ID: 34909
This presentation explores how might we transform a university’s course catalog, expert faculty, and multimedia archives into a global public good through the Wikimedia ecosystem. We explore formal, institutional-scale collaborations that move beyond traditional classroom or departmental-level projects in higher education.
A focus of the effort we have underway at MIT is the shift toward a "multimedia-first" strategy. By integrating video lectures and course materials into Wikimedia Commons, partnerships can go beyond text to bridge critical knowledge gaps in, for example, climate science, technology history, and women's history.
The session will address critical issues of this type of collaboration:
- Navigating the social and technical challenges of high-volume, automated contributions across multilingual projects.
- Transitioning a text-centric culture to effectively host, curate, and search complex digital assets like video and structured metadata.
- Moving from isolated, project-based "edit-a-thons" to permanent models that align with a university’s core mission of knowledge dissemination.
Historically, university engagement with Wikipedia has been siloed within departments or library collections. This interactive session invites the GLAM, education, and multimedia communities to help shape a new model of engagement that respects the volunteer-led spirit of the movement while amplifying the reach of specialized academic knowledge to billions.
