How did those two days go on museums, open data and the wiki approach, in Naples at the beginning of May?
A month has passed since Wikimuseums, just the right amount of time to get to grips with the first set of results from the Museo Pignatelli, more than 100 people between museum operators, university students, Wikipedia experts, directors of Italian and international museums and freelance cultural professionals.
During the course of the two days organised by us at BAM! in collaboration with the Polo museale della Campania, with support from the Embassy of the Netherlands, theory and practice was alternated in conferences and workshops.
The follow-up by Wikimedia Italia and OpenStreetMap marked a breakthrough in the discussion, which continued, started with the presentation of national and international cases (Galleria Nazionale di Parma, Matera Capitale Europea della Cultura 2019) and the (Rijksmuseum) in Holland.
How did it go? It seems easy to say, but for us the outcome was super positive. Why?
We have a hundred different reasons, but we’d like to point out the most important ones for us:
- Feeling: yes, the kind that develops between the partners of the project was really a perfect harmony, obviously driven by a shared attitude towards approach and of intentions, which not only led everything to run smoothly, but, we believe, allowed an opinion and a feeling of will to be transmitted: to guarantee and work for public access to knowledge and cultural assets.
- Enthusiasm: The participants were the biggest surprise. University students, digital departments of some of the most importantmuseums of the national (and international )scene! And various cultural operators, have grappled with the magical world of Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap. Willingness to listen, to follow up, and identifying Wikipedians present: as not to miss even one bibliographicoversight.
- Debate: some important Italian museums began a dialogue with each other and the public and asked about which direction they wanted to take and which values they wanted to be respected (and enforced). It was a moment of public debate where ideas and interesting relationships for future collaboration were born, which is not all that common, as we well know. Hats off.
- Numbers: within hours, the edit-a-thon began to work on a good 20 entries, 12 of which were also mapped and georeferenced through OpenStreetMap and put into the international project qrpedia (on the website of the project you can read the follow-up on the first and second day of activity).
- Community: also thanks to this success, the Neapolitan edition of Wikimuseums is the first of a series of targeted initiatives to involve a community (of interests and practices) on the issues of openness and appreciation of museum collections. The Facebook group is proof where the first spontaneous collaborations for projects are being created.
- Well come on, let’s say it: with the hashtag #Wikimuseums we went right to the top of trending topics on Twitter on the 6th of May!
In short, the experiment can be considered a success, and the community is in progress: we will continue to keep you updated here, and on the Wikimuseums site, to tell you how the adventure of edited voices, open data and shared collections is going.
Thanks everyone!
