Open-air museums and the Wikimedia community
Once you have digital data, anybody can do anything with those! Therefore, RETOLD had formulated very early the wish to find communities, we could cooperate with. But we needed to zoom out first. Our open-air museums are part of something larger, Galleries, Libraries, Archives & Museums (in short called GLAM). Although there is a big diversity between these categories, we all strive for free and open access to digital cultural heritage.
Enter the Wikimedia community. They have initiatives to cooperate with GLAM around the world. We soon found out, that both our museums and Wikimedia agreed largely about inclusive and open licensing wherever possible. On the one hand, Wikimedia could be a channel of our digital data, but more importantly, they are a large community of people interested in GLAM. RETOLD had several meetings with colleagues in Germany, as two of our three museums are located there. If it works there, we believe it can work elsewhere too.
A good overview is the GLAM-Wiki, with cooperation projects between the Wikimedia community and GLAMs in over 30 language areas: https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM. An important advantage of cooperation is that one expands its visibility online in many languages and audiences. Also, co-creation means, the online crowd can help detailing information when you share data.
The Wikimedia community is very diverse; hence cooperation can take many formats. An edit-a-thon for example, is a scheduled time when people edit Wikipedia together, offline and/or online around a specific subject. This has the advantage of giving newcomers an easy introduction into Wikipedia. Another option is to extend this into a writing month, where one tries to get as many as possible articles around a specific theme improved. You can also invite Wikimedia for a photo weekend, so people make images around a specific theme and upload these to Commons. A n example is Wiki Loves Monuments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Loves_Monuments. Another community is called “Provenance loves Wiki”, and there are also initiatives to help GLAM update their texts for use with current target groups. Our RETOLD partner Museumsdorf Düppel is part of the Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin. They once had a Wikipedian in residence, see: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/Stadtmuseum_Berlin.
In Aschaffenburg a shop opened where digital and non-digital activities are coordinated, see https://digital.aschaffenburg.de/digitalladen/