes on and it does not include articles about generic subjects - only articles that are specifically about the individual object in question. You can see this here: http://toolserver.org/~magnus/treeviews.php?depth=9&date=2010-06&cats=A+History+of+the+World+in+100+Objects&combination=subset&autolang=0&page_creation_date=1&doit=1Note that a fair few of these didn't exist before last week.

- Several other libraries have expressed interest to me personally, or I've heard through the grapevine that they too now want to do something "in-house" with Wikipedia. This is not just in London (although several are) but in the US, Australia and Spain. Nice For example yesterday I met with the V&A and today with the British Library to fly the flag. Equally the Wikimedia-New York City and D.C. team have put a notice up saying that they're going to have a meeting with the Smithsonian soon.

- The total pageviews so far this month for all articles related to the British Museum (ignoring articles about staff) is 336,000 http://toolserver.org/~magnus/treeviews.php?depth=9&date=2010-06&cats=British+Museum%0D%0A-British+Museum+directors%0D%0A-Employees+of+the+British+Museum%0D%0A-Trustees+of+the+British+Museum&combination=subset&autolang=0&page_creation_date=1&doit=1
This is compared to last month's total of 500,000 which we'll probably reach. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/BM#Quantitative Of all the articles 16 are newly created since the backstage pass.

- The Hoxne Challenge is on TOMORROW. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/BM/Hoxne_challenge. The fact of this event is top story in this week's Wikipedia Signpost http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2010-06-21/News_and_notes. Even though we've not actually had the event yet - the mere fact of people's willingness to get involved has *already* taken this article from 2kb in length to 20kb! Here's the diff: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hoxne_hoard&action=historysubmit&diff=369758479&oldid=333169107 There's obviously a long way to go yet, but it's significantly better already which is a fantastic achievement. Note that someone's even begun a stub in French http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tr%C3%A9sor_de_Hoxne
If you can help out with this, please do. This article is already the 6th most common source of inbound traffic to the BM site from Wikipedia (see below).

- As you may have also noticed in that "signpost" article, the British Museum have changed their collection website's frontpage to feature the most prominent item from the Hoxne Hoard in quiet recognition of our event. http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/explore_introduction.aspx They've also been working away in the web team to make the records about the Hoard more citable, findable and collated in one spot:
http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/article_index/h/the_hoxne_hoard.aspx One of the things to come out of the backstage pass day was the realisation that it is very hard to reference the BM website if we're talking about a collection of items. This link now compiles all of the links to the individual sub-sections on one page.

- As you may have also noticed in the "Signpost" article - the BM has started linking out to Wikipedia articles that are a) about objects in the collection and b) Feature articles. The two examples so far are "Disasters of War" and "Durer's Rhinoceros". See the bottom of the page: http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/pd/a/albrecht_d%C3%BCrers_rhinoceros.aspx and http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/pd/f/goya,_the_disasters_of_war.aspx Note that the link to Wikipedia specifies that it's a Featured Quality article which I think is a nice endorsement of WP's internal quality assessments.

- We now have two projects that have grown out of the "one on one" collaborations project. One with the Asia department and one with Prints and Drawings department where the Wikipedian will come onsite every now and then to be given access to the research libraries.

- Cyrus Cylinder is actively being reviewed as a FA candidate. Please comment here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_article_candidates/Cyrus_Cylinder/archive1 and indeed, if you're a curator reading this - peer reviews for any article related to your expertise are welcome. Bullet point lists are preferred as this makes them easier to divide up amongst a group.

- Last night "Royal Gold Cup" featured in the "Did you know" section of the mainpage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Gold_Cup bringing the total number of mainpage appearances for BM objects in the last two weeks to 11! Since then Royal Gold Cup has also been listed at FAC. Please help review it too if you can.

- In terms of Wikipedia sending traffic to the BM website, Wikipedia remains the single largest source of non-search engine traffic to the BM. The articles that have sent the most number of people so far this month are (in order): British Museum; Hedwig Glass; Lothair Crystal; Rosetta Stone; A History of the World in 100 Objects; Hoxne Hoard; Lewis Chessmen; First Jewish Revolt Coinage; and Ginger (mummy).
Whilst pageviews and reader-engagement on Wikipedia is a goal in its own right, it's nevertheless interesting to see these stats as I think you can see that we're having a direct influence on who visits the BM website and where they go. I'm particularly interested to see the Coins one in that list as it's the one BM department that we don't currently have an article about any of their specific objects. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Jewish_Revolt_coinage

Please do get in touch if you have any questions, queries, offers to help etc.
Liam Wyatt
Volunteer Wikipedian in Residence, British Museum


wittylama.com/blog
Peace, love & metadata

On 24 June 2010 15:02, Liam Wyatt <liamwyatt <at> gmail.com> wrote:

> At the suggestion of Mike Peel, I'm forwarding this mailout to the UK list
> too in the hope that you might find it interesting. I have only been sending
> these mailouts to people who have actively expressed interest in following
> the British Museum - Wikipedia project but I can send them here too if you'd
> like. You can read about the project itself here:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/BM

Fantastic stuff! Do let internal-l know as well ... this sort of thing
is, frankly, WMF blog material.

(And just wait until the NPG call asking if they can do something like
this with us )