Digital Works Podcast
Talking about all the different things that 'digital' means in the arts, culture and heritage sectors. Tales of success and failure, interrogating the shiny new things and looking at what works (or not) and why, Interviews with digital folks working across the sector and beyond, in-house, consultants, funders, and more.
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Digital Works Podcast
Episode 056 - Dr Martin Poulter (Khalili Foundation) on building bridges between cultural heritage and Wikipedia and the transformative potential of taking a more open approach to content and knowledge
Dr. Martin Poulter is Wikimedian in Residence at the Khalili Foundation.
We hear how Martin moved from being a dedicated volunteer Wikipedia contributor to a key advocate for the open content movement, harnessing Wikipedia’s potential to democratise access to cultural heritage and knowledge.
Through his collaborations with organisations like the Bodleian Libraries, University of Bristol, and the Khalili Collection, Martin shares his thoughts on the significant opportunities that can arise when cultural institutions embrace Wikipedia.
Martin also shares a frank and insightful perspective on the cultural and mindset change that is required to fully capitalise on these opportunities.
Hello and welcome to the Digital Works podcast, the podcast about digital stuff in the cultural sector. My name is Ash and in today's episode episode 56, we speak to Dr Martin Poulter. Martin is Wikimedian in residence at the Khalidi Foundation and in his work at the University of Bristol he has been the Wikimedia Ambassador for JISC. We talk about the opportunity and potential value that lies in cultural organisations working with platforms like Wikipedia and taking a more open access approach to their collections. Martin shares the impact of some of the work he's carried out with the Kalele Foundation and he also describes the challenges in shifting to working in this way. Martin has huge amounts of experience working with Wikipedia and it feels like there are some really interesting and valuable opportunities for cultural organisations to rethink how they make their collections and expertise more available to the public. Enjoy Good afternoon, martin. Thank you very much for joining me. I'm really looking forward to our conversation.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much, Ash. Thanks for having me on joining me. I'm really looking forward to our conversation.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much, ash. Thanks for having me on. There is a lot that I'm hoping we can cover in the next sort of 45 minutes or so. But my first question, as it always is you're currently at the University of Bristol. You're also working with the Kaleeli Foundation and Kaleeli Collection. In the past you've worked at the University of Oxford. It'd be great if we could just get a potted history of the story of Dr Martinell Porter.
Speaker 2:Sure. Since 2011,. I've been an evangelist for Wikipedia and the Wikimedia movement. The open content, open culture movement.
Speaker 2:And so initially this was a volunteer and I would just go to any place that would have me. I was a volunteer contributor to Wikipedia writing articles. But I decided this is really important, this is something changing the world. This isn't just like a website, that's good. This is a movement that wants to encourage the sharing of knowledge and culture. And so it's not just it gets good on its own, it's got to work with universities and museums and scholarly societies. So I did that kind of outreach. I went and did training, I did an event at the institute of physics. I went to a staff meeting of bristol airport to talk to them about wikipedia. Just any workplace that would take me. I would go in and do my presentation or give training or whatever, just as my life's mission. There's the change I want to bring about in the world.
Speaker 2:And then a paid opportunity came up. Eventually there was the job of wikimedian in residence at the bodden libraries in oxford, which was kind of my ideal job. I'd been an an Oxford undergraduate 23 years earlier, so the idea of going back and having this special job, doing the thing I kind of most liked doing, that was brilliant. So for a while I lived half the week in Oxford and half the week in Bristol. So that expanded into across universities. So there were four museums and numerous libraries in one square mile in Oxford University. So I was kind of working four museums and numerous libraries in One Square Mile and Oxford University. So I was kind of working with museums and research projects.
Speaker 2:That came to an end. But then the Khalili Foundation was looking for someone to do very similar work and not so many people have heard of the Khalili Collection or the Khalili Foundation yet, although I'm working on it. But there's this philanthropist, sir David Khalili. He has eight art collections, each of which is the superlative, which is the largest of his kind, and he has the world's largest private collection of Islamic art, which is truly a lot like 32,000 objects, bigger than a lot of national collections, and seven other collections which are all outside the Western mainstream, outside the mainstream art market.
