Wikidata:WikiProject sum of all paintings/Benefits for museums

This page explains the benefits for museums to participate in sum of all paintings. Wikidata obviously benefits from data contributed by museums, but partnerships are a two way street: Both parties need to benefit from it.

This page is a work in progress. Feel free to improve and expand.

Brainstorm topics

• Finding errors in metadata
  • Relatively easy export of that metadata, ingestible to the GLAM's database
• Creation of the first Catalogue raisonné for many lesser known artists.
• Identify the "canonical" image of a painting. Combats the "yellow mikmaid syndrome" and increases likelyhood of reuse (in WP infoboxes and beyond)
• Authority control
  • "meta authority control" - a place to interlink many different authority control systems.]
  • Central independent party for linked open data (LOD)
• Provide context for paintings
  • Allows GLAMs to connect their paintings to larger collections (e.g. by same artist) held in other institutions.
• Exposure (eyeballs!)
• Have paintings in the bigger picture [I don't understand what this means - Wittylama (talk) ]
• Bigger chance Wikipedia articles get written about paintings (and artists)
• Find-ability of paintings
• Re-use Wikidata metadata on the museum website
  • Enables multi-lingal metadata fields, increasing accessibility/find-ability of content
• Innovation [need to be more specific. Wittylama (talk) ]
• Wikidata is the future.
  • Freebase stopped because it's superseded by Wikidata.
  • Viaf switched to Wikidata instead of Wikipedia for their main links
• ...

Why contribute your metadata to Wikidata?

Current benefits

1. By donating your collection metadata yourself - instead of leaving it to volunteers to describe your collection on Wikidata - you take charge of your metadata's quality. Like the Yellow Milkmaid Syndrome, but for metadata.
2. You can easily track whether and which items in your collection have articles on various language Wikipedias. Which artworks have Wikipedia articles in which languages? See an example: paintings in the Rijksmuseum collection.
   • This allows you to easily create to do lists for local Wikipedia volunteers, to suggest Wikipedia assignments to your local university's art history departments...
3. You can easily track which items from your collection (don't) have images on Wikimedia Commons.
   • This allows you, and the Wikidata volunteers, to identify the "canonical" image of a painting. This combats the "yellow mikmaid syndrome" and increases the likelihood of reuse of that best-quality image (in Wikipedia infoboxes and beyond, see below).
4. The enthusiastic volunteer community at Wikidata will jump in to correct, improve and enrich metadata about items in your collection.

Potential future benefits

1. Wikidata is an integral part of the Wikimedia ecosystem and is the youngest, fastest-growing project there. What does that mean?
   • In the future, more and more Wikimedia projects - including Wikipedia in your local language - will use so-called 'templates' (think information boxes, automatically generated lists and image galleries) that are derived from Wikidata directly. An article about a visual artist might, at a certain point, include an automatically generated list of their artworks, derived from Wikidata - including their works from your collection; at least: if you have donated metadata about them, or if volunteers have added them to Wikidata.
2. Your collection will probably become much more findable on the whole World Wide Web, in a way that your own collection management system and online collection might never be able to achieve.
   • Google knowledge graph - Google discontinues Freebase and will, in the future, probably use Wikidata as a basis for its knowledge base. So it's really really good to be there, with your collection, on Wikidata.

What can you get out of Wikidata?

Possible future developments

1. You will be able to retrieve and freely use all enhancements and improvements made to your metadata on Wikidata.
   • For persons, we are meticulous about adding authority data from as many sources as possible. Pretty soon, Wikidata might become more comprehensive than VIAF here. We already use and combine four major art historical authority files that have (to our knowledge) never been brought together into a single, freely available knowledge base before - ULAN, CLARA, Dictionary of Art Historians and RKDartists. Your collection will become intricately linked with these. Via Wikidata, you will be able to link to all these authority files from your own website without much manual work from your staff.
   • Wikidata volunteers are interested in starting to use as many freely available vocabularies and metadata standards as possible. We are looking at Iconclass, the Art and Architecture Thesaurus, and more may follow. If you make metadata about your collection available on Wikidata, you increase the possibility that we, volunteers, will enrich your metadata with these vocabularies as soon as we deploy them. If your museum doesn't have the manpower or financial means to use these vocabularies yourself, you might hugely benefit from our work - for free.
2. Metadata on Wikidata is translated in many different languages - not only the language(s) used in your own collection management system. In the future, this will make it easier and easier to develop applications on top of Wikidata's metadata, that are multilingual by nature.

Benefits beyond my own collection

1. Through Wikidata, we can create the first Catalogue raisonné for many lesser known artists - including the lesser known artists in your own collection, of course.

Frequently asked questions

1. What about quality control? If non-expert volunteers add metadata to my collection, quality and reliability are not guaranteed.