Submissions/Improve-an-artist

This submission is on the wait list for Wikimania 2013.

Submission no.: 2062
Subject no.: B13

Title of the submission: Improve-an-artist

Type of submission: Presentation

Author of the submission: Maarten Dammers

Country of origin: Netherlands

Affiliation: Wikimedia Nederland

E-mail address: maartenmdammers.nl

Username: Multichill

Personal homepage or blog

Abstract

Most of our current GLAM projects are focused on working with one organization. I'm proposing a new kind of project where we turn this around: We're going to focus on improving the information about one artist and see what's GLAMs can contribute to this.

Detailed proposal

Most of our current GLAM projects are focused on working with one organization. A Wikipedian in Residence, a multilingual writing challenge or a content donation are examples of projects which are usually focused on one organization. It's not that this are not great projects, it's just that we should expand our scope.

Projects like Wiki Loves Monuments show that it's also possible to organize something about a subject (in this case cultural heritage), work together on a (massive) international scale and function as a framework for local projects.

I'm taking the lessons learned from projects I've organized to set out the boundaries for this project. The artist should be well known, have works of art around the world and should be long dead (copyright). The artist and the period when the project runs should be know well in advance so that local groups have the time to get in touch with GLAMs and organize things. The project should be used as a framework to organize small local (sub)projects like an edit-a-thon or an image donation.

The main part of the project is a multlingual writing challenge about the artist on Wikipedia. This should be prepared well in advance using the lessons learned from previous writing challenges; like having a list of possible topics to write about and have plenty of information online in English so people have something to translate. But Wikipedia isn't the only project. On Commons files about the artist can be improved (for example by adding "creator" and "institution" template), new files can be uploaded and we can work on organizing the files. Wikidata is a new project in this. Think about things like creating an item about every work on art and linking it to the artist. Other projects like Wikisource (letters of the painter?), Wikiquote (maybe famous quotes?), Wikivoyage (articles about the Museums where the paintings are on display?) could maybe also participate depending on the volunteers interested in picking this up.

After a month (?) of work and a bit of competition (writing challenge) we should present the results. Possibilities to do that would be a tool like reasonator or to work with external organizations like Europeana, World Digital Library or maybe even Google to spread a curated result.

Track

Cultural and Educational Outreach

Length of presentation/talk: 25 minutes

Language of presentation/talk: English

Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?: Yes

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