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Notability Criteria
A key difference between how museums and Wikipedia define their scope is what they decide to keep and what they decide to discard. In the museum world this is accessioning/deaccessioning objects and is determined by Significance criteria. In Wikipedia this is creating/deleting articles and is determined by Notabilty criteria.
Although they serve similar roles to each community, and the one can be used as an argument for the other, Significance and Notability are NOT equivalent. Both are terms of art with specific meaning for their community.
Significance for a museum is "the values and meanings that items and collections have for people and communities." (as defined by Significance 2.0 of the Collections council of Australia). Whereas within Wikipedia, "Notability determines whether a topic merits its own article." (as defined by the policy page).
The key phrase for what constitute Notability in Wikipedia is this:
"If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to satisfy the inclusion criteria for a stand-alone article."
All of the keywords in that sentence are expanded upon in the very detailed policy page. There are also specific Notability guidelines for many areas of interest - films, people, events, websites... A good rule to remember is that museums are primarily object-centric whilst Wikipedia is concept-centric. So, whilst Wikipedia has an entry about every denomination of ancient roman coin, it does not have an entry on a particular individual coin. This is in contrast to a museum catalogue which would have an entry on the particular individual coin but no entry on the denomination of coin it represents.
However! There is as yet no specific Notability guideline written for museum objects or artworks and I believe this to be one of the greatest issues hindering greater Museum-Wikipedia collaboration.
So, based on examples in those other specific Notability guidelines, what criteria would you use to define the notability for accessioned objects?
If we can bring together a good list here, we could eventually turn it into an official Wikipedia guideline.
P.S. I've previously blogged about this a little bit over here: http://www.wittylama.com/2010/02/wikipedian-in-residence/
This comment was placed at my blog with a note to move it to this forum.
http://www.wittylama.com/2010/02/wikipedian-in-res...
The notability/deletion nexus is to me the most vexing aspect of Wikipedia, associated with the perception of a propensity of self-appointed arbiters not necessarily expert in the field to delete others’ work on the basis of lack of notability. The anonymity and lack of accountability coupled with omnipresent threat of deletion keeps a lot of museum professionals from getting too deeply involved in creating and managing Wikipedia content [I know, I know - citation needed].
The distinction you draw between notability and significance is a good one. The problem with notability, and to a lesser extent significance, is the question of ‘to whom’; does the opinion of a few undo that of many; and who decides?
In the biological domain, every species, no matter how rare or insignificant to the general population is both notable and significant and should have its own Wikipedia (and Wikispecies) article. However, Wikipedia probably does not want to cast its net over every specimen in a museum, no matter how notable and significant these may to the museum or the science (these specimens could be the analogue of your individual coins).
Another example would be authors. Any person who publishes on a species, even if it only a ‘one-page-wipe’, becomes ‘notable by that very act. But you probably do not want every technician who has ever worked in a museum.
This is where GLAM-Wikicam comes into its own: museums are going to maintain this level of highly atomized granularity for their own operational purposes so there is no reason for Wikipedia to do it as well. They will also be doing it with species level information, often harnessing and coordinating efforts of entire scientific communities. This authoritative ‘point of truth’ information can be harvested (in real-time or cached, in whole or in part) for Wikipedia without the need for human intervention or ‘value-adding’. Projects like the Encyclopedia of Life (http://www.eol.org/) are already doing this with Wikipedia content - there is no reason why the reverse should not be possible.
The key is information integrity, and the chain of acknowledgement and attribution. If we can deal with this, contributions from those currently reticent will flow.
In terms of criteria, it is difficult to list these without a degree of circularity. A couple of things relating to scientific collections and information (and cultural material may be similar?) might include:
I have a fairly liberal attitude to notability i if one person is interested enough to look it up and write it and another is interested enough to look it up and read it, then it it notable, even it it is lowbrow ‘trivia’. We are not dealing with a book and there are no real theoretical or financial limits to the number of pages. That is not to say they may not be some ideological ones.