Science Museum all staff briefing
Wikipedia and the Science Museum
John Cummings
Wikimedian in residence for the Science Museum and Natural History Museum
wikimedian@nhm.ac.uk
What is Wikipedia?
The largest encyclopedia ever written,
available in 285 languages.
Editable by everyone
Funded by donations and run by a
charity; the Wikimedia Foundation
Who writes Wikipedia?
Everyone can edit Wikipedia
100,000 regular contributors, generally referred to within Wikipedia as the community
The editors have control and set the policies
"Wikipedia doesn't work in theory, only in practice"
Who writes Wikipedia
x200
What does Wikimedia do?
"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
“We have lived in this world where little things are done for love and big things for money. Now we have Wikipedia. Suddenly big things can be done for love.”
Clay Shirky
“ To make sense of the science which shapes our lives, help create a scientifically literate society and inspire the next generation. Our ambition is to be the leading international museum championing the understanding, enjoyment and prestige of science in modern society.”
Science Museum Strategic Ambitions 2012 -22
Wikipedia's Audience
Serves ≈500 million people each month
21 billion page views per month (inc 3 billion mobile)
Page views have doubled since 2008
Largest and most used science education platform in the world
NASA
≈100,000 images on Wikimedia projects receive
>181 million views per month on Wikimedia projects
Large Hadron Collider
Wikipedia article receives around 7 million page views per year in English
and is available in 77 languages
Commercial Reuse
Defining commercial reuse is difficult
On Youtube the videos received 2700 views in 10 months
1500 people visit these Wikipedia articles each day
50 images release under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license at a medium resolution
Thalidomide
English
German
Hebrew
Polish
Swedish
Prosthesis
English
German
Hebrew
Polish
Swedish
Hans Geiger
German
Swedish
Geiger Counter
English
German
Swedish
Nose
German
Tycho Brahe
English
History of Syphilis
English
History of Rhinoplasty
English
Image usage on Wikipedia articles
≈ 3500 page views per day
> 1.2 million views per year
Penicillin Wikipedia article
Image views per day
>21000 views per day = 7,600,000 page views per year
Suggested actions
The Science Museum has a large and unique contribution to make to open knowledge, it can be more open with it’s content: