Cultural partnerships/Joint events

Cultural partnerships
Content partnerships — Digital image restorations — Joint events

Backstage Pass

Wikimedians as a rule are very interested in knowledge, at a level that can go beyond what is available to see in museum displays. Wikimedians also frequently have specific interests in certain objects, which may not be commonly on display, that they have been researching and writing Wikipedia articles about.

Tours, either within the institutions or behind the scenes, are a great way to engage wikimedians in the contents of your collections, and a useful way to give them knowledge about items that can then be spread online via Wikipedia articles and freely reusable images. This is especially true if a large part of your collection is not commonly publicly displayed.

A Backstage Pass event aims to share the expertise of real-world institutions with our wiki-expertise. Principally this involves an organisation or interest group hosting a private tour for the benefit of local Wikimedians and in reciprocation we help improve the content on Wikipedia/Commons that is relevant to that organisation.

For more information, see:

• Wikimedia AU page on Backstage Passes
• Working with Wikipedia – Backstage Pass at the Powerhouse Museum PowerHouse Museum blog, 2 April 2009
• A slightly different version of such event is for example this - Ada Lovelace Day 2012, where the partner institution has allowed us to have an access to its resources while a group of volunteers would focus on writing Wikipedia articles based on these.
• Any upcoming Backstage passes would be listed on our Events page.

GLAM-WIKI

In August 2009, Wikimedia Australia organised an event called "GLAM-WIKI" that brought together people from Wikimedia with people from the Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums sector.

Wikimedia UK has run the UK edition in late November 2010 at the British Museum. See GLAM-WIKI 2010 for more details. The follow up event on 12-14 April 2013 can be found here.

Interested?

Wikimedia UK would be delighted to work with cultural institutions to put together and advertise joint events with museums for wikimedians. If you are interested, please contact Wikimedia UK office on daria.cybulskawikimedia.org.uk or 0207 065 0990.