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The UK's Heritage Lottery Fund gives grants, sometimes up to many millions of pounds, to a huge range of arts, museums and culrural heritage organisations across the UK. These grants are always have an essential element of public participation, and are intended to leave a legacy of improved heritage privision. The opportunities to mobilise resources onto Wik8media or to Commons is huge, yet these opportinities are largely missed. The WMF (UK) should attempt to influence HLF to make heritage organistions more aware of the opportunities for engagement right at the early stages of writing grant applications.
To engage with HLF EM Regional Office to increase HLF's own awareness of GLAM-Wiki opportunities for public engagement and outreach - especially during the process of GLAM organisations preparing funding bids to the HLF, and then during project delivery.
To identify need for (and any funding opportunities between HLF and WMF which could lead to) the production of high-quality support materials to assist GLAM, heritage and environmental conservation organisations in determining whether the opportunities for Wikipedia involvement could be an appropriate element of their funding bids.
To plan and prepare presentation material for initial meeting with regional HLF officer to discuss cooperation. (Suggest Lesley O-J DevOff@E-M)
To demonstrate the wide range of projects which WMF/Wikimedia projects have already developed in partnership with heritage organisations worldwide.
To gauge the level of interest in WMF developing materials for circulation by HLF to GLAM organisations to summarise the types of relationships which funded bodies could enter into with Wikipedia as part of a public engagement element of any funding bid.
Opportunities for fund-seeking bodies to offer public engagement via Wikimedia:
In preparing this plan, it became apparent that HLF have set out licencing conditions for digital content which, if taken at face value, prevents any GLAM/heritage organisation from participating in content-sharing with Wikipedia. See this document.
HLF state that:
All digital outputs must be:
usable for five years from the Grant Expiry Date of your project as set out in the Grant Notification Letter
available for the life of your contract with HLF (the period set out in the Grant Notification Letter)
free of charge for non-commercial uses for the life of your contract with HLF (the period set out in the Grant Notification Letter)
licensed for use by others under the Creative Commons licence 'Attribution Non-commercial' (CC BY-NC) for the life of your contract with HLF, unless we have agreed otherwise.
Short PowerPoint on Wikipedia overview. (One undoubtedly exists somewhere already)
Establish current HLF requirements for Creative Commons licensing - possibly too restrictive by default for Wikipedia use. See this blog by Andy Mabbett.
Develop and produce a "Working with Wikipedia" guidance leaflet/booklet to support GLAM applicants seeking HLF funding (showing the various options and opportunities for engaging with Wikipedia.)
Video showing GLAM's past GLAM-Wiki projects. (This could be new media, or reworked material from Wikimedia Commons.)
Guidance on Creative Commons licencing, permissions, and Wikimedia Commons/OTRS process.
"Wikipedia: "What to do next" ( A follow-on leaflet for participants who have attended a local Editathon, run as part of HLF-funded project work. i.e. aiming to steer brand new Wikipedia editors into working on their own on heritage or other topics. An idea thrown up after a Women in Red event)
Develop a UK GLAM Connect page for heritage institutions to connect with supportive Wikipedians at a country/county level. Equivalent to Wikipedia:GLAM/Canada,Wikipedia:GLAM/US/Connect, which are flagged up at the bottom of the Wikipedia:GLAM/Contribute page. (I expected there to be be one - but can't find it for love nor money).
Research & develop an appropriately resourced HLF Funding-focussed UK GLAM webpage on Wikipedia to add further support, (possibly incorporating an opportunity to directly engage with GLAM-Wiki editors.)
As I'm sure you are aware, Wikipedia is the largest and most popular reference tool on the internet. By Janury 2020 it holds over 6 million encyclopaedic articles in English, each created by volunteer cooperation, and editable by anyone. All of its content is freely provided, but has to meet strict criteria of 'notability' and be based on reliable sources of information. Wikipedia is now the fifth most visited website on the Internet, and the 'go to' place for most people seeking a good overview on almost any topic imaginable, be it a Holbein painting, a Pokemon character, a World Heritage Site or a museum. Around the world there are now similar Wikipedia projects in over 150 different languages, and the Wikimedia Foundation is the charitable organisation that maintains the infrastructure and supports them all.
The opportunities for Wikipedia to be a means of sharing knowledge or mobilising images through heritage projects is absolutely immense. Despite this, we see very little awareness or involvement in Wikipedia by many of the projects that HLF supports. We find this surprising, considering the requirement for all funded projects to demonstrate community engagement within their bids. We suggest this is a lost opportunity that needs addressing both regionally and then, perhaps, nationally.
We would welcome the opportunity to discuss how we could collaborate to raise awareness of the opportunities that working with Wikipedia offers. It's a means of engendering public participation and sharing and disemminating project outcomes and offeringJo-Jo Eumerus training to local knowledgeable people. We feel the best time for heritage organisations to understand the opportunities that collaborating with Wikipedia can bring is when they're in the early stages of preparing their funding bid applications. So how can we best reach them at that critical moment?
To this end, would you be interested in meeting with three of us to discuss how we can achieve closer ties?. Doug Taylor would represent WMF (UK), whilst I and RB(?) would be two local editors who could demonstrate some of the local, national and international initiatives that Wikipedia editors have supported in recent years, and suggest ideas for future ties to up-coming or existing HLF-funded heritage projects. This includes:
GLAM -Wiki cooperation (Derby Museum, British Museum etc)
Wikipedia in Residence positions
QRpedia
Training sessions and Editathons
Themed projects.
Free sharing of photos, audio and video via Wikipedia Commons
Women in Red
anything else?
If you would find it helpful, we would gladly prepare a short presentation on Wikipedia to show all you staff its past work with the Galleries, Libraries, Archives & Museums sector (GLAM - as we call it) before talking more informally with you about ways of ensuring future funding bidders in the EM region and beyond can be made more aware of how working with Wikipedia can help them meet their community engagement priorities whilst contributing to the world's greatest encyclopaedia.
Yours, etc.
Nick M
Former Senior Keeper of Natural History, Derby Museum. (HLF-funded)
Technical Advisor to Derby Cathedral Peregrine Project. (HLF-funded)