Speaker 2:And he's a philanthropist and he's a pioneer of cultural philanthropy. So he subsidised the publication of catalogues, subsidised exhibitions, has put on exhibitions around the world to expose people to islamic art and maybe a different view of islamic culture and history from what they're getting from news headlines, and also using all of the digital platforms. So they needed somebody to help them get on wikipedia and relate to those platforms and I did some voluntary work for that and then I was the obvious person to get the job and they wanted to pay someone to do it, and so it's wonderful. I do occasional bits of consultancy for other clients at universities. I'll be brought in to do training. But the Khalili Foundation is specifically more than about just art. It's about intercultural understanding, interfaith, promoting the overlaps between Christianity, Judaism, Islam, bringing people together and talking about the shared culture and about peace building. There's a big project about what can be done in different communities around the world to encourage peace and use culture and faith as a way for building peace. So it's amazing to be attached to all of that. That's.
Speaker 1:I mean fantastic that you have identified this strand of work and managed to go from volunteer to sort of leading voice person in this area. And I first came across your work specifically through a piece that you wrote for Georgina Rottweiler's cultural content newsletter. You were talking about the benefits of Wikipedia, wikimedia, the benefits of open access, particularly the benefits of thinking about those types of platforms when it came to, I suppose, ephemeral, real-life activity like temporary exhibitions, and you talked about an exhibition at the British Museum and it was really compelling and obviously really impactful. It wasn't just sort of philosophically an interesting and good thing to do. There were, it seemed like, really tangible benefits.
Speaker 1:But I just want to pick up on something you mentioned. You sort of said you know Wikipedia it's not just a good website. Actually it's a movement and I'm interested to hear a little bit more about that. How do you think, or why do you think, that's important for cultural organisations to be thinking about? Is it because there's an overlap there between the mission of the Wikimedia Foundation and the mission of many cultural organisations?
Speaker 2:There's definitely an overlap and my starting point for building a partnership with any kind of organisation is looking at the mission of that organisation. So the scholarly societies and I've looked at this for the Psychological Society and the Institute of Physics and the Economic Society they all have a line in their mission about promoting public understanding of their subjects. So I approach them and say we do that Literally everyone on the internet and ultimately everyone in the world is our audience and we're the main way that a lot of the audience finds out about certainly a lot of academic and cultural topics and especially about cultural institutions, that you're preserving and conserving and documenting this heritage for future generations. Well, now, here we are. We have a global network in which information can be shared instantly. We are kind of the future generations and so it's in the interest of what those institutions are normally trying to do to reach the public and inform the public and allow them not that the public are passive recipients, the public want to actively share and want to kind of construct their own educational materials and reference materials and so giving people permission to take particular images or reuse particular out-of-copyright texts or so on, that's really important.
Speaker 2:21 years ago it wasn't common for people to have a hobby where they write an encyclopedia. Now, thanks to Wikipedia, there's millions of people who do that, and that's how I started. It was a hobby in my spare time to write an encyclopedia, and an encyclopedia writer needs libraries, needs museums with properly catalogued objects, with information about when and where they're from. It needs all these sources and needs to cite those sources and give attribution to who owns this material. Where does it come from? Where can I find it if I want to see it physically?
Speaker 2:So I think there's this great cooperation possible between this largely voluntary sector and these traditional institutions, but there's such a cultural difference. There's such a cultural gap because we on Wikimedia are about remixing. You don't ask permission and you don't get a sign-off to edit someone's permission, and you don't get a sign-off to edit someone's article and you don't get sign-off to include an image in an article. We have this database of images, we have these existing texts and there's translations being made all the time. There's 300 different language versions of Wikipedia and I see what I write translated into a bunch of different languages Indonesian and Malay, and so on. They don't have to ask my permission or clear it with me. They just go ahead and do it and that's really liberating, and the idea that we can take the output of open access research or open educational resources or open reference resources and repurpose them and reach a large audience with them is great. But, yeah, even public institutions, which normally serve the public, don't have that and some of them get very scared when this is suggested to them.
