Open science meets open wikis

Communicating the Museum conference in Düsseldorf

Seven Wikipedians from seven different countries speaking at least six languages came together for a Wikipedia lounge at the Communicating the Museum conference in Düsseldorf, Germany to talk with museum representatives (most of whom were PR people) about Wikipedia. They answered their questions about the Wikipedia article about their museum and Wikipedia in general and invited them to take part in co-operations with Wikipedia to make their images and metadata more visible to the visitors. This would ideally result in more visitors to their website and of course to their museums.

Liam Wyatt (Wittylama), the Wikimedia Foundation's Cultural Partnerships Fellow, gave a talk to all attendees during which he talked about his time as "Wikipedian in Residence" at the British Museum, in June of last year.

For more information, see the blog post (in German).

Wikimedian in Residence for Open Science

Daniel Mietchen has been awarded a grant by the Open Society Foundations to become the first Wikimedian in Residence on Open Science. His role will be to try and find ways to reuse and repurpose primary scientific research published in open access journals like Public Library of Science in Wikimedia projects like Wikipedia, Wikiversity and Wikimedia Commons.