Wikipedia:Museums and libraries partnership FAQ
Museums and libraries partnership FAQ:
1. What is a partnership?
- A partnership is an relationship between the Wikimedia Foundation and a cultural institution that benefits both sides. Since Wikimedia is decentralized, most partnerships develop through local WMF chapters.
2. Why have a partnership?
- There are several reasons to form partnerships.
- Partnership gains access to more and better media content. Partnerships have yielded donations of educational media much larger than our volunteers would have been able to obtain and upload if they had been acting alone. Sometimes a partnered institution will fulfill special requests such as higher quality digital versions of images.
- Local WMF chapters have held community-building events at partner institutions.
- Cultural partnerships can generate collaborative projects. A recent partnered exhibit between WMF Netherlands and the Tropenmuseum of Amsterdam about the country of Suriname made national news in The Netherlands and received a visit from the president of Suriname. Volunteer work associated with the exhibit resulted in article improvements to the Dutch Wikipedia.
3. What types of partnership have been done?
4. How much of the important material has been digitized?
- A great deal of historic media has not been digitized yet.
5. What are the technical standards?
- Currently the cultural sector has no generally accepted quality standard for digitizing media. Wikipedians who work with high quality digital files are interfacing with institutional staff to encourage best practices.