Recently, I have become aware of an organisation called “Culture24“. This is a British crew who are publicly funded to provide a service – promote and support the UK cultural sector online (and, hopefully, go and visit them in real life too).

They provide teachers’ educational resources, GLAM information listings (especially useful for the smaller museums that don’t have their own web-presence), event and activity listings by time and location as well as news/reviews and culture-sector updates. Their director was one of the keynote speakers at the NDF conference I blogged about last week.

All in all their service is publicly funded, wide-ranging, interesting and  a really useful source for Wikipedia references.

– Change –

It was, until relatively recently, known by a different name – “The 24 hour museum”. They changed their name to “Culture24” for a variety of reasons, not the least of which were the fact that it’s about more than just museums and also because no one could tell what on earth “24 hour museum” actually meant. A horological museum perhaps? A museum that stays open overnight? The intended implication was that was was that it is a place to get your cultural-fix at any time and this purpose is served much better under the new name.

They are shutting the old website and redirecting everything to the new website homepage. However, given the depth of the site, most inbound links to the old website will not resolve to the new one neatly (and, perversely, redirecting articles actually decreases their google rank). People are being asked to change their inbound links.

– Problem –

According to the link tracker, at the time of publishing the English edition of Wikipedia has 217 external links to http://*.24hourmuseum.org.uk (and derivatives) and many of these are both important and will break when the old website is switched off.

Links from their specific museum listings redirect neatly (e.g. http://www.24hourmuseum.org.uk/museum_gfx_en/SC000290.html ) but news items do not (e.g. http://www.24hourmuseum.org.uk/nwh_gfx_en/ART41764.html )

The staff at Culture24 see Wikipedia’s external links to their website as very important and want to make sure they work with us. As a result they came to the discussion page for “Wikipedia: Advice for the cultural sector” to ask how to make sure that Wikipedia was linking correctly. This is, as far as I’ve seen, the absolute best-practice example of GLAM-WIKI interaction “in the field”. Read it for yourself here.

Because of the obvious care that Culture24 staff have in working with Wikipedians I think it of the utmost importance that we try to show the same respect back and help them with their problem.

– Challenge –

Can we go through this list of external links and clean them all up in time?

Could you take the time to choose a section of the list, check the reference, and change it to the equivalent page on the new website. I bet we can have it done in a week if a few people help me out. Some of the links are to the “user” or “talk” namespaces and I think these can be discounted.

I think several can probably be deleted but I think many more can be added in. Given Culture24 is the official and publicly-funded register of museums in Britain, I would argue that we should link out to their record in the external links section of every Wikipedia article in the Category:museums in England and other related categories. What do you think?

– Summary –

Help transfer as many of  the links as possible from 24hourmuseum.co.uk to the equivalent page on Culture24.co.uk using this list as your guide.

Thank you!