Speaker 1:For some reason, I understand, and some, yeah, cultural barriers that I think are holding them back yeah, and I think you know this is an area that I've touched on before in these conversations. I talked to Linda Spurdle at Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery about them open sourcing essentially a lot of their collection images and the real cultural friction that that sort of generated with colleagues and within the organisation and sort of how do we keep control of this? It's like, well, we're not the whole process of this is letting go of control. Of this is like well, we're not the whole process of this is letting go of control.
Speaker 1:Just going back to the article you wrote for Georgina, I think there's a really nice sentence that sort of encapsulates why I got in touch really. So you said Wikipedia allows for many more serendipitous pathways to discovery from people interested in things like collections you hold or exhibitions you've put on, who haven't necessarily heard of you before, and it feels like a really nice example of fishing where the fish are. But because wikipedia is not a venture capital backed, you know, for-profit commercial entity, it feels like actually it's a different type of relationship than being present on the most popular social media platforms, because increasingly it feels like cultural organizations are starting to have perhaps long overdue conversations about the ethics of being present on some of these social media platforms, in particular about the ethics of engaging with certain types of technology. Does Wikipedia, wikimedia, offer a easier place to be present where there are high volumes of traffic, or are there also considerations and trade-offs and compromises that you need to be aware of when you're going to be engaging with putting stuff on wikipedia?
Speaker 2:it's definitely an easier place, it's so easy, it can happen by default. So views of kalili collection images on wikipedia greatly outstrip the views on the Collegiate Collections website. Well, 100 to 1 at least. And that's true of lots of culture institutions, so even the Ashmolean Museum, which hasn't had a formal sharing arrangement with Wikimedia. The main way the public encounter the collections of the Ashmolean Museum is on Wikipedia articles where someone's been to an exhibition, taken a photograph of something that they're interested in and maybe noted down the little card and the inventory number, then uploaded that to Wikimedia and it's used in different articles. And this is actually a huge source of traffic because Wikipedia is the dominant information site on the internet. And so, yeah, you say, fish where the fish is. That's a good metaphor that if people are going to the collections website, if they already know about the khalidi collections want to find out more about it, same for an institution, whereas people are going to wikipedia to learn about alexander the great or the prophet muhammad or about mecca, or, and maybe they've never heard of the kalili collections. But in the course of researching this other thing, they'll find images and some will click on the link to find more about this object. That's shown within the article.
Speaker 2:So there's a huge opportunity. There's huge metrics which aren't being measured. I think institutions are collecting metrics for things like social media or their website. They're not realising there's these other metrics that are bigger, both in terms of reach and in terms of volunteers, engaged Volunteers, like I say, remixing, reusing material, and it's truly a common, it's truly a shared resource. Whereas you put something on Twitter or Instagram, you're adding to the value of a commercial company, and that company may have values that you actually fundamentally disagree with, or it might have a capricious chief executive who decides to suddenly take away the important functionality and you're kind of hostage to that. Whereas Wikimedia, it's a non-profit project, it's a truly long-term project. There's no shareholder to satisfy, there's no kind of sponsors that risk pulling out and consent to the platform. So it takes a leap of imagination more than anything, because you can't imagine at the outset all of the uses that Wikipedia authors will find for your content.
Speaker 2:There's the image of Van Gogh's Starry Night. There's an image of that in Commons and you can imagine it illustrates the article on Van Gogh and the article about the Starry Night painting and the article about the Van Gogh Museum, but it also illustrates lots of articles about mental illness because of what's written about the state Van Gogh was in when he did that painting and about painting techniques, chiro-skiro and whatever. So there's dozens more uses of that image than what just somebody now the cataloging it and thinking of its purpose within an institution would use. So, yeah, you've got to relinquish control, you've got to not think in terms of income generation target and it's tempting. Tempting to think, oh, we'll eventually, even if we're not generating income with these digital images now, we might at some point in the future. So we'll not do sharing.
