In the leadup to the “Wikimedia@Museums and the Web” conference tomorrow in Denver, Colorado there’s a couple of neat things I want to show you…

Flying over the Rockies on the way to Denver

First:
This is the slidecast of a presentation I gave at the National Library of Australia a couple of days ago discussing GLAM-WIKI recommendations and the British Museum project. One of the especially interesting things to come as a result of this presentation was from their director Jan Fullerton. I pointed out the example of their image of William Bligh’s logbook from the Bounty being used on Wikipedia against their terms of use: “Should you wish to publish material from the Library’s manuscript collections, you will need to obtain permission from the Library as custodian of the material.”. Jan made the point afterwards that their statement was in no way intended to stop Wikipedia’s use of their Public Domain images, quite the opposite – she wishes to encourage Wikipedia’s use of their collection. Who knows, they may even look at changing the NLA’s terms to be more explicit about this permission in the future.

Second:
The work on the British Museum “Wikipedian in residence” project is coming along apace. Thanks to user:Nihiltres we not only have a “home base” for the project at [[Wikipedia:GLAM/BM]] but that page also now includes the beginnings of an article assessment matrix (importance v. quality) for all articles related to the British Museum. This is the kind of thing that normally only happens with a WikiProject but he’s been able to utilise the tools to create one for the British Museum too. It is a qualitative measure of the BM’s presence on WP and will be able to demonstrate improvement over time by taking intermittent snapshots. If anyone would like to help out with the initial assessment of the articles here’s the list, any assistance is greatly appreciated.

Also put together for the WP:GLAM/BM page is a new quantitative tool called “TreeViews” coded by Magnus Manske. This tool combines the pageview statistics for all articles in any given category/categories to give a grand total. Sounds simple but is hugely important as a measurement tool. There are also options include subcategories, exclude subcategories, sort alphabetically/numerically and a boolean AND/OR option for multiple categories. The cherry on top is the ability to automatically search the equivalent category in other languages thereby getting a total number for all articles in ALL languages at once – w00t. As a result I can confidently say that last month articles associated with the British Museum were viewed 350 340 times – not bad eh?!

Third:
The amusing people from the “Wikipedia Saves Public Art” Wikiproject (twitter) have talked about their progress on the Indianapolis Museum of Art’s blog – “The bird flies in Denver“. In it they also make use of the TreeViews tool to demonstrate how their project has raised the profile of public art in Indianapolis in a very measurable way. Brilliant. They’ve also got too much time on their hands, clearly, given the great little video logo they’ve put together. It might equally be called “Wikipedia: Crushing pigeons since 2001”.

Finally:
The total edit counter for all Wikimedia projects is just about to surpass One Billion edits! Follow along for yourself at http://toolserver.org/~emijrp/wikimediacounter/.

Update:
Just a couple of hours ago Shelly Bernstein from the Brooklyn Museum announced that they will be pushing their own multimedia collection out to not only the internet archive, Flickr Commons but also Wikimedia Commons!