Tuesday, November 03, 2009

The WikiCup is about quality and, Durova is a winner


For a few years now there is the WikiCup, a competition on the English Wikipedia aimed at creating quality content. It runs from January until the end of October and it generates a great amount of featured articles, featured pictures, did you knows, good articles ... all in all around 1.500 pieces of quality content.

I am really pleased that Durova won.. It is a massive boost for the restoration movement as it demonstrates the appreciation for great quality illustrations. It is not that Durova only contributed with illustrations but it is certainly what she is known best for and what made her win.

With the WikiCup 2009 secured, Durova will retire from the WikiCup, she indicated that she wants to spend more time on working on and the promotion of content collaboration with GLAM's. We would like to see more content from more museums and archives from all over the world and, in order to make this happen, digital restorations of what they have to offer makes a difference.

To make the whole restoration movement scale, we need to recruit in the whole world people interested in this. It is much easier when working with Arabic museums or archives when you speak Arabic and you can translate annotations into Indonesian for material from the Tropenmuseum when you speak Indonesian. In order to make this happen we have to coach people and teach them how to do this.

Congratulation to Durova, may you bewitch and beguile with your splendid work for a long time to come !
Thanks,
       GerardM

No comments: