Wikipedia:WikiAfrica/Share Your Knowledge/History

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A guiding path that makes the collaboration among cultural institutions and Wikipedia easier. It has been created for WikiAfrica and gives its contribution to the GLAM project.

Share Your Knowledge   Get Started   Guidelines   Current work   Evaluation in 2012   History  


→WikiAfrica   →GLAM



The spirit of the project is best summarized into two animated shorts; Share Your Knowledge: Why? (subtitled in English, French, German and Greek)...
... and Share Your Knowledge: How? (subtitled in English and Greek).


Share Your Knowledge (2011-2012, sometimes shortened as SYK) is a program that enhances the content and work of cultural organisations through Creative Commons and the Wikimedia Foundation websites, prompted by the good results of a previous experience with the Italian GLAM Associazione Amici del Museo delle Grigne Onlus.


It is also a subproject of "WikiAfrica", which is focused on creating African contents on Wikimedia Foundation's sites (especially articles on Wikipedia) with the involvement of research and documentation centres, institutions for international cooperation and archives. Share Your Knowledge helps WikiAfrica reaching the 30,000 African contents milestone by the end of this year, regarding the number just as a chance to collaborate and engage as many people and institutions as possible. They are both promoted by the Italian nonprofit Foundation lettera27.

Among related activities there were:

How it works[edit]

Careof-DOCVA, Milan, hosts the first SYK Conference, 05/25/2011.

Share Your Knowledge was structured as a pilot training programme for 15 organizations. The programme facilitates the adoption of Creative Commons licenses and the migration of contents onto Wikipedia, Commons, Wikiversity... A tutor and a lawyer, who specialises in intellectual property, support the process. Training provides tools to enhance the use of existing material, and strengthens, through newly incorporated procedures, access to any content they will produce in the future.

The process creates guidelines and case studies that are easy to duplicate and trigger long-lasting, sustainable benefits that attain the mission of cultural organisations. Additionally, experts are involved as external evaluators.

The project collaborates with the organizations to:

  1. Focus on content that has been created and is supported by each organisation;
  2. provide tools that allow access to the organisation’s content, using both the Creative Commons licenses for archival documents, and new procedures;
  3. get users, employees and the public in the production and the promotion of cultural content, mainly using Wikipedia as the central place for this knowledge.

A little bit of history[edit]

It all started with a very simple consideration: contents are amongst the most important resources by cultural institutions. Each institution owns, produces and supports content (publications, researches, databases, music, art, essays, documents, plays, videos, images, press releases, biographies of artists and authors, teaching materials). In the best case scenario, some of these act as documentation of activities, for example when reporting about a project or requesting funds for a new one. More often they end up in dusty archives from which they are never recovered. This is certainly a waste, since resources are invested in the production of these materials, which are sometimes of good quality, and that might still be useful to someone (including Wikipedians). Consider as an example how valuable pictures testifying events or conditions of present (or past) life of a developing nation are; a non-profit association might own some of them, originally meant only to document its activities in that country.

Cristina Perillo (project manager), Iolanda Pensa (scientific director), Federico Morando (Nexa Center and Creative Commons Italy) at the first meeting of SYK, April 2011.

So here is the idea: to restore and enhance those contents, not only by publishing them online, but also releasing them under a free license (CC BY-SA), which optimizes their circulation allowing many of them to be reused on sites like Wikipedia or Wikimedia Commons.

The path was not short nor simple. The institutions involved have participated in numerous meetings and training opportunities that presented and took stock of the various stages; many had never faced the issue of multimedia contents management and, for the first time, they were learning about the existence of free licenses and the possibility of applying them to works for which they hold all the rights. The new license was therefore adopted and spread via e-mail, press release or through the websites' footer, for already-online contents. The institutions also predisposed that their collaborators (employees, as well as interns, alternative service volunteers... ) learned how to upload contents and then published them. Wisely, someone made use of the program for Wikipedians in Residence. Other institutions have instead sought and obtained the support of the project tutors. In the meantime guidelines and procedures pages were published to ensure transparency and encourage replicability. The focus now is on late uploads and general rearrangement (it is particularly important to ensure contents are appropriate to the projects and properly categorized), and case studies about the various partnerships are being developed and get published monthly. Of course, there were difficulties: quite understandable, when you approach for the first time vast communities which speak many different languages ​​and also have different rules, that sometimes are very complex to interpret. Some articles'notability was discussed, in some cases the copyright notices were questioned, some contents were deleted. However these lessons, learned by anyone who has been directly involved in the project, are fully part of the achieved results, because everyone is increasing their own wealth of experience also thanks to them. And then there are many Wiki(p/m)edians from different countries, who have shown their support and their participation in various occasions, such as during the edit-a-thons. Here come real gratifications: the tools we use tell us that entries created and modified within the project get thousands of hits per month, and more than one image was voted as "Featured" and appeared (or will do so soon) on the home page of Commons and Wikipedia in various languages. But these may be not the milestones which make users and promoters prouder. There is also the awareness of having created the program with the highest number of institutional partnerships ever in the GLAM/Wikimedia field (gaining thus support from various local chapters); of having given birth to an idea so well crafted and managed, that it has already inspired at least another project, thanks to the replicability of the program - a project by the Italian association COSV, based on music and free licenses in Vanuatu and Mozambique; of having woven a network of contacts that will not cease to bear fruit for a long, long time to come. Here are some phases and protagonists of this adventure.


The project was launched in 2011 by the Italian Foundation lettera27.

Main partner
Africa Centre;
With the support of
Fondazione Cariplo
In collaboration with
Institutions involved

More institutions join SYK[edit]

More than 50 institutions have in the meantime signed an agreement with lettera27 liberating contents, mainly related to Africa, and thus officially joining the initiative, which is now also endorsed by Wikimedia España, Wikimedia Serbia and Wikimedia CH; a full list of institutions and case studies can be found on Outreach wiki. In 2012 a course was held to train future "Wikipedians-in-residence".

Other contents[edit]

Results[edit]

The Italian association COSV shared details about a project based on free licensed music in Pacific Islands and Southern Africa and involving lettera27, the first "spin-off" of the Share Your Knowledge experience.

Learn more[edit]

External links[edit]

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