Wikipedia:GLAM/NHMandSM/booklet

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Educating the world[edit]

The value of releasing content under an open license for educational organisations[edit]

To do[edit]

  • Add info from German booklet about copyright
  • something about loss of control of information,
  • Attribution, does not allow users of the content to misrepresent them
  • Look at Glamwiki for examples of organisations, also glamorous
  • Pick images as backgrounds for each page or double page
  • Wikipedia is at the top of most Google results
  • All images in this guide are taken from Wikimedia Commons
  • Credits for images
  • Every organisation has a unique contribution to make: Whilst the images in this booklet show what is possible, there are many parts of Wikipedia that lack good quality or even any content,
  • People finding information relies on the person knowing who has the content
  • Wikipedia has the largest audience
  • Wikipedia acts as an aggregator of open licence content
  • Put your content where people are looking for it

Image index[edit]

All images in this guide are available under a Creative Commons Attribution license

Welcome[edit]

Page 1 (right)

This document outlines the benefits of releasing content of content under Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license for educational organisations including schools, universities, galleries, libraries, archives, museums and charities. Every educational organisation and individual have a unique contribution to make to free and open knowledge.

The images used in this guide are wonderful examples of open license content and are available to freely reuse, images and their licenses are detailed on the opposite page.

Content refers to anything the organisation produces it owns the copyright of including:

  • Images
  • Videos
  • Text
  • Audio
  • 3D models

Traditional Copyright[edit]

Page 2 (left)

The work of educational organisations is directly obstructed by the lack of open access and a non-free license for its content. Traditional copyright licensing severely restricts the huge potential for educational outreach to the wider world. Releasing content under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license is the largest contribution an educational organisation can make to public understanding of it's areas of ????interest????.

As an example NASA, who have an open license on their images, have just over 55,000 files on Wikimedia Commons, they are used on over 120,000 distinct pages on Wikimedia projects including Wikipedia in over 100 languages, they receive over 171 million page views per month.

The Creative Commons Share Alike license allows others to reuse and change the content

  • Reuse allows everyone to share your content helping to reach the widest audience possible.
  • Allowing others to alter and add to content makes it easy for several organisations and individuals to work together


refs Number of images found using http://toolserver.org/~magnus/ts2/glamorous/ Number of image views found using http://toolserver.org/~magnus/baglama.php

The License[edit]

Page 3 (right)

The license

You are free:

to Share—to copy, distribute and transmit the work, and

to Remix—to adapt the work Under the following conditions:

Attribution—You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work.)

Share Alike—If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same, similar or a compatible license. With the understanding that:

Waiver—Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.

Other Rights—In no way are any of the following rights affected by the license:


your fair dealing or fair use rights;

the author's moral rights; and

rights other persons may have either in the work itself or in how the work is used, such as publicity or privacy rights.


Notice—For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. The best way to do that is with a link to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/


Commercial reuse[edit]

Page 5 (left)

A Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license allows commercial reuse of content, there are several reasons for allowing commercial reuse:

  • Only 40% of the world’s population currently has internet access, most ways of getting information to the other 60% of people are commercial: newspapers, magazines, TV and photocopy shops (a common practice in developing countries due to cost of transporting books).
  • Private schools, after school clubs, trade schools and university can be classified as commercial organisation and so not able to use the content.
  • The commercial value of museum images is often lower than the resources needed to exploit it and continues to fall due to the shrinking of the customers of these service i.e print media.
  • Restricting educational access to content for commercial gain is directly obstructing the work of organisational organisations.
  • Wikipedia requires a commercial license, it offers the largest audience in the world.

Link to German CC booklet

Examples of organisations that use the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License[edit]

Page 6 (right)


  • infographic of number of images and views per month


Number of images, number of views

  • NASA

104,000 files on Wikimedia Commons distinct pages on Wikimedia projects including Wikipedia in over 100 languages over 171 million page views per month.

  • Reyjksmuseum
  • Al Jazeera

2,200 files 450 pages content appears on 2,000,000 page views per month

  • British Library
  • British Museum
  • Deutsche Fotothek

4,000 files used 4,9000 pages content appears on 7,000,000 page views per month

  • German Federal Archive

83,000 files 130,000,000 page views per month

  • New York Public Library

pages content appears on


  • Media from PLOS journals

pages content appears on 21,000,000 page views per month

About Wikipedia[edit]

Page 8 (left)

Wikipedia is the largest encyclopedia ever written, available in 285 languages and is the 6th most visited website. Wikimedia serves around 500 million people and receives around 21 billion page views each month, around 1/2 million views a minute12. Wikipedia Zero is an initiative of the Wikimedia Foundation to enable mobile access, free of data charges, to Wikipedia in developing countries to 330 million people who may not be an accessible audience in any other way.

Wikipedia is where the most people are looking for the information educational organisations want to provide them and acts as an aggregator of open licence content.

Wikipedia embodies the general principles of collaborative education which many projects that specialise on specific areas use.

