Redefining ROM in Wiki ‘edit-a-thon’
About a dozen of the Royal Ontario Museum’s “e-volunteers” will gather Friday to flesh out the museum’s Wikipedia page, attempting to make it a jumping-off point for those interested in learning more about some of the museum’s Chinese artifacts.
The group of volunteers has been stealthily adding paragraphs to the Wikipedia page about the ROM’s history and the building’s architecture, as well as a sentence here and there about current and past exhibits, for the past year.
On Friday, they’ll kick it up a notch with the museum’s first “edit-a-thon.”
Volunteers will tour the Chinese galleries.
They will spend an hour preparing research, and then get down to business: four hours of writing and editing short articles and adding pictures, if there’s time.
The event has been in the works for several months. Intern Molly McGowan, also the event’s co-ordinator, picked the topics for articles to be written.
“I read a book about the history of the ROM, and one of the collections that starts very early on is the Chinese collections,” McGowan said. “(It) ties into the centennial, so I decided to start with the Chinese gallery and go from there.”
If Friday goes well, the e-crew hopes to do several more such gatherings, focusing on different exhibits and artifacts, before the centennial celebrations start in 2014.
It’s all about having “more eyes on our content,” said social media co-ordinator Ryan Dodge, which is why they’re using Wikipedia, a website with a frequent search return rate. “We want to basically ensure that there is more ROM content on Wikipedia that would eventually lead people back to us or back to our curatorial resources,” Dodge said.
The power of the Internet for garnering attention is something Dodge said the museum is focusing on, since it hopes to be “sort of a community builder.”
In some respects, the engagement is already working. One of the e-volunteers who will be writing articles Friday is Kristy Van Hoven, an outreach co-ordinator for the National EMS Museum in Minnesota. “It’s really like a mystery kind of sleuthing project,” Van Hoven said. “You dig and dig and dig.”
In the future it won’t be just volunteers, Dodge said. Part of the online focus also includes teaching ROM staff how to write and edit Wikipedia articles. “Some of our curators have been shown how to do that, and we’re building on that,” he said.
He also isn’t too perturbed about the possibility of Wikipedia errors, which is a common complaint about Wikipedia, as its content is created by users, the site is open to abuse and all the information cannot be verified.