Cultural Content - Reaching millions of readers through Wikipedia
Creating past exhibition content on the platform with Martin Poulter
👋 team content
Within GLAM institutions, when thinking about how to make our digital content more visible, we tend to focus on our platforms: our website, our social media.
But for knowledge-based institutions, Wikipedia represents a huge strategic opportunity. I’m reminded of a quote from Loic Tallon (then Chief Digital Officer at the Met) which appears in The Digital Future of Museums:
“We have Henry VIII’s armour, which is viewed 180 times a month on our website. But the Wikipedia entry on Henry VIII is viewed 405,000 times a month and The Met’s object is part of that article. And whilst the experience of the armour is very different within the context of a larger Wikipedia article, and as one of 22 images on that page, the access to the artwork in that content is really important. It’s doing it in ways, in languages, in context which we cannot replicate internally.”
I wanted to learn more about how Wikipedia can be used to best effect for GLAM institutions, so I got in touch with Martin Poulter, who I previously worked alongside when he was Wikimedian-in-Residence at the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.
Today Martin is a part-time Wikimedian in Residence at the Khalili Foundation. In this piece, he talks us through working to create an online version of the British Museum’s ‘Hajj’ exhibition, which the Khalili Foundation was a major donor to. Too often past exhibitions become quite invisible online, despite the amount of work and original content that went into making them. Wikipedia offers a possible solution, Martin shows us how.
Over to Martin…
Looking for an exhibition years or decades past, sometimes I find there is an online counterpart, but it has been lost to link-rot. Sometimes the online archive still exists but not in high-traffic places where readers will stumble into it.
I think institutions are missing out on an opportunity to get continuing public interest and kudos from past exhibition success.
I have put this hunch to the test in my current job. In the process, I put two images from a cultural collection in front of nearly five million readers each, engaged volunteers on the other side of the world, and reached many thousands of readers with text and images about cultural heritage.
The platform I use is both high-traffic and long-term, namely Wikipedia. While social media content is ephemeral, Wikipedia builds over time. And while social media is likely to reach audiences who already know about you and have subscribed to your content, Wikipedia allows for many more serendipitous pathways to discovery, from people interested in things like collections you hold or exhibitions you have put on, who haven’t necessarily heard of you before.
This is my story of how, done well, GLAMs can harness significant benefits from using Wikipedia to document their past exhibitions for a new and wider audience.
In this article we look at:
Uploading exhibition images to Wikimedia Commons
How to represent an exhibition within Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons
Getting linked from the Wikipedia front page
Creating a digital corollary of an exhibition on Wikipedia
By way of an example, I’ll take you back to 2012 — when the British Museum hosted the world’s first major exhibition on the subject of the Hajj; the pilgrimage to Mecca which is one of the five sacred duties for Muslims. The museum’s own collection played a relatively minor role; the exhibits came from forty collections in fourteen countries, the largest being the Khalili Collections.
‘Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam’ was a huge success, both in terms of attendance and critical reception. There was an official website for the exhibition, but — as is often the case — at some point it was taken down. The British Museum and the Khalili Collections had taken a big risk putting on a very unusual kind of art exhibition, it had paid off in terms of attendance and plaudits, and yet there was no testimony to that success easily accessible online.
Not everything deserves a Wikipedia article, not even everything done and documented by an established museum or collection. The criterion used by Wikipedia is that there needs to be significant coverage in multiple reliable sources (three at a bare minimum) that are independent of the subject. When the topic does not meet this notability requirement, the community will sooner or later delete the article. As events that are extensively documented and covered in the press, art exhibitions make ideal topics and yet not many have Wikipedia articles.
In this case, there were many published sources for the exhibition; I could draw on the printed catalogue, the broadsheet coverage from the time, the Museum’s newsletter, the evaluation commissioned by the museum, and a research paper about how Muslim and non-Muslim visitors experienced the exhibition differently.
Illustrating the topic
Wikimedia Commons is the repository of freely-reusable media used by Wikipedia and its sister projects. This is where almost all the images and video clips in Wikipedia articles are hosted. You can share up to fifty files at once, giving them descriptions and specifying their licence. There are methods of uploading larger sets of images and metadata in bulk. I had already uploaded 1,500 files from the Khalili Collections as part of my work.
These shared images let me begin a recreation of the Hajj exhibition in the form of a gallery. Working through the printed catalogue, I found and tagged on Commons all the images of objects from the exhibition. The result is an image gallery of Khalili Collections objects from the Hajj exhibition. Any of the 39 other organisations who lent collections to the exhibition are free to upload their own images and add the tag, building a more complete representation of what was displayed in 2012. As a collaborative platform that holds millions of images from thousands of sources, Wikimedia Commons seems to me an easy and low-cost way to preserve for posterity a multi-collection exhibition.
Structuring the Wikipedia article
I began a draft in my user space of the exhibition article in Wikipedia. This allowed me to work on it without interference from other Wikipedians until I was happy with it.
