One year on: 12 months working with the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum

  • October 9, 2012
Coventry Cathedral ruins with rainbow
This stunning photograph of Coventry Cathedral, taken in 2006 was nominated for – and awarded – Featured Picture status as a result of the partnership.

1 October marked the first anniversary of Wikimedia UK’s ongoing partnership with Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, the longest-running GLAM partnership in the UK outside of London. Over the past 12 months, we’ve achieved a great deal. We’ve organised four events at the museum with over 80 people attending in total, the museum has donated images to Commons and we’ve turned readers into editors.

From little acorns

This time last year, we ran a Backstage Pass event at the museum. 25 people attended, coming from as far away as Southampton and Wales. Attendees worked on expanding several articles and created new ones. In January, we worked with the museum to upload some watercolour paintings from the museum’s upcoming exhibition, in addition to several others images from the museum. We also ran a training event for locals, and reached out to several local historians.

A rolling stone…

In March, we ran our first edit-a-thon, based around the historic city of Coventry. Several new editors attended, who have since come to other events. This is key to what we’ve tried to do with this project: we want to keep new editors attracted through the project involved. It’s for this reason that we also now regularly have Wikimeets in the city.

Evolving and growing

Our most recent, and arguably most successful event was Wikipedia Takes Coventry. This was a “Wikipedia Takes…” event where participants set out to photograph the city. Over 50 participants took over 2,100 photographs of historic and otherwise interesting places in Coventry, releasing them under a free license for use on Wikipedia and elsewhere.

So what’s next? We’re having our next meetup later this month and we’d love as many people as possible to come! Our ongoing collaboration continues; head over to the project page to learn more and get involved.

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