Wikipedia is created by 100,000 regular contributors and hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, a charity based San Fransisco, there are also Wikimedia chapters in several countries. Wikimedia UK is the largest English language chapter.

“Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing.” Jimmy Wales, Co Founder of Wikipedia

How many views does a Wikipedia article get? Wikipedia articles on popular subjects get many 1000s of page views per day, you can find out how many page views an article gets by going to stats.grok.se and typing in the name of the article as it's written at the top of a Wikipedia page (it's case sensitive) and simply click Go


Additional benefits[edit]

page 8 and 9 (left and right)

In addition to a massively increased audience with credit in all reuse of content there are other benefits:

  • Linked data and added context

Adding ????

  • Collaboration

By allowing other organisations and individuals to reuse and combine information several institutions and individuals can collaborate to create resources they could not have done individually.

  • Potential for increased use in research

A combination of ease of access to images and other content, and an easy to understand and compatible license will allow content to be used more widely in research.

  • Ease of Understanding of the license

The Creative Commons Attribution License is an easy to understand license that clearly defines usage, this will encourage reuse by people with potentially little understanding of copyright e.g teachers.

  • Kudos from open knowledge community and the rest of the world

Releasing content under an open license will show the museum's commitment to open access education and encourage organisations to work with the museum.

  • Possibilities for volunteers

By making a commitment to free and open education through releasing content under an open license it may attract more volunteers to work with educational organisations both in person and virtually. Many people care passionately about open access to information, one of the reasons there are 100,000 regular contributors to Wikipedia. Releasing content may may attract specialist volunteers, especially people with skills in digitising, social media and online education.

  • Crowdsourcing

Many organisations face significant challenges in digitising and transcribing collections, translation. Crowdsourcing offers the opportunity for organisations to collaborate with people all over the world.

  • Easy tracking of educational outreach

Measuring outreach on Wikimedia projects is a simple process using publicly available tools like GLAMorous and Wikipedia page views to track usage of content over all language Wikimedia projects and number of page views.

  • Sustainability of digital content

Uploading content to other services offer an offsite backup of images independent of organisation’s systems for free. There is continuous development of new features by the Wikimedia community and paid staff members at the Wikimedia Foundation.

How to release content under a Creative Commons license[edit]

page 10 - 11 (left and right)

Process The process may be quite different for different sizes of organisation and different volumes and types of content.

Flickr etc

An easy solution is to use Flickr and Vimeo or Youtube. Tools are available to easily move images from these sites to Wikimedia Commons. Wikimedia UK or other local chapters are often able to advise and assist with upload of content and transfer to Wikimedia Commons.

Add a notification to your website stating which content is under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license.

Getting help from Wikimedians

contact Wikimedia UK


An example of an organisation that has a well developed Flickr account is the Biodiversity Heritage Library

No watermark should be applied to any content, most open knowledge projects including Wikipedia do not allow watermarks. The content should include as much metadata as possible, especially if it has value in research. New content could be specially created for open license sites like Wikipedia, video should include no copyrighted music and hardcoded subtitles should be avoided to allow other language users to translate subtitles.


Page 12 - 13 FAQ (left and right)[edit]

Licensing questions

Wikipedia Isn't Wikipedia full of errors? Wikipedia is where the majority of people are looking for information make it as good as possible

Can I use Wikipedia to advertise my organisation


Page 14 (left)[edit]

About the authors:

John Cummings is currently the Wikimedian in residence for the Natural History Museum and Science Museum in London

Possible images to use[edit]

Tried to get one at least from each of the main Wikipedia catgories

Front cover[edit]

General reference[edit]

Culture and the arts[edit]

Geography and places[edit]

Health and fitness[edit]

History and events[edit]

Mathematics and logic[edit]

Natural and physical sciences[edit]

People and self[edit]

Philosophy and thinking[edit]

Religion and belief systems[edit]

Society and social sciences[edit]

Technology and applied sciences[edit]

Notes[edit]

The power of collaboration


Can make something greater together than seperately

Contributing to Wikipedia offers the opportunity to collaborate with organisations and individuals with common aims to share and improve information, it is the only way that GLAMs can provide for and reach a truly worldwide multilingual audience with all levels and aspects of understanding.

multilingual

reach audiences that the organisations do not have the resources to do themselves


About Wikipedia


It offers an existing worldwide audience

Wikipedia collaborative endevour

Allowing others to help share and contribute content






allowing everyone to be both consumer and collaborator.



GLAMs can make a unique and significant contribution to free and open knowledge that will further their visions and missions.


put in stats about Wikimedia projects

Open licensing of content would create a massively increased viewership of GLAM content with attribution and linking to information from other sources .


open by default, releasing content under an open license offers a way of reaching more people than all other

People finding information relies on the person knowing who has the content

Wikipedia has the largest audience


Put your content where people are looking for it


restricting access to content only where it is sensitive at the

releasing content at the highest resolution

releasing content at a lower resolution



open as default