Speaker 2:That's easy to kind of quantify an imagined benefit of holding on to and being very restrictive with your digital content, but all the time you're kind of holding on and not sharing. You're missing out on this exposure. Maybe your cultural mission, maybe your mission is to educate people about a particular period or particular culture, you're missing out on the benefit Corrie Dotterell said it's really important to culture institutions to be loved, to be loved by the public. That'll help you when times are tight, when finances are tight. And if an institution, a gallery or archive, whatever helped you write an encyclopedia article, helped you write a biography of a sultan, that you were writing a biography of, and the Khalili collections were useful because they shared a portrait of a sultan. People appreciate that and that's like a constructive relationship between you and that. Member of the public.
Speaker 1:And so it sounds like one of the benefits of being present on a platform like Wikipedia is that it actually allows cultural organisations to be generous and be valuable, and actually maybe that's the mindset or that's the purpose that it solves. It's not a transactional thing or that's the purpose that it solves. It's not a transactional thing. It's about cultural organizations contributing to discourse with expertise, with resources and that being valuable in and of itself. And, as you said, there's probably a longer-term strategic line that you could perhaps start to draw around awareness and around sort of general positive feelings towards an institution if you are being valuable in that way. But actually, if you're going to be engaging with this type of platform, it's not a short-term sort of return on investment type dynamic that you're engaging with.
Speaker 2:It's definitely long-term and the outcomes are long-term. The images I've uploaded from the Bodleian, I think last year they reached quarter of a billion image views and so that has fed into the Bodleian's metric support and that is the largest number that's ever appeared in the Bodleian metric support. And I was asked like how much work is that the impact of? I said well, I just uploaded these images during one year, during, I think, 2015, 2016. And this is just the ongoing reach, and more languages are being reached all the time With the Khalidi collections.
Speaker 2:I'm only working in English, but there's a total of 92 languages on which this material is appearing and the software tracks it back. The software helps translate information about the objects and the photographs and these volunteers can caption the photo in their own language and that can be fed back. So there's these other communities who value this content because they're writing in Arabic or Urdu or Indonesian and they see it relates to their culture, so they want to use it and that, yeah, that appears in that metric but and that contributes to why we're getting millions per month image views.
Speaker 1:I just want to sort of talk about the idea of long-termism, I suppose, because, you know, more than one cultural organization has had its fingers burned by being, or relying on, the algorithms of a particular platform that was then changed without anyone realizing. I mean, even Google is now doing this. Some, particularly museum websites, are very reliant on organic search traffic. That's probably going to be impacted by the AI products that Google are now introducing into search. So I'm interested to hear a bit more about the long-term perspective of Wikipedia as a platform, because, as you say, it is the site of reference, for, you know, it's the first point of call. If you don't know about something and you Google it, a Wikipedia article is going to play a role in your developing an understanding of that topic.
Speaker 1:And you know, know, let's say, cultural organizations go. Okay, this sounds interesting, it sounds compelling, but actually this is a. You know, this is an online platform over which we don't have any direct control. How can we be sure that it is going to last? You know, in the article you wrote for one further, you made the case for using Wikipedia, wikimedia as a bit of a repository for images that were appropriate to share in that way. I'm interested in your perspective much more informed than mine on this about Wikipedia as a platform over decades rather than just the next few years.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I really see Wikipedia as like a cathedral few years. Yeah, I really see wikipedia is like a cathedral. That, yeah, people start building cathedrals knowing that they're not going to live to see it completed. And the reason I think that partly because of the love that's held in by the public that there's no public funding and there's no commercial sponsorship. It's funded by individuals valuing this and not wanting a world without it and so making loads and loads of small donations.
Speaker 2:But, more crucially, the licensing. So the idea that everything's open source and, in effect, shared under very free licenses. So the software that runs wikipedia is media wiki and that's source. Anybody can take that for free, don't ask permission. All the content, all the kind of guidelines and policies are open content. There's a separate project, wikidata. That's kind of the machine-readable Wikipedia. That kind of represents things, abstract relationships and data. That's no licensing restrictions at all. Again, you could set that up in a platform copy over the content.
Speaker 2:So if the Wikimedia Foundation were to turn evil tomorrow and say, oh, we realize Wikipedia is essential to the web, we're going to make it a subscription service and if you pay for Platinum Plus service, you get to edit the articles as well.
