You are hereTechnology issues impeding full collaboration
Technology issues impeding full collaboration
Visions of what a full collaboration between the cultural heritage community and Wikimedia projects might be could lead to elaboration of new functional requirements and protocols for data interchange. We are a long way from where museum metadata could be easily integrated into Wikipedia or where Wikipedia content might be transparently brought into museum resources to enrich contextual links. We hope that contributors to the discussion will elaborate some of these visions and identify what is currently lacking in the architecture of our mutual relations.
David Bearman
Museums are skeptical at ceding to WP responsibility for being the repository of metadata--we'd favor DBPedia or freebase or some such solution, so that we as primary content creators can continue to tinker with image quality, new metadata, tags, whatever, and have those changes be harvested by WP.
And I think it's fair enough - Wikipedia isn't meant to be comprehensive in the same way that our catalogues are, where the 'notability' criteria are different.
I would like to hear about what the museum community needs to order to contribute metadata, in particular, to Wikimedia. I know that there has been contention in the past about museums contributing scans, but without a doubt, I think, we could agree that the information about the material Commons already has would be a wonderful addition to the site. Many uninformed uploaders simply add material such as "Painting by Da Vinci" while museums have a great deal of information regarding the medium and the provenance. This kind of information should not be lost and is, of course, not owned. Is there a way that museums could contribute information about artworks already on the site? How can we make this easy to do? Could we at the same time add links to where the art work was held as a courtesy to the viewer and the museum?
One of the interesting things that is going on in the Wikimedia-world right now is the "Multimedia Usability Project" - http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multimedia:About
The part that is probably most relevant to the museum sector is an idea we've got going called the "staging area" for mass uploads. Currently it is only really possible to upload multimedia items one-at-a-time which is fine for some people but doesn't make it easy to create collaborative projects along the line of Flickr Commons.
The idea of the staging area is that institutions who are partnering with Wikimedia would be given FTP access (or equivalent) to upload, mark/edit/categorise/license/caption etc. etc. in a separate place to the "public" Wikimedia commons and then, when they are ready, hit "publish".
This kind of thing would have been extremely useful for the first the first edition of the "wikipedia loves art" project when much frustration was caused by the immediately-public system used on Flickr (where the images were initially uploaded in the absense of such a Wikimedia staging area).
However, there are still many things that Wikimedia doesn't do particularly well even wih a staging area - machine-readable metadata comes to mind immediately.
What other technical tools or requirements should Wikimedia be building into its systems that would make multimedia collaboration more effective/valuable from the museum point of view?
(sorry to make this post "just" about multimedia - I realise there's a whole raft of equivalent questions with the textual content too - so feel free to suggest other things!).
- Liam