October 26, 2011
Take part in Share Your Knowledge: follow it step by step
Over 1600 new entries on Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and Wikisource and a large amount of contents released under a Creative Commons license: these are the achievements of the first year of lettera27 Share Your Knowledge, the training project for cultural institutions launched in April 2011. Nine cultural institutions have supported the sharing of knowledges and embraced the use of Wikipedia and Creative Commons licenses to make their contents available, and to plan guidelines that will help follow this direction in the future.

The cultural institutions who took part in the training adopted a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike (CC BY-SA) license for selected content, which they then uploaded on Wikipedia. A significant example is the adoption of this license on Artgate, the online archive for Fondazione Cariplo’s art collection, established in 1923 and now accessible on Wikipedia in Italian and English. 

To mention a few other examples, Africa Centre focused on African poetry on Wikipedia in English, the organisation COSV started to release images of Africa from its photographic archive on Wikimedia Commons and entries such as interculturality and cultural heritage on Wikipedia in Italian were expanded thanks to the collaboration of Heritage and Interculture, an on-line resource run by Fondazione ISMU.

The experience of the institutions taking part in Share your Knowledge, the origins and development of the project, the results achieved so far and work still in progress, are all described on Wikipedia and on the Creative Commons website. The Share Your Knowledge ‘Guidelines’ are also online, an important tool to evaluate the work done so far and ensure it can be reproduced. The guidelines give step-by-step advice to cultural institutions wishing to contribute to Wikipedia and to adopt Creative Commons licenses for their materials.

Alongside the guidelines, another chapter of analysis and reflection is the ‘Evaluation’ section, produced thanks to the contribution of a group of evaluators, which includes Fondazione IULM, DensityDesign Research Lab – INDACO Department/Politecnico di Milano, WikiCulture.net, Guido Ferilli, Flavia Marzano, Ermanno Pandoli, Pier Luigi Sacco, Domenico Sedini, Chiara Somajni and Dario Taraborelli.

The section presents case studies, tied to the adoption of licenses and the creation of new entries, which document the results of the collaboration between the involved institutions and Share Your Knowledge. A visual evaluation, created by DensityDesign Research Lab – INDACO Department/Politecnico di Milano presents, through images, the analysis of the project, the methodology used and the experience of four institutions.


Image: Photo by Valeria Vernizzi