The article explains the background to the exhibition, summarises its content, then describes its reception and legacy, including the press reviews and the exhibitions in other countries that followed from the British Museum’s original. This main text is preceded by the lede; a few paragraphs summarising the entire article.
Wikipedia’s guidelines for articles about books say that the book’s content should be summarised in about 600 words, so I took that as the word limit for the summary of the exhibition’s content. Rather than paraphrase the entire catalogue, I had to summarise what types of objects were exhibited, and pick out some particularly interesting examples of objects or of historical connections.
Wikipedia’s house style is very different from how you would write an institution’s own website or social media. The community members are on high alert for text that looks promotional, reacting against it like white blood cells against an infection. Unlike writing publicity materials, when you might take the most positive quotation from each review, the Wikipedia article needs a balanced summary of reactions. My summary gave representative quotations or paraphrases from every published review I could find, including a brief, proportionate mention of the few reactions that could be taken as negative.
Wikipedia likes links
When I mentioned notable places or people — such as Harry St John Philby who cleaned the inside of the Kaaba, and whose brush and cloth were part of the exhibition — I linked the relevant Wikipedia article. These links made the article a front-end to more than one hundred other articles, including four that I had created. As a result, the article can take up a lot more of readers’ time, and educate them more thoroughly about the Hajj and its history, than its 2,700 words’ length suggests.
Getting on the front page
Did you know...that the front page of English Wikipedia has an area to showcase interesting facts from recently-created or recently-improved articles? Getting an article in the Did you know (DYK) section requires an independent reviewer to check for neutrality, proper sourcing, copyright, originality, and so on.
Importantly, the article needs to be nominated within seven days of being created, moved from user-space into the encyclopaedia, or substantially expanded. The DYK statement has to be a surprising but well-sourced fact. At any one time, there are eight such textual statements from different articles in the DYK showcase, one with an image.
A volunteer reviewer confirmed that the article met the rules and style guidelines. Thus, on 31 December 2022, the DYK section quoted from Waldemar Januszczak’s enthusiastic review of the exhibition, and showed a thumbnail image of a relevant exhibit, a sitara (ornamental textile from the door of the Kaaba).
“Did You Know... that the British Museum's 2012 exhibition Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam included textiles from the Kaaba (example pictured) that were described as bringing "a visceral artistic buzz to the display"?”
The front page had 4.46 million views that day. Of those readers, 4,000 clicked through to the article.
Featured Article status
On English Wikipedia, articles that the community judges the very best — worthy of professionally-written encyclopaedias — have Featured Article (FA) status. Fewer than one in a thousand articles qualify. In my case, after submitting the Hajj exhibition page for FA status, the review took about six weeks and involved 3,800 words of discussion.
This is where the pedantry-for-public-good ethos of Wikipedia is at its most intense. Unlike the anonymous, distant review of research papers, a Wikipedia review process is an ongoing, fine-grained discussion. Five reviewers checked my citations, verified the copyright status of the images, and suggested many tweaks and improvements. One of the reviewers had actually attended the exhibition in 2012; for them, reviewing the article extended the knowledge they had picked up at the event.
The time invested in checking, tweaking, and reviewing the article paid off when it passed review, gained the Featured Article badge, and was selected as Today’s Featured Article for 17 May 2023. For 24 hours, the front page showed the article’s lead image — a manuscript painting of the Sacred Mosque in Mecca — and a one-paragraph summary, reaching another 4.7 million people. 35,000 readers clicked through to the full article.
The benefits of Wikipedia: multi-lingualism
This was very satisfying, but getting the article to Featured Article status and the front page was not the end of it. In April and May 2023, a volunteer on Indonesian Wikipedia translated the entire article, then another did the same for Urdu Wikipedia and a short summary appeared on Malay Wikipedia. This seemingly resulted from the way the English original had been showcased. On 31 July, the Urdu translation gained its own Featured Article status after a discussion involving nine reviewers. Urdu Wikipedia is about 3% of the size of English Wikipedia, so has only about one hundred FAs.
At the time of writing, the article exists in four languages, getting 4,000 views per year in total. I have a hunch that other translations will follow, and a greater confidence that this text will be there in some form for many years.
Why Wikipedia?
Wikipedia is a long-term project. It is sustained not by sponsors or public funding but by the goodwill of its readers. If you create an article that is not in the correct house style, backed up with the right kind of citations, you should expect that it will eventually be cut down, rewritten, or even deleted. On the other hand, if you write in the style and quality the Wikipedia community wants, they will value it, showcase it, and protect it from vandals. I can point to text on Wikipedia that I wrote fifteen years ago, and will still likely be there decades from now.
Now I have a workflow which I am applying to create image galleries and Wikipedia articles for other past exhibitions. I also have a sense that this is a huge missed opportunity for the sector as a whole: a chance to get image views, public awareness, and continuing kudos for the institution. Having run a successful event, why would we not make sure it gets the greatest lasting benefit for its public profile?
This article by Martin Poulter is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence (CC-BY-SA 4.0).