Notes and links for my presentation "A guided tour to Wikipedia" given at the GLAM-WIKI 2010 conference at the British Museum on Friday November 26th 2010.
The audience was a mixture of people from GLAM ("Galleries, libraries, archives and museums") organizations & Wikipedians, and after trouble getting live internet working, and deviating down various avenues arising from questions, I only got through about half the plan below. There were no slides and the whole presentation was built around live web pages from Wikipedia ("WP") and elsewhere (next time pre-taken snapshots I think!) most listed below, to which I've added brief comments. Stuff I didn't get to mention is marked ¶. Huge thanks to User:WereSpielChequers for accompanying me on the keyboard, and thanks to everyone who came; I hope it was useful. Johnbod (talk) 17:47, 28 November 2010 (UTC)
Basics
- Wikipedia:Five pillars - the most basic summary of WP policies
- Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. - the US case on which our use of many images of 2D art rests; WP servers are in the US and US law applies to uploads and editing performed in the UK - we are effectively "offshore" in this respect.
- November 2001 most visited pages WP is 10 years old in January 2011. This is a blast of nostalgia, with tiny numbers for views per month and a massive US bias (bear in mind this was the month after the 9/11 attacks). Now the English WP gets about 10 million views per hour.
- Alexa page on Wikipedia put display setting to "max"; recent figures
- comScore stats more stats, to 2009
- International stats yet more stats - Index
- most visited pages, per hour
Why is WP so popular?
- It comes very high on google searches - see below
- standard & attractive format
- extremely wide coverage
- very good system of links to other articles
- It's not too big - contrast Europeana and the 1,800,000 items on the British Museum online database, which makes searches difficult (yes they have the Highlights database also).
Weakness variability of quality and coverage Core editing group relatively small ¶The stress in looking at WP statistics on edits & new articles is misleading
- Stats - editing levels etc - we looked here at how the number of "very active" editors is in decline, and how a relatively small group actually produces a high proportion of overall edits - reassuring or alarming? Take your pick.
- distribution of edits, shows that English Wikipedia articles (talk pages etc excluded) have been edited by 3,215,701 registered editors (as well as unregistered ones), but the table below shows that, for example, the 8.7 million edits made by the 7,979 editors who have each made over 3,162 edits represent 37% of the total edits, and that a group of only 421 editors who have made over 31,623 edits each represent 16.4% of the total. And in fact most of these high-scoring editors will be performing house-keeping jobs rather than adding text.
Edits >= Wikipedians % of editors Edits total % of content 1 3215701 100.0% 153400434 100.0% 3 1305870 40.6% 150331427 98.0% 10 630016 19.6% 146450864 95.5% 32 246988 7.7% 140017568 91.3% 100 101721 3.2% 132163057 86.2% 316 44638 1.4% 122334838 79.7% 1000 19906 0.6% 108638514 70.8% 3162 7979 0.2% 87739409 57.2% 10000 2328 0.1% 56854644 37.1% 31623 421 0.0% 25126480 16.4% 100000 35 0.0% 6323434 4.1% 316228 4 0.0% 1771555 1.2%
- Graph - over 25 edits per wk 2001 to now; a different measure showing a similar decline.
- Wikipedia:WikiProject Visual arts/Popular pages Monthly and avge daily figures for October 2010; now no longer topped by Lady Gaga as her tag as an artist has been removed.
- Stats examples: Long-term article views since December 2007 to date blank - enter an article title like say British Library or Raphael (where the figures start just after a large expansion). Zero views mean the figures weren't collected for that day. There is a seasonal rhythm: very low at Christmas, very high afterwards, falling in the summer, often highest in autumn.
- German art - expanded 6-23 December 09, DYK December 16, 2009. old diff Nov 09 - improvement in article quality has very little effect on page view figures.
- Lawrence Durrell Collection - history - we looked at the article after straight after the first 3 edits in 2005, then at the history with lots of later edits, then at the article now.
- Royal Observatory, Greenwich - jumps from c. march 2010. Why? The Olympics? But why then? One of many mysteries.
diff Aug 08-Nov 10 ¶ The effects of a vast list of edits from over 2 years on a popular article. In fact, when you go into them, the only significant text added is "The scientific work of the observatory was relocated elsewhere in stages in the first half of the 20th century, and the Greenwich site is now maintained as a tourist attraction.", and "Indeed prior to this, the observatory had to insist that all the electric trams in the vicinity could not use an earth return for the traction current."
- Wikipedia:Why create an account? ie become a registered user. We talked about this, but I didn't have a link to this page, which gives a clear summary.
- ¶ Andrew Keen in his book The Cult of the Amateur complains about the personalization of the internet. Unlike say Facebook and Twitter, I don't think this criticism can be directed at WP, where all personal views of the editors are intended to be excluded, and to a large extent are.
- ¶The lazy and passionless tenor of art coverage in Wikipedia is both mystifying and aggravating A 2008 blogpost by Jonathan Jones of The Guardian having a good moan about the WP article on Goya, which is indeed still lacklustre, unlike some on his individual works. But he seems to be confusing WP with a blog.
WP has a vast number of articles, but no directing editorial mind or group. There was an important early decision to dispense with “expert” supervision of articles. The long-running and recently ?concluded dispute over the edit-wars on articles relating to climate change has re-inforced this view, as experts may have difficulty maintaining a neutral point of view. But WP is very keen to have more expert contributors, and many worry that these are often put off by being challenged or reverted. In fact many professional artists and art historians do edit, but not always on the subject of their expertise.
Examples of typical articles at the various quality levels:
- FA (Featured article): El Greco, Mary Rose - assessed by a formal process by several editors at WP:FAC
- GA (good article): Rembrandt, Imperial War Museum - Assessed by a formal review by a single editor through the WP:GAN page.
- B: Jeff Koons, British Library - the lower ratings are just added by a passing editor, or sometimes the creator.
- C: Bristol Industrial Museum
- Start:Royal Armouries Museum
- Stub: Royal Armouries
WP:GLAM/BM tables - British Museum articles before and after their Wikipedian in residence project in June 2010.
The most relevant Wiki-projects:
- Wikipedia:WikiProject Visual arts
- Wikipedia:WikiProject Museums - for articles on institutions and curators etc, not objects in museums
- Wikipedia:WikiProject Libraries - again, not for individual manuscripts etc.
- Wikipedia:WikiProject Archaeology - often overlaps with others above
The (incomplete) summaries of articles covered by the principal GLAM-relevant Wikiprojects. I didn't expand on how moribund some wikiprojects are these days.
WP:GLAM - the page design specifically for GLAM people interesting in adding content relevant to their institution to WP, especially by editing themselves. The content here is likely to be expanded in the light of the conference. There are answers for many of the most common questions.
....and we didn't have time for:
- ¶ Weak areas of art coverage: Decorative arts, especially metalwork and furniture; ceramics and some areas in textiles are rather better. Non-Western art, Africa worst of all, as in all parts of WP, but Indian, Islamic & Asian art all pretty poor. Big topic articles can be very poor indeed, even where articles within the topic may be ok.
- ¶Commons category "fashion shows"
- ¶Commons category "tables" - These are not as bad as they used to be, but they are still examples of categories of Commons images that have been "swamped" by automated mass uploads of images released by one of the "collaborations" between institutions and WP. Obviously these are a good thing, but the categorization of the images needs to be done sensitively, and so far often isn't. The first page of the "fashion shows" category used until recently to be almost entirely of photos of fashion shows from the DDR in the 1950s, but I'm glad to see that many have now been moved to specific sub-categories.
¶Category:Collections of museums in the United Kingdom
- ¶Invaluable_Summaries_of_Wikipedia_content - English and French joke summaries from 2007. In fact the Pokemon characters have largely gone now.
- ¶Wikipedia May Be a Font of Facts, but It’s a Desert for Photos NYT, NOAM COHEN, Published: July 19, 2009
- ¶The Iraq War printed diffs in 11 vols
- ¶Just What Is It that Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing? - see the talk page. A relatively rare example of a long-running row on an art subject.
- ¶Lucas Cranach the Elder, Tintoretto - examples of articles on major artists which are still largely made up of content copied wholesale in the very early days from the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1911. There are still far too many of these.
- ¶Tara Brooch - The point here was the photos. Bad though they are (taken with my new camera; I'm much better now I've read the manual), when they were taken they were still the best photos available online for this famous object, including those on the National Museum of Ireland website. It is inevitable but unfortunate that the best WP coverage of museum objects is usually of those in the big museums with huge amounts of online content already. Outside this small group coverage falls off a cliff, both on WP and the museum's own site - even for the National Museums in Dublin and Edinburgh.
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¶ Mosque lamp This was going to be my grand finale! As Mosque lamps are both decorative art and Islamic, it's no suprise that WP did not have an article on them. I had pre-prepared a quick stub, using the first page of hits on a google search, especially the Wallace Collection, BM & V&A. I was going to creat a WP article by moving my text into "articlespace", and refresh the google search, expecting that my poor effort would immediately become the internet's top resource on mosque lamps, according to google. It might not be fair or sensible, but that's the way it is. Note that we did already have a Commons category.
Before: ¶Top 5 UK hits on google for "mosque lamp":
- Mamluk dynasty, about AD 1350-55, British Museum (Highlights, like all these hits)
- Enamelled glass mosque lamp, by Philippe Joseph Brocard, 1867 (British Museum)
- Pottery lamp, Ottoman, AD 1549, From Iznik, modern Turkey (British Museum)
- Plain glass Venetian mosque lamp, late C16, (V&A)
- Syria/Egypt, c. 1340 (V&A)
- and at no. 8 this from the Wallace collection, actually the fullest single page of those linked here.
¶Top 5 US hits for mosque lamp, supplied by a New York wikipedian (well done Matthew Cock! - not what I expected at all):
- Mamluk Dynasty mosque lamp, enamelled with the name and titles of Sayf al-Din Shaykhu al-Nasiri, Cairo, c. 1350-55 (British Museum).
- Mamluk Dynasty mosque lamp, enamelled, c 1285 (Metropolitan Museum, acc. no. 17.190.985).
- Mamluk Dynasty mosque lamp, enamelled ,ca. 1329–35 (Metropolitan Museum, acc. no. 17.190.991).
- Ottoman Dynasty mosque lamp, for the Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem, Isnik, dated AD1549 (British Museum).
- Mamluk Dynasty mosque lamp commissioned by Amir Sayf al-Din Shaykhu, Cairo, c. 1350-55 (British Museum).