IT and Museums: British Museum begins collaboration with Wikipedia

The British Museum has begun collaboration with Wikipedia, the online, volunteer-written encyclopedia, to help ensure that the museum’s expertise and notable artifacts are reflected in that digital reference’s pages, informs The New York Times.

According to Matthew Cock, who is in charge of the museum’s Web site and is supervising the collaboration with Wikipedia, the urgency of collaboration with Wikipedia was determined by the fact that unlike Wikipedia the British Museum’s website was dramatically losing its popularity. He said: “I looked at how many “Rosetta Stone” page views there were at Wikipedia. Five times as many people go to the Wikipedia article as to ours.” He claims that thousands of museum’s exhibits (totaling 8 million items) deserve to have their own pages in Wikipedia, however they have been not created yet. 

About 40 Wikipedia contributors in the London area spent a day at the museum, meeting with curators and taking photographs of the collection. Liam Wyatt, Vice President of Wikimedia Australia, will spend five weeks in the museum’s offices in order to build a relationship between the two organizations.

One of the British museum’s curators has already become Wikipedia’s registered user and has written several articles about the museum’s collection.

The British Museum – the principal historical museum of the Great Britain – has been opened for its visitors since 1759.