Content Partnerships Hub/Helpdesk/Content Upload/Natural History Museum

Content Partnerships Hub

Improving the Wikimedia movement’s work with content partners

Content Uploads

Description

Wikimedia UK has requested support from the helpdesk of the Content Partnerships Hub, for a project to upload content from the Natural History Museum of the United Kingdom.

The Natural History Museum has one of the widest natural history collections in the world including the largest collection type specimens (the specimen or specimens which are used to describe the species in science) as well as collections from Darwin, Linnaeus, Wallace, Anning and others. The collection includes species from all over the world and holds both specimens and fossils as well as an extensive mineral collection. The museum is digitising over 5 million specimens in their collection (video of the process). Their research and digitisation aims to support researchers working on biodiversity, climate change, food and health.

Their online database (based on CKAN) holds over 2,600,000 images (click the search button and then click on images), the default license is compatible with Wikipedia. Each image in their collection is between approximately 50MB and 1GB. This includes over 600,000 lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) images. Image include standard DSLR images as well as x rays, microscope images, macro images etc. This 2.6 million images doesn't exclude NC, ND or license not known filters, or filter out pictures of labels and log book pages etc which may not be suitable for Commons.

The Natural History Museum has very close connections with other natural history connections across Europe and beyond who we could also work with and since all collections use Linnaean classification we can transfer a lot of the learning and techniques to other institutions collections.

Justification

On behalf of the requester

Does it contribute to filling gaps?
Does it help local or global campaigns or events?
Will you learn new skills through the project?
Will it show the content partner the benefits of working with Wikimedia?
Is the project innovative?

Checklist

Technical

Are all technical issues clear and documented?

Legal

Are all legal and ethical issues addressed?

Risk assessment

Have the risks (financial, reputation, unmanageable workload, social, legal) been assessed and the overall risk found to be low or manageable?

Sustainability

Is there a campaign, a competition, an affiliate etc. to make sure that the content is used on the platforms? Will it contribute to building capacity or developing capabilities in the movement? Will the movement learn something from the project?