Where in the Wikiverse is the Brooklyn Museum?

Today, we are releasing a new feature in the labs area of the collection online that reports on our recent project to cross-post no known copyright images to Wikimedia Commons.  When we started the project to cross-post all those images, we had no idea what would happen. We figured a good analysis would be a perfect addition to the Brooklyn Museum collection labs.

wikilang_chart.png

This labs project highlights our progress by detailing how many images we’ve cross-posted to date and uses the MediaWiki API to show what the wiki community has been doing with the images once they landed there.  If you are curious, like we were, to find out how the wiki community has been interacting with our images, this is the project for you! Check out… Where in the Wikiverse is the Brooklyn Museum?

Author profile

About Shelley Bernstein

Shelley is the Chief of Technology at the Brooklyn Museum where she works to further the Museum's community-oriented mission through projects including free public wireless access, web-enabled comment books, projects for mobile devices and putting the Brooklyn Museum collection online. She is the initiator and community manager of the Museum's initiatives on the social web. She organized Click! A Crowd-Curated Exhibition, Split Second: Indian Paintings, and GO: a community-curated open studio project. In 2010, Shelley was named one of the 40 Under 40 in Crain's New York Business and she's been featured in the New York Times. She can be found biking to work or driving '74 VW Super Beetle in Red Hook, Brooklyn with her dog Teddy. ::contact::
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3 Responses to Where in the Wikiverse is the Brooklyn Museum?

  1. Very interesting; thanks for posting this.

    What tool did you use to get the data?

    The data it shows that most people edit location, genre, medium, and subject–all very useful bits of information.

    It’s also super interesting to see that nearly 10 edits have occurred for each image!

    Certainly the number of images used in articles will continue to grow.

    Best,
    Richard

  2. pfctdayelise says:

    Very interesting page! Will it automatically update over time?

    I’m also curious if anyone has a take on the deletion discussion. I have no idea how bequeathing affects copyright. Maybe it’s a kind of irrelevant concern for the Brooklyn’s purposes?

  3. Hi Richard. We’re hitting the MediaWiki api with a PHP library called “Wikimedia Bot Classes” to retrieve the raw embed and revision data. From there home-baked scripts take over. The classification of revisions is arduous: For each upload we iterate over the full set of revisions, identifying the modification in each, and classifying each modification as one or many general classes of edit (e.g. location, genre, subject). This has largely been automated but still requires human intervention to classify some ambiguous edits.

    @pfctdayelise: Yes and no. The page updates nightly to reflect new embeds, but the process of categorizing revisions requires too much human intervention to automate. The What Are They Editing chart will thus remain frozen until another analysis is run.

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