If every year of Wikipedia’s life coincided with a numerical data relating to the entries it contains, it would not be enough to quantify one million per year. 22 years after its inception, the online encyclopedia features 23 million unique entries in over 300 languages.
The free knowledge tool by definition feeds on its collaborative nature: from 2001 to today, they are the quasi 300,000 active volunteers every month to implement its flow, for an average total of 345 changes per minute. The platform, which travels at a traffic equal to 1.7 billion unique monthly loginspoint now to involve all museums through the All the museums on Wikipedia initiative, promoted by Wikimedia Italia, in collaboration with Icom Italia, Creative Commons Italia, the Cognetti de Martiis Department of Economics and Statistics of the University of Turin and the co-financing of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Wikipedia, with all its debated limitations related to reliability, has undoubtedly been providing a contribution to the dissemination of knowledge via digital. Through this project, the crucial step is precisely that of becoming a primary source, given that it is the institutions themselves that open up directly.
The invitation is addressed to over 3,000 cultural institutions, so that can place a selection of images and documents on the Internet with free tools and licenses, in view of an Open Access Policy. Expanding cultural inclusion, diversifying the forms of access, is after all one of the points of the National Plan for the Digitization of Cultural Heritage:
“Open access and in general the opening of public content – he explains Iolanda Think, president of Wikimedia Italy – are now recognized as sustainable tools that they enhance reuse, interpretation, research and creation of new products and services in accordance with the principles of open data, open government, open science and the centrality of communities, as clearly explained by the Faro Convention, to which Italy adhered in 2020″.
Museums, ecomuseums, archaeological sites, parks and foundations who own permanent exhibition collections can join for free and make their collections accessible online through a wizard, through Wikimedia Commons, the database that hosts over 90 million freely used images, and the Wikidata collaborative database, up to Wikipedia: ” We want all Italian museums on Wikipedia because we want them connected to the world – continues Pensa – We want them to benefit from the fact that they exist more students interested in the collectionsmore families who organize their holidays to discover sites never seen before in Italy, more researchers who can study the archaeological finds, historical documents and fossils preserved in our country”.
Inevitably, the distribution of knowledge and free knowledge are combined with the digital society: “When we talk about free knowledge – is the reflection – we are talking about something very precise: free means that photos, texts and data placed online are available to everyone for all uses, free of charge, without the need to register, give away your data or be bombarded with advertising. The European Union in Open Data Directive reiterated the importance of open content for the benefit of citizens and businesses. If cultural heritage belongs to everyone, it must truly be available to everyone.”
Opener of the project the Egyptian Museum of Turin, which has digitized and made accessible on Wikimedia 2,300 artifacts, out of a heritage of about 40,000. Images and information, such as provenance or materials, are therefore returned to the user/visitor in a scientific and timely manner: “Museums – underlines Christian Greco, director of the Egyptian Museum – are the material encyclopaedia of the generations that preceded us. Our collections belong to the public res and represent a piece of collective memory. To bring the collection to lifein order for the studio to develop and for the cultural and creative industry to develop, there is an absolute need for all the collections to be accessible to everyone and in every place”.
The Egyptian Museum stands out among the most avant-garde cultural institutions in Italy on digitization and the topic of Open Access. On its website it is possible to consult a selection of almost 3,000 of the approximately 4,000 objects in the collection, the images can be freely downloaded and reused under the Creative Commons license, and the digitization of the museum’s historical photographic archive is underway, which houses around 45,000 objects divided between glass and celluloid plates, slides, 19th and 20th century prints that document a period of time between the second half of the 19th century and the early 2000sin addition to the Italian archaeological missions from 1903 to 1937 in 14 locations in Egypt, which brought over 30,000 finds to Turin.
This kind of process has been going on for years all over the world. The American giant Smithsonian Institution last year it opened up its digital archives and put them in the public domain on the Smithsonian Open Access platform. Millions of contents thanks to a project that frees 2.8 million images from copyright.