The video is interesting. (rush transcript while I listened once, ignored boring bits).
"We had something like 700 plus Google news articles the following morning.
Which i think is a success for Bristol, putting Bristol on the map. Which is really what this is about. But can we help put Bristol on the map longer term, that's why we want to talk to you today." -Steve Virgin
Bamkin comes, does most of the talking. Says a Bristol museum, the M-shed, has a tiny Wikipedia article and that people probably won't visit something the town spent 27 million building unless the article is improved.
Bamkin touts reporters using Wikipedia to do research.
"You actually need an expert to improve most of our pages now." - Bamkin
Bamkin explains a project to promote the Derby Museum. "We invited wikipedians to work with Derby Museum and as a result of the meeting we had about 10-20 articles written on it...
we were told that Wikipedians would never be allowed to write museum labels because we'd be putting people out of work etc.. but we did want to do it." (Now talks about the use of QR codes at the Derby Museum).
"Now we've got Wikipedians in Indonesia editing stuff inside the Derby Museum.
It's pretty cool."
Talks about the cost of translation being overcome using free Wikipedia labor, so that museums can have QRcodes that lead to information in lots of languages.
"We made the front pages of the main Wikipedias (English, French etc..) it
's giving us more hits to Derby Museum's web page, actually going from our page, clicking through to their page, it's fulfilling our mission to educate and to share information around the world, and
it's raising the interest and status of the city. So hopefully I can talk a bit more about that, how it effects a city, because people actually see giving money to museums are kind of a waste of money if you like.. actually your museum funding can actually be a benefit to the city."
Talks about how 1,200 new articles in various languages were created on the Derby museum ("
somehow, no German, I don't know why").
"
We're also doing something for the tourist industry. So here we've got Joseph Wright Day, a big event in Derby, we were on four main pages, the mayor was giving out prizes to people in five different countries, and we were on the French wikipedia (main page) three times.
"So Bristol, have we got into Google? (
slide says: "Improving a city's Google position on the web.")
We've got 12,000 links in Derby, so, from a the position on Google is determined by the number of links you've got. The more links you've got, the higher you go up the ratings. On English Wikipedias, if you search for a museum in the UK I suspect the M-Shed is not going to be in the top five. But Derby Museum, smaller than this one, is possibly up there with the British Museum going 'we're famous' because we have got lots of articles written in Ukrainian and therefore on the Ukrainian Wikipedia we're an important museum. Who put Bristol on the map?
If you look on the French Google map, i Haven't looked at the French google map, but if you haven't got an article in French how are French people going to want to know, when they click on Bristol, are they going to see the M-Shed, are they going to be able to see information about it? I don't think so because you don't have any information in French. So in conclusion (now shows slide on benefits. 1. QR codes add value to museums at no cost. 2. Wikipedia pages mean updating is easy. 3. Linking to smart phones creates accessibility. 4. Language support is possible using QRpedia. 5. Opens up your multi-ethnic city. 6. Curators create global impact for their museum and can't read it)."
Virgin back on (with slide that says "Bristol Museum and Banksy" and "120,000 queued in month)." : "So very quickly, we just saw this example from a couple of years back.
A fantastic global footprint for Bristol, an amazing thing. 120000 people queued in one month to see it. More people viewed this (showing slide of a Wikimedia UK page on Bristol Museum and Banksy).
If you had combined the two and had that being translated into God knows how many languages you would have had, what was that number earlier, 120,000 people in a month, you would have had millions. Because that really did put Bristol on the map. But by God, if we had that in 250 languages it would have been on the world map. And that's how I think we can involve everybody across the city, whatever race, color creed they are in writing the content. The museums could fulfill that desire to do that outreach that they're desperate to do for the cost of a piece of laminate and a piece of sticky paper that they could put in a discrete corner of everyone of their exhibits.
It's a phenomenally cheap, very imaginative way to absolutely energize a city and put a city on the map. And there you go..."
.)
