A Wikipedian at Mart

"We want an open museum that promotes new ideas, encourages debate, exchanges and collaboration, a plural museum that gives voice to different opinions and perspectives through programmes and activities that interpret the complexity and density of contemporary society."

From Mart's mission statement

From May to October 2014, The Mart hosted a Wikipedian in Residence. As part of Wikipedia's GLAM Project, the Museum entrusted the selection process to Wikimedia Italia, which identified Daniele Metilli as the ideal candidate: someone who could challenge himself, propose new solutions to old problems, and actively involve visitors and residents in the promotion of the museum's Collections. 

Collaborations between museums and the Wikipedia community began in 2010 with the first residents housed at the British Museum, the Picasso Museum in Barcelona and the Palace of Versailles.
Mart's project was the first of its kind in Italy.

Working side by side with curators, archivists, librarians and art communicators, Metilli transferred the quality content developed by the Museum onto the popular online encyclopaedia. His work has made a wealth of data freely accessible to many on subjects, such as: the Futurist avant-garde; verbo-visual research; sound poetry; architecture archives; the artists from Trentino represented at ADAC; and Italian and international authors whose works of art, archival material and books are conserved in the Museum. The residency was also an opportunity to put online images and documents of interest to the scholarly community and the general public.

Finally, the residency was an opportunity for Metilli to acquire new professional knowledge and to engage with museum standards and practices.

Download the report

60 biographies on Wikipedia

+20% Trentino artists on Wikipedia

3,000-word biographies, on average

2,000 biographical details on Wikidata

850 works on Wikidata

1,200 scanned pages

Mart and GLAM

Throughout 2014, in Wikipedia's GLAM project section, the biographies of more than 60 artists were written or substantially revised. These biographies were chosen from among those most representative of the Mart's Collections and the 2014 exhibitions, including all those featured in the Archivio del '900.

In addition to artists historically linked to Trentino, such as Futurist Roberto Iras Baldessari, painters Aldo Pancheri and Luigi Ratini, sculptor Fausto Melotti and engraver Carlo Cainelli, the biographies of architects Luciano Baldessari and Agnoldomenico Pica and that of eclectic intellectual Carlo Belli have been expanded.

New biographies have been created of verbovisual artists Ugo Carrega and Stelio Maria Martini, the founder of self-historicism Guglielmo Achille Cavellini, futurist dancer Giannina Censi, journalist and art critic Silvio Branzi, and others. The complete list is available on the project's Wikipedia page.

The biographies were compiled according to Wikipedia's standard rules and formats, incorporating existing information whenever possible.  Often already existing texts produced by Mart were adapted and reused, in particular those by the Historical Archives, which chose to share their biographical records under an open Creative Commons licence. The work covers the full breadth of the archive — around sixty collections.

An entry for the Archivio di Nuova Scrittura was created to describe one of the most important collections preserved at Mart. The full Archivio del '900 entry was also expanded.

Wikidata

In parallel with the qualitative work of writing on Wikipedia, a more quantitative, but no less important work was carried out entering all the biographical information that could be expressed in a structured form in the Wikidata database. About 2,000 biographical data involving 200 artists were uploaded. Together with this data, information on all the exhibitions shown at the Mart in 2014 was entered and links were created between the artists and the exhibitions.

 

This makes it possible to perform complex queries; for example, to obtain from Wikidata the list of artists who were students of Luigi Comel at the Scuola Reale Elisabettina in Rovereto, to view Carlo Belli's family tree and find out that it intersects with those of Fausto Melotti and Carlo Fait, or to obtain a list of artists whose works were displayed in the exhibition “The war which is coming is not the first one”, sorting them by date of birth or nationality.

War books

Mart has digitised, transcribed and put online three rare books that tell the story of the Great War in real time.

For the exhibition “The war which is coming is not the first one. Great war 1914-2014”, Mart has collaborated with the Wikimedia Foundation to make literary texts free of copyright available to the public.

The selected texts come from the Mart Library, or from other institutions such as Biblioteca Civica G. Tartarotti in Rovereto, Biblioteca Provinciale dei Cappuccini in Trento, and Museo della Guerra in Rovereto, and have been displayed in the exhibition alongside installations, paintings, photographs and other objects, with the aim of inviting the viewer to a deeper understanding of the events of a hundred years ago.
The Mart digitised the texts, transcribed them, and uploaded them to Wikisource, the platform for publishing copyright-free literary texts.

Each book was uploaded in two different formats — image and text — in order to allow both the reading of the original and the free re-use of the text.  The terms of reuse also include commercial exploitation: the Mart has made these resources available in the belief that free access to literature can also be a stimulus to the economy of culture.

 

Books