Strategic Proposal: Maintaining Wikipedia Entries for Emerging and Living Artists

NB: This proposal was originally written for my library school course, LIS 655-01 Digital Preservation, at Pratt Institute. The assignment was to propose a way for a cultural institution to use Wikipedia in its strategic planning and/or to help carry out its mission. I am not affiliated with either WCMA or MASS MoCA and this was written without their input.

Proposal

Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) and Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) should consider incorporating Wikipedia into their online presence by creating and editing pages for contemporary artists and artworks in their collections. Doing so would not only contribute to the field of scholarship of contemporary art, it would also draw a larger audience to the digital collections of WCMA and MASS MoCA. Wikipedia is a free, easy-to-use platform which could easily be incorporated into existing marketing and publication models, and represents a potential audience of thousands of new users (including students, researchers and casual browsers) for WCMA and MASS MoCA’s digital educational resources and image collections.

Background

The Berkshires in western Massachusetts are known as a cultural haven for visual and performing arts. Two of its most popular art institutions are MASS MoCA and WCMA.

MASS MoCA is a contemporary visual and performing arts museum located in North Adams, Massachusetts. Its stated mission is to “catalyze and support the creation of new art, expose our visitors to bold visual and performing art in all stages of production, and re-invigorate the life of a region in socioeconomic need”.[1]  It embodies this mission by exhibiting new art and artists, granting artist residencies, and providing numerous educational programs. The museum is a converted industrial site with warehouse spaces ideal for large installations and unconventional artworks. The museum has been a boon to the regional economy as well: according to MASS MoCA, it generates $20 million per year.[2]

Just a short drive away is WCMA, the art museum of Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. It is an integral part of the college campus and the community, regularly hosting classes from the college and tours for elementary school children. It has a strong teaching mission, and focuses on collecting works that support the curriculum of Williams College classes and have strong educational potential.[3] Like MASS MoCA, it cultivates contemporary art, serving “as a laboratory for the production, exhibition, and critical discussion of works by living artists”.[4] Each of these museums houses unique collections that include fostering the work of contemporary and local artists. They work closely with educational and scholarly communities (from elementary to college and university levels), with stated missions that focus on teaching. WCMA has an online digital collection already in place, which includes high quality images and teaching materials for K-12 educators.

Assets and Strengths

Both museums have strong ties to the local community and provide invaluable support to emerging artists. They have well-established reputations in the art world. They utilize art history and fine arts students at nearby colleges in their internship and educational programs. Both museums also have strong institutional support. WCMA is a department of Williams College, and engages closely with the college on using art to teach across departments. MASS MoCA has already completed two phases of renovation on its site, and is set to expand its gallery and performing arts spaces even further through $25 million in funding from the state government.[5] With these strong assets, both institutions are vital proponents of education and new art.

Opportunities for Improvement

However, there are some significant challenges these museums must deal with on an ongoing basis. While the Berkshires are a popular tourist destination, its location is relatively remote, making it more difficult to engage with users from outside the Berkshire region. WCMA addresses this issue with its online digital collections. It currently has a 13 separate digital collections available on its website, but the interface is somewhat limited and unappealing. MASS MoCA archives its exhibition information online, but does not have a searchable digital collection of artworks. Their educational outreach focuses on users who can actually visit the museums in person. WCMA has tried to remedy this by providing K-12 art history teaching guides on its website and creating two online education modules for Egyptian and Indian Art. Yet these resources are limited in scope, with only a handful of images available within the education modules. None of the contemporary art exhibited at WCMA is included in the education modules, just in the downloadable PDF teaching guides.

Plan of Action for Wikipedia

These museums would greatly benefit both their institutional reputations and further their educational missions by increasing their online presence. They could create and bolster their digital collections, revamping and redesigning their websites, and aggressively marketing themselves on social media, all at a high cost of time, money and effort. But there is another, easier way they could augment their digital output which would directly benefit the institutions, their artists, and their educational users. They could become editors for the popular online encyclopedia, Wikipedia.

WCMA and MASS MoCA should develop a Wikipedia editing project that incorporates the below items (in increasing order of time/effort):

1. Editing and expanding existing Wikipedia pages on WCMA, Williams College and MASS MoCA
2. Editing and expanding existing Wikipedia pages on emerging artists
3. Creating new Wikipedia pages for emerging artists

For the first option, WCMA and MASS MoCA simply take more involvement with the management of their own separate Wikipedia entries. For example, WCMA could add a list of public artworks on campus to the page for Williams College or create a list of recent exhibitions on its own Wikipedia page. The second and third options involve more active engagement. Both institutions would edit or create Wikipedia pages for the living artists they have or will exhibit. Creating entirely new pages would involve the most amount of work, but present the most benefit to the artists involved. At the very least, WCMA and MASS MoCA should take charge of their Wikipedia presence and become more involved in editing and enhancing their Wikipedia entries.

Utilization of Existing Assets

Both WCMA and MASS MoCA exhibit new, emerging and contemporary artists and often collaborate on these kinds of exhibitions, sharing share curatorial and editorial resources. For example, in 2008, the two museums (along with the Yale University Art Gallery) launched a retrospective of Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings at MASS MoCA.[6] This makes them ideal partners for working on adding new artists to Wikipedia.