Speaker 2:So horrible people got in control of it, it could be replicated and kept open and the community would move to that new nice platform. So it's not even tied to particular servers or particular organization. Whereas if you've made materials in Flash and you've used kind of proprietary software or Silverlight or something we use, which is a Microsoft thing, to make really fancy 3D visualizations, well, once the web stops supporting those platforms, you lose all that content, basically. So this is why, although we host images and video, for a very, very long time we didn't host MP4s or GIFs because there was licensing restriction. There was somebody who owned those formats who could in principle, say I want a penny every time somebody includes a GIF in a website. So it's the formats that are open, the data's open, the software and code is open source and auditable. So it's part of kind of the shared commons of culture and so long as it's valued by someone, it can continue to exist Brilliant and I'm a big advocate for sort of open source technologies and it's really.
Speaker 1:I think Wikipedia is such a brilliant example of how that can work at scale and there are lots of interesting idiosyncrasies about those types of communities that we can perhaps dig into. And you know you touch on in the article I've mentioned a couple of times. You know the number of suggestions and revisions that any piece of writing that's put onto wikipedia will then be subjected to is significant yeah.
Speaker 2:So people have got to think about it very differently from social media, from like being on youtube or being on twitter. You're not on wikipedia in the same sense because your youtube channel that's all content you publish and you can moderate the comments and set the about page and so on. In Wikipedia, you're part of a community. Everything's collectively owned. You can't say this is my article only, I own this. Everybody has got to be open to make changes or suggest changes and you've got to understand this kind of the standards of the communities you're in. And if you're working in social media or working in the web, especially for institutions, and you're used to writing in a particular promotional way and talking about how the latest thing is so innovative, we're really pushing forward and we've got really exciting bloody, blood, blah. You have to put a cork on that kind of language because wikipedia has to be very descriptive. I mean you don't see this as a casual wikipedia reader, but the site is under siege all the time from public relations agencies for marketing who are trying to talk everything up, who are trying to create articles for things which don't really deserve articles, but for companies or commercial products, and there's a battle just every day hundreds of times really promotional. Basically an advert being created and then Wikipedia's coming deleting it, or maybe they'll remove all the adjectives or something. So you put something in and it's a bit promotional. Some admin might see that and that's the thousandth time that day that they've reviewed some new thing which looks a bit promotional. So they can get short-tempered. There can be misunderstandings. So it's not even kind of the technical skills of understanding the platform, it's the social skills that lead to success. You've got to negotiate, you've got to persuade, you've got to look at this kind of guidelines. You've got to look at what's published. So what's on Wikipedia has got to be a distillation of the most reliable sources. And so arguments about what should be in the article or not, or how much coverage should there be of different sections of the article, what should be in the article or not, or how much coverage should there be of different sections of the article. If you can refer to existing published things textbooks, papers and so on that really helps. So being an expert helps. Being a curator helps. I've got a PhD. That helps.
Speaker 2:But it's not just because of I pull rank. Do you know who I am? I work for Oxford University. It's because knowing a literature and knowing the facts of something and being able to point to how something's already covered in scholarly literature, that's what wins the argument. And a lot of what I do is still a volunteer as well as a paid Wikipedian.
Speaker 2:I go into articles and I cut out a lot of unnecessary adjectives. If you say someone is a leading inspiration and an innovator and all that stuff, well that's not Wikipedia style. A Wikipedia style would say this person had this job in this institution, won this award, has published these books, that kind of thing, stuff that's checkable and factual. So there's definitely a mind shift and there's definitely tension between the wikipedia community, who have focused very much on doing one kind of job, and maybe someone doing social media for a museum who's doing a different kind of job, so that leads me on to another question I wanted to ask is if an organization is thinking about, you know, engaging with wikipedia as a platform platform, contributing either assets or adding to articles.
Speaker 1:You've held these responsibilities inside institutions. What is your view on where this should sit structurally, because it feels like it's a bit of an intersection of lots of different skills. You probably do need some communication people in the mix, whether that's content people, marketing people. However, you do also need curatorial colleagues in the mix to ensure that subject matter is absolutely accurate and spot on and factually correct. Is it your view that it's a bit of a team approach or could this sit with one team, one set of skills?
