IF ever there was the antithesis of the crowd-sourced Wikipedia, it would be a museum, where an expert picks what is seen and not seen, then carefully prepares captions explaining what each piece of art means.
But while there used to be innate suspicion toward Wikipedia among museum staffs, even hostility, in recent years there has increasingly been cooperation. Wikipedia’s volunteer editors are frequently invited to spend the day at museums and archives to create and improve articles related to the works housed there.
There is a simple explanation: Wikipedia is where curious people online go for answers. In a typical month, nearly 500 million unique visitors come to its sites in more than 250 languages, and it is in everyone’s interest — Wikipedia editors and museum curators alike — that those answers are accurate and useful.
“There is a sense that if it is not on Wikipedia, then it doesn’t exist,” said Emily Temple-Wood, a 19-year-old molecular biology major at Loyola University of Chicago, who as a volunteer editor is a driving force in increasing the number of female scientists represented on Wikipedia. She has organized meetings at museums and libraries where Wikipedia volunteers work from lists of worthy figures who are absent or barely mentioned on the site.
Dozens of such “edit-a-thons” have been held the last few years, on subjects like women in the sciences and the arts, the history of Greenwich Village, or the history of African-Americans in North Carolina. The institutions that have promoted and hosted the meetings include the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as collections like the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis and the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library.
A new journalism class at American University, “Wikipedia and Public Knowledge,” is organized around such edit-a-thons, held each Tuesday at a prominent institution in Washington, including the National Archives and the National Museum of the American Indian. The 20 students in the class are expected to create or improve articles on Wikipedia and scan in and describe documents or images.
“There is that thrill, what I am doing here is not just showing up in a blog or tweet, but is being amplified by Wikipedia’s audience,” said the class’s professor, Andrew Lih, a longtime contributor to Wikipedia who has written a book on its history.
The attitude of museums toward Wikipedia has changed drastically, he said, noting that it used to be “very hard to get the attention of any of these folks to collaborate with Wikipedia.” Now, he said, “when I put in a call to folks, I got so much response we had to reject people.”
Still, many curators are suspicious of a site where anyone can create and edit an article, and where assertions of expertise are greeted with skepticism or, at best, a shrug.
“We are a profession of fabulously wonderful prima donnas,” said Eleanor Harvey, a senior curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. “It pains us to be misquoted, it pains us to be misunderstood — and sometimes you slam the door on new ways.” But ultimately, she said, she had concluded, “If you are in love with your material, why wouldn’t you want people to be exposed to that material?”
An exhibit of Ms. Harvey’s, “The Civil War and American Art,” was the focus of a one-day edit-a-thon at her museum in February 2013. In an interview, she said she was pleased that the articles created that day conveyed the abstract idea behind the show — that landscape artists were often commenting on the Civil War through their paintings of nature.
Thus, the Wikipedia article on one spectacular painting, “Aurora Borealis,” by Frederic Edwin Church in 1865, a depiction of the Northern Lights based on sketches from an Arctic exploration, has this sentence of context: “Created at the end of the American Civil War, ‘Aurora Borealis’ (1865) was believed to depict the portent of a simultaneously triumphant and desolate Union victory, its meaning amplified in relation to later works, including ‘The After Glow’ (1867).”
Ms. Harvey said she did not write or edit any articles during the edit-a-thon, but read them afterward. “I didn’t have to suggest changes, which I was surprised about,” she said, adding, “I really appreciated that they didn’t overwhelm you with information — just enough to make the case.”
Wikipedia articles represent a crucial bridge between journalism and history writing or museum curating, Mr. Lih said. Museums are good at depth and accuracy, he said, but slow to share their knowledge. Journalism, by contrast, is fast but can lack context and be inaccurate.
This leaves a unique role for Wikipedia as “early history” or “late journalism” — where current events can be put in context, and older topics can easily be updated. That role makes Wikipedia respected as “the best first place for research, but not the best ending point,” Mr. Lih said.
There is a movement, Wikipedia-Glam, for galleries, libraries, archives and museums, that recruits and pairs Wikipedia editors and cultural institutions. Most people involved agree that the deepening ties between Wikipedia and museums date to 2010, when the British Museum welcomed the first “Wikipedian in Residence” to act as a liaison with Wikipedia. There are currently about 10 Wikipedians in Residence — most paid a stipend or salary by the institution or a Wikipedia organization.
Having a knowledgeable Wikipedia editor as a guide is crucial because Wikipedia can be forbidding, with arcane rules, a still-intimidating editing tool and a culture often unfriendly to newcomers.
For example, one student in Mr. Lih’s class, Chelsea Tufarolo, wrote a short essay about creating a Wikipedia article about Natalie Smith Henry, an Arkansas-born painter known for her post office murals during the Depression. “Moments after my article went live (if this is the right word for it), it was nominated for speedy deletion,” she wrote.
With Mr. Lih’s intervention, the person who sought to delete the article for being too insignificant withdrew the complaint, and the article was improved and still exists on the site today. “That’s where I am very sympathetic to people who use Wikipedia for the first time,” Mr. Lih said.
Museums clearly see the value in working with Wikipedia.
Dominic McDevitt-Parks, a digital content specialist at the National Archives who began as a Wikipedian in Residence intern, noted that the main Archives website, had around 20 million views a year, while Wikipedia articles that use records from the National Archives combined for more than one billion page views a year.
Ensuring that National Archives content is available to sites like Wikipedia is part of fulfilling the archivists’ ethical call to provide “equitable access,” he said, adding that in the past, “that just meant you processed the collection so a researcher could use it, but with a broader view of access, you want things in your archive to be used by the broadest audience possible.”
There is much common ground between Wikipedia and museums, Ms. Temple-Wood said: “We both want to share knowledge with people, but we have a different platform.”