As a Wikipedian, I totally agree with Shelley’s and the BM’s approach to the COI issue outlined here.

Believe me, we do very much encourage cultural institutions to contribute writing to Wikipedia, so long as they do so in a transparent manner.

Agreed that it would be nice to hear from participating institutions on the issue of did it work for them or not. For Brooklyn, I think our thoughts will become clear as we publish the next several posts (I’ve got two more, Erin has at least one coming).

Regarding COI in general, we are asking our staff to setup their own wiki accounts if they want to edit, to identify themselves by name and position in the bio and then to always make edits logged in, so their contribs can be tracked. We have two people here who are going to brush up the article on Feminist Art (seems appropriate that someone from here would work on it). I’ve asked them to make sure that anything that mentions the Brooklyn Museum specifically (links, paragraphs) needs to go on the discuss page, not the main page so the wiki editors can vet it as neutral third parties and decide if it should be published. To us that seemed like a good middle ground to start and I’m sure the wiki community will chime in pretty fast if they see a COI.

A couple of questions:
Was it successful? It would be very interesting to have all of the participating institutions weigh in here on how it worked (or didn’t) work for them.

The COI discussion is very interesting. The question is how can employees of institutions responsibly contribute to Wikipedia about the artworks in their institution. I should imagine that it would be very beneficial to have folks from inside helping to share information about their institution’s collection because they may be the most well informed people about it.

I wonder to what extant all institutions think about this? Is it okay for curators and conservators, and whomever else to edit articles about artworks within their collection? I think so, for sure.

I would like to point out that the informational conflicts, such as they were, were mostly a function of different ideas coming from the different museums.

This is a basic issue when working with diverse institutions, not a unique problem of working with a “community”. And it is the type of issue that we could much better handle through a greater lead-time and clearer planning by all from the beginning.

Yup, we are going to get there after a big downward spiral in the next post :( Some of the participants were such troopers and awesome people, that’s the bright light at the end of the tunnel. :)