British Museum and Wikipedia to collaborate on web content
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Anyone who owns or publishes a website on any given topic is aware of the stiff traffic competition by Wikipedia, the giant online, volunteer-written encyclopedia founded in 2001, whose articles are usually favored by the search engines.
As an example, All-About-Egypt gathers a fair amount of readers from the search engines on articles written with specific key phrases, a form of web writing called search engine optimization. But on broad, general keywords such as “Egypt” or “Ancient Egypt” there’s no beating Wikipedia.
Even a prestigious website like britishmuseum.org cannot compete with the encyclopedia of the web. Matthew Cock, in charge of the British Museum’s web site pointed out that “…five times as many people go to the Wikipedia article (on the Rosetta Stone) as to ours.”
The free online encyclopedia is consulted by an estimated 330 million different visitors a month with billions of page views a year. Its articles are frequently the first result when a search engine is used. Because these articles are seldom written by experts, quantity and quality of information do not necessarily go hand-in-hand with Wikipedia.
Thus, on a “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” approach, officials from both organizations have started collaborating to make sure the museum’s content on Wikipedia correctly reflects the accuracy of information provided by the British Museum curators.
Of a total of 8 million objects in the BM collection, a few thousand pages about them that currently don’t exist could be added to the Wikipedia site, according to Mr. Cock.
Source: The New York Times
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