വിക്കിപീഡിയ:ഗ്ലാം/കേരളം - പൈതൃക മ്യൂസിയം/en

Malayalam Wikipedia and GLAM projects

A synopsis :

GLAM stands for Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums. GLAM is an initiative by Wikimedians to include the wealth of knowledge from galleries, libraries, archives, and museums into Wikipedia and its sister projects. It is also an attempt to include the employees and visitors of GLAMs to join the community as editors and contribute their knowledge and contribute in subjects in which they are interested. These initiatives also help to preserve the unique knowledge of GLAMs and their staff, because they very rarely use digitisation. It often happens that the immense knowledge possessed remains largely limited within these institutes, giving less scope for research and improvisation. The wealth of knowledge from the past might be lost for ever if adequate measures are not taken to preserve them in a more easily accessible and freely distributable format. The western world (especially European countries) have already done many GLAM and similar projects to nurture and protect their traditionally acquired knowledge to make it available for the future generations.

Kerala- Museum of History and Heritage (http://www.museumkeralam.org/) is one institution, with whom Malayalam Wikimedians would like to work with in order to make its store of knowledge accessible to the whole world and preserve it for generations to come in a digital format. Wikipedia, run by Wikimedia Foundation, is a powerful tool to save knowledge in an easily accessible and free to use format. Wikipedia is run by lakhs of volunteers across the globe to make knowledge freely accessible in all prominent languages, and is currently the largest encyclopedia in the world in terms of content. Wikipedia is involved in sharing knowledge not only in international languages like English, but also in our mother language Malayalam (and in 280 other world languages) to enable people of all languages to easily share and acquire information in the languages of their choice. Malayalam Wikipedia is one of the most active projects among Indic language Wikipedias which will soon complete ten successful years of existence. An initiative like GLAM in Malayalam language will surely increase the quality and depth of the content available in Malayalam Wikipedia. Also it would celebrate Malayalee and Kerala treasures to the whole of Kerala and the whole of the world. The project will serve as an impetus for other indic language Wikipedias to create similar projects to document the wealth of the knowledge.

GLAM initiative : Project Plan

The GLAM initiative is aimed at collecting information about the objects displayed/preserved in the participating institution and add them to Wikipedia with the active participation of the employees of that institution. In other words, this project is aimed at the digitization of the knowledge offered by the institution using Wikipedia as a medium. This link (http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM) gives the details about the GLAM activities undertaken by foreign language Wikipedias like English, German, French, Polish, and other Europaen language Wikipedias.

Benefits for the Museum

• The details regarding the collections of the museum will be propagated to masses of people accessing Wikipedia and details are more likely to be translated to other languages, which in turn attracts more attention.
• Besides, Wikipedia is an excellent platform to organize, classify, and store museum related data. The employees of the museum will have an excellent opportunity to familiarize themselves with the digitization process and to type in Malayalam.
• The employees would promote the noble cause of sharing and promoting their mother language and in sharing their knowledge.
• The employees will also benefit from a much larger and more global audience through this effort.
• Also the institiution is expected to obtain get global attention through the sharing of it's knowledge to a global audience like Wikipedia.
• Digitization would be the starting point for creation of QR codes, which would further enable the museum to propagate its ancestral glory to more people.

Benefits for Malayalam Wikipedia

Information on culture and heritage which was never shared digitally in the past would be added to Malayalam Wikipedia. The project would also help the employees of the museum to be a part of free knowledge initiatives.

Role of Malayalam Wikipedians

The Malayalam Wikipedians would introduce Wikipedia editing and Wikipedia writing style to the employees of the institution, familiarise them with the article writing format, give training to type in Malayalam and teach them the policies of Wikipedia. The Wikipedians' involvement would be to enable the employees to create and edit articles independently on Wikipedia and its sister projects.

Expected Support from History Museum

If permission is granted by the museum, Malayalam Wikipedians will help Museum management to identify interested employees from the institution and students from the Archaeology department of Karyavattom campus and give them necessary training to edit Wikipedia. We expects to identify participants who have basic knowledge in computing and those interested in volunteering. Wikipedians will enable them to write articles on the displays (including the year of discovery, historical importance and additional background.) Photographs of the displayed items shall be taken and uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, our sister project dedicated to media files.

The project is expected to run for a maximum of 6 months during which the collaborative effort of both the museum personnel and Wikipedians would enrich Malayalam Wikipedia with quality information on museum's exhibits.

We expect the museum authorities to :

• grant permission for the conduct of this project in the museum
• decide a time bound duration for the project which would be not more than 6 months
• discuss with Wikipedians about the content to be added to Wikipedia as a part of this project and make a solid plan
• recruit interested staff members to join the project and provide them permission to access the exhibits of the museum to collect details regarding them
• involve the students from Karyavattom campus in the project and, if necessary, train them and provide them access to the exhibits
• Allocate a fixed time for employees each day to involve in this project. (Every week a maximum of 5 hours would be sufficient.)
• Provide infrastructure to the employees (computer and Internet) to involve in this project.
• Grant permission for taking pictures and videos of the museum exhibits and sharing them online (via creative commons share alike license)
• Involve local Wikipedians and others who are interested in the project in all stages of the project, and give them access to the Museum

The museum is not required to arrange for funding for the execution of this project since Wikipedians are involved in this project in voluntary basis. The only expense involved would probably be that for arranging meals for a maximum of 20 participants for the one-day training program, training materials, user guides and other requirements for the training program will be brought by Wikipedia volunteers.

Stages

Stage 1

• Identify museum staff, students, and interested individuals interested in the project
• Identify the requirements for the participants

Stage 2

• Provide training to selected participants
• Decide the articles that needs to be created on Wikipedia as part of this project
• Divide article among participants, but encourage collaborative editing in the selected articles
• Explore the possibility of obtaining local resources (including reference books) for the project

Stage 3

• Creation and expansion of articles
• Provide assistance to the participants in citing references and adding pictures to the article
• Evaluate the project on a weekly basis and make changes if necessary

Stage 4

• Recognise and satisfy the goal of the project with the collective support of Wikimedians and participants
• Evaluate and record the ideas shaped out of the project
• Create an offline version of the contents added to Wikipedia via this project
• Popularize the project and find means to conduct similar projects in the near future