Speaker 2:At the Bodleian I was part of the communications team and that was really kind of ideal and I sat next to the social media person and it is a similar role because you're kind of sharing the expertise of the institution. You're responding to requests. You might be sharing content that the institution thinks is important and wants to see shared and wants on Wikipedia. But you're also connecting to the community. They may have requests, like they say, I get a query like I'm writing a biography of this sultan and I know the Khalili collections has a portrait of them. Could we please share. So I've got to pass that on.
Speaker 2:Make sure that the institution consents to that. There are queries about individual objects, so one person can be a waypoint between different communication professionals, curators and similar experts and, yeah, kind of strategy level, people in the organization and as well as kind of broadcasting what the institution messages it wants. Also kind of a help desk and it seems so natural for so many museums and institutions to employ a social media person to do that through twitter, but not do that for wikimedia. But wikimedia is reaching the bigger audience and is less ephemeral, like saying that so your twitter and instagram posts are kind of forgotten the next day or the next few hours, but on wikipedia it's building something that people are consulting day after day, after day.
Speaker 1:You know, I've worked in-house in institutions quite a long time ago now. It was sort of at the dawn of when institutions were needing to be, or expected to be, more active on social media, and it was interesting at that time trying to make the case to leadership team who just did not see the value why do we need to be on? I remember one director of an institution I worked at said I'm not on Twitter. Why should we be on Twitter?
Speaker 1:And for people that are listening to this who maybe want to make the case for we should be more proactively involved in Wikipedia as a platform, what's your sort of advice for how you sell that in? I suppose, because, again, my perhaps slightly cynical view is that wikipedia might be viewed as oh you know, it's that free thing that comes up at the top of search results and anyone can edit wikipedia. So you know, actually, why would we be sort of diluting what our presence in the world by engaging with that? And, for all of the reasons we've just talked about over the last half an hour, I think that's wrong, but I can also see that being a viewpoint that would be used to push back on people saying I think I should be spending some of my time on this stuff, and so what's your advice for?
Speaker 2:landing this. I'll come to why in a second. I'll do what. First because, as well as working within institutions, I've tried to build lots of different partnerships over this decade and a half I've been doing this and what I encounter most in the cultural sector is kind of a surprising lack of imagination. So an organisation might say well, we want Wikipedia work because we want to improve the article about our museum, or we've got a new project, we've got a new partnership, so we want that on Wikipedia somehow. And often the answer to that is that's just not possible.
Speaker 2:Wikipedia is about what has stood the test of time, what's been covered in the media or covered in scholarly sources. So you can't look at your latest achievements and expect them to be on Wikipedia. It requires patience. It's about not the first draft of history, because that's journalism, as the saying goes, but like the penultimate draft of history. So you kind of look over what you're doing and if you've got collections that are about something, you should be looking to improve Wikipedia articles about that thing. If you've got a collection of Spanish metalwork, that's great. You can improve Spanish metalwork and maybe write a biography of Cedars-Larga the great metalworker, and that's just more straightforward to do, and Wikipedia would be more accepting of that than saying, oh, we want the article about my institution to be able to have this whole section about what it's doing now.
Speaker 2:Wikipedia is very suspicious about people editing about themselves or their employers or their kind of paid clients. So basically, you don't do that directly, you request other editors to do that. So that's the main thing about what that's like. Think imaginatively about what the cultural heritage you're sitting on could do to benefit wikipedia and mutually benefit. Why, I think in the early days of the web, my career started when the web was just starting to be a thing and there were debates in institutions. Why should we be on the web? Why have a website? People can dial in to our whatever, so they can dial in directly to us and get our catalogue from us over their modem. Why join this thing which is kind of open and has links? So people might come to our site but they might go a link and click on it. That takes them somewhere completely different. Why would might come to our site but they might go a link and click on it that takes them somewhere completely different. Why would we want to do that? And now nobody has a debate about whether to be on the web. Because why would you choose not to be available to somebody looking for information about your institution?