The Wikipedia project may be accomplished by utilizing existing staff in the publication marketing department or intern and volunteer college students. Both WCMA and MASS MoCA already have internship and volunteer programs in place, so it would be straightforward to add Wikipedia duties to existing positions. Many of these interns and volunteers study art history at Williams College or other nearby schools, so this would provide a vital educational opportunity for students to conduct research and add to the scope of knowledge in a real, tangible way. With online tools, scholarship is changing, and Wikipedia is just one of the ways academia now engages online. Supporting Wikipedia in this way would demonstrate that WCMA and MASS MoCA are also on the cutting edge of education, not just art. WCMA may also collaborate with the faculty of the Williams College Art History Department on a class assignment to create/edit pages for living artists. The relationship between the department and the museum is already close, and faculty could be open to the idea of giving students the chance to actually publish their art history research in a well-known forum.

Opportunities for Exposure and Scholarship

By using Wikipedia, each institution has the chance to link their digital images and scholarly information with a popular research/discovery platform. The point of digital collections at WCMA was to try and reach a wider audience than those that would be able to come into the museum itself; incorporating images and information into a hugely popular platform like Wikipedia would better serve that mission. Rather than trying to build an audience and a marketing campaign from the ground up, WCMA and MASS MoCA would harness the community of users on Wikipedia. Images could be added to Wikimedia as well Wikipedia, taking advantage of another platform that is already popular with students and educators. An ongoing Wikipedia project would be especially important for increasing the exposure of emerging artists who may be underserved or not represented in Wikipedia at all. Wikipedia could serve as an in-progress digital artist file and catalog raisonne, where information such as lists of important works, exhibition histories, artist statements, and artistic styles could be collected into one place instead of scattered throughout the Internet on different museum, gallery or artist websites. For example, MASS MoCA’s Wikipedia page contains a list of past exhibitions. Yet many of the artists who participated in those exhibitions do not have Wikipedia pages at all. MASS MoCA already has exhibition images and information; it would not be difficult to create an artist page from that content. One advantage of Wikipedia is that creating a page also creates opportunities for other users to add new information.

Editing Wikipedia would also increase exposure for WCMA and MASS MoCA themselves. While MASS MoCA has a rather extensive Wikipedia page already, WCMA’s entry is only a few, uncited lines. Neither WCMA’s nor Williams College’s Wikipedia pages mention anything about the artwork in WCMA’s collection or public artworks on campus. Jenny Holzer and Louise Bourgeois have two sculptures on campus. Holzer’s piece is listed on her Wikipedia page, but Bourgeois’ is not. These artworks received extensive press when they were installed and are beloved by both students and visitors, but as far as Wikipedia’s users are concerned, these pieces are marginal. Both institutions already create and publish content regarding their artists, artworks, and exhibitions. If one searches for “Jenny Holzer” and “Williams College,” the first three results are from the WCMA website: the content often exists and has already been vetted by the institution. A Wikipedia project would merely add another venue for publication. WCMA and MASS MoCA have an amazing opportunity to add directly to a hugely popular research site, increasing exposure for their own institutions and for the artists they champion.

Potential Drawbacks and Solutions

At first glance, there may be some downsides to an ongoing Wikipedia project. First, any Wikipedian candidate must be trained to use Wikipedia and training materials should be produced. Then, there is the cost of time and effort on the part of Wikipedians and review by supervisors. Wikipedia articles and edits demand the same rigorous, high-quality production and review that any institutional publication merits. If interns or other non-subject specialists are responsible for editing or creating Wikipedia articles, there must be some sort of editorial oversight. Even if the content is created by curatorial and/or marketing staff and merely uploaded into Wikipedia by interns, some sort of review process would need to occur. As with any digital project, copyright must also be taken into consideration if images will be uploaded into Wikimedia.

However, none of these issues are insurmountable with careful planning, and the benefits far outweigh the downsides. Wikipedia already maintains training and help documentation, which supervisors at WCMA and MASS MoCA could base their training documentation off of. It is not a particularly difficult system to learn, especially since it is probably already very familiar to potential editors. For reviewing articles, this may be accomplished as part of a regular editorial, curatorial or marketing review process; copyright issues would also be resolved during this time. If editing Wikipedia is part of a class assignment, professors can review as part of the grading process. Working together to share artist information and creating documentation would lessen the burden on each individual institution. It also opens up additional educational and special event opportunities for students and interns, like site visits, archival tours, or group edit-a-thons at either museum location.

Conclusion

Wikipedia is a powerful tool with a huge built-in audience and support community. Utilizing it accomplishes multiple important tasks for the museums and for contemporary art as a scholarly discipline. By creating and editing articles on Wikipedia, WCMA and MASS MoCA can directly enhance their own reputations, further their educational missions, and support emerging artists.

References

[1]  Our mission. (n.d.). In MASS MoCA: Museum of Contemporary Art. Retrieved from http://www.massmoca.org/mission.php

[2] As cited in Cook, G. (2014, March 6). MASS MoCA plans to double its size with $25.4 million from state. WBUR: The ARTery. Retrieved from http://artery.wbur.org/2014/03/06/mass-moca-double

[3] Building a teaching collection. (n.d). In Williams College Museum of Art. Retrieved from http://wcma.williams.edu/collection/building-a-teaching-collection/

[4] Mission. (n.d.). In Williams College Museum of Art. Retrieved from http://wcma.williams.edu/about/mission/

[5] Cook, 2014.

[6] Ibid.