Speaker 2:And I think the same argument applies to the open content sphere, which includes Wikipedia. So if you're choosing not to be visible, you're choosing to exclude Somebody watching TV at home and the TV shows about Alexander the Great, and so they decide to inform themselves about who Alexander the Great was and when he lived. So they look up a Wikipedia article and then maybe they click on the images and so on. Why would you exclude that audience? And in our case, it's particularly been about reaching other languages. The Halili Collections website is fantastic. It's a leading website, really fancy, interactive things you can see that interact with collections, but it's in English. Nobody's writing Malay or Italian or Vietnamese content for that website. But people are doing those things on Wikipedia and they are translating it If you let them. We don't have to track down these people and incentivize them.
Speaker 2:They already see the value, they're already motivated to do it. We've just got to give them permission.
Speaker 1:In my head. I'm following a hypothetical journey of someone, of an organization, moving in the direction I think both you and I would encourage them to. Let's say, a case has been made, a person has been given some time to spend on this, it's clear what they're going to be contributing to hidden challenges, hidden difficulties that you know you've been doing this stuff for over a decade you would sort of encourage people to make themselves aware of ahead of time.
Speaker 2:I think because it's so open the system, because you're not the only person contributing to this, it's really hard to predict outcomes. You can basically say we're going to give people permission to put these images into articles and use them within a particular education and reference context and, like I said, to the Van Gogh painting you can't imagine at the time you're uploading the image all the ways different people find to use that image.
Speaker 2:So it's unpredictable and if you can set a target of engagement and a target of reach, that's kind of meaningless. But the good news is that the unexpectedness is on the positive side. It's not risks of things unexpectedly going wrong, it's risks of things unexpectedly kind of going viral and being used much more than you would have thought. So yeah, intellectual property stuff can be difficult. What I've been showing my career is old stuff, which is so. The original artwork is definitely out of copyright, but the Khalida collection has some images of 20th century art. So there's still a copyright in that art that exists until 70 years after the artist dies. So we can't share those images and so that's a restriction. Yeah, if you've got text, do you want to share? And the licensing hasn't been thought through at the outset. You should ideally have contributors being aware at the start that this is going to be under creative commons license and being aware of creative commons licenses.
Speaker 2:The pitfalls are to do with usability and software, because wikis aren't a new software, they're basically a 1997 era software and wikipedia is basically that. I mean it's not a beautiful site and it's not a site that has modern standards of usability and accessibility. That's the downside of it not being having a huge commercial corporation backing it, and so bulk upload is possible. It's possible to upload hundreds of images to Wikimedia in one go, but the process is fiddly and involves getting a particular software package and then having a spreadsheet with the data and having a directory, and that can take a lot of trial and error. And you might want to describe objects, artworks, in wikidata first. So what I do is I describe a vase, a painting, a sculpture in wikidata as an abstract representative of the metadata of that thing about where it's from, who made it, what culture it's from. Then I upload an image to Commons, which is the digital media repository, and say this is an image of this object and it imports the description of the object. It does it in a multilingual way, so if somebody switches their interface to Arabic, they'll get Arabic text for a lot of things.
Speaker 2:And then there's the next stage of raising awareness on Wikipedia, posting on notice boards within Wikipedia, to say I upload them to a different site called Wikimedia Commons. That's a bit baffling. And then the metadata is another site called Wikidata, which is different software and works a different way. So you've got to allow a lot of time. So I'm like a bulk upload. It's not like putting images on Flickr. It's complicated. You've got to kind of understand the messaging within Wikipedia and across different wikis, different language versions, which is very different from any other kind of internet forum or messaging system. So it does require a particular set of skills. Then again, I've seen people who aren't very experienced with Wikipedia but who are good communicators and just willing to learn and willing to experiment, come into a Wikimedian role and make a huge success of it.
Speaker 2:So it's maybe it's the communication skills that you're talking about, being able to talk in different levels in the organization talk to managers, talk to geeks, talk to art experts Maybe that's the really important thing and just to experiment and try things and explore these different, interconnected, open platforms. I think that's how you may success. An open-mindedness, like I say. Don't come to it thinking here's what we're going to. We're going to get our own wikipedia article up to so much viewership and we're going to get the decent of our new projects. Find out what wikipedia is trying to do and what you can do to align to that.
Speaker 1:I mean, it sounds like the sort of principles are similar to and I know it's not a social media platform, but it's like joining a new social media platform, understanding the tone and the rhythm and the temperature of how interaction happens on that platform, and it's not just a case of uploading some content. Actually, it is a community that you need to engage with and, as you said, there are things to learn, but it also sounds like there are lots and lots of people who will be willing to guide you and give you answers.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Wikimedia UK deserves a shout out here and maybe people aren't aware of this, but there's a national charity that supports the Wikimedia projects and mainly focused on building relationships with lecturers and courses, with universities, with galleries, libraries, archives, museums, scholarly societies, so they can help find a Wikimedian residence, and they're kind of the voice of the community and just really useful to contact those people. I mean, there are similar kind of charities and kind of local organizations all around the world for Wikipedia, but, yeah, get in touch with the nearest one. There's a really good one in Sweden as well where they're assembling a database of all cultural organizations all around the world to make like a master map.
Speaker 2:So different national Wikimedia chapters have different areas of focus, and the UK one excels at this kind of partnership Amazing.
Speaker 1:And maybe lastly, are there any organisations that you think are doing sort of particularly successful work in this area, are sort of particularly good examples of how you would recommend organizations engage with Wikipedia? And if there are, who are they? And maybe what are the stealable traits or stealable approaches that other organizations could look to draw inspiration from?
Speaker 2:Well, I've been talking about employing a Wikimedian in residence on staff at the same level as kind of a social media person. But there is another option that's cheaper but still involves you to be a bit bold and involves less control. And my examples of this you can change the default license for your website or for the digital images on your website to make it wikipedia compatible. So you can't have any non-commercial clause, you can't have a no derivatives clause on for material on wikipedia because that's not compatible. We've got to be able to make derivatives, we've got to be able to repurpose. So when the welcome collection had its online 100 000 images and decided to change its default license to attribution only, that enabled the reuse of that material on commons and it took one heroic volunteer months to upload them all and upload the descriptions and some metadata. But those 100,000 images available on Commons, useful to all kinds of reasons. I was helping someone write an article about a hospital and we found the floor plans of the hospital in this collection and hundreds of people went in and added extra information. They categorized the images, they extended descriptions, they found relationships between images. Sometimes there's an image that's an archival image that kind of needs color contrast fixing or fixing damage to be used in an encyclopedia article, and there were people who were enthusiasts, who just enjoy doing that for free, so all kinds of improvements were made. It really engaged a lot of volunteers, so it has since been an employed Wikimedian at the Welcome Collection.
Speaker 2:But there needn't be. It just means that you don't shape the outcomes of the happening. It's entirely community directed and things will happen when a volunteer wants to do them. So you can't target. You know they'll be used across this, this and this image. It's by osmosis and things can take years and years. But it's better than just keeping it all under restrictive license. And the Met Museum in New York has been really outstanding. They released all their catalog metadata and all their digital images in a partnership with Wikimedia. So no restrictions. Wikimedia can use all of this stuff and that's hugely helpful in illustrating all different kinds of art and different cultures and even some Islamic art. So, yeah, there are things you can do which just involve making a change to the footer of your website, which would involve being Wikipedia. I'm advised becoming more active and actively sharing and shaping what's happening on Wikipedia, but just being less controlling is a step forward.
Speaker 1:Yeah, at the Digital Works Conference last month, we heard a lot about that idea, you know, about engaging more generously with communities that already exist, about thinking differently about how your knowledge and resources might be used, as you've said, in ways that you can't imagine, and it feels like Wikipedia is a really interesting distillation of a lot of those ideas and concepts and I think you've shared so much today that hopefully is of interest to all sorts of different types of organizations that might be listening to this. So thank you for your time today, martin. It's been a really enjoyable conversation thanks so much and that is everything for today.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening. You can find all episodes of the podcast, sign up for the newsletter and find out about our events on our website, thedigitalworks. You can also find us on LinkedIn, now that Twitter is a total garbage fire. Our theme tune is Vienna, beat by Blue Dot Sessions. And, last but not least, thanks to Mark Cotton for his editing support on this episode. See you again soon.
