The Swedish National Heritage Boards cooperation with Wikipedia
Wikipedia is one of the top destinations on the web when people look for information. In 2012 the Department for Heritage Resources launched a pilot project to investigate the possibility of the Swedish National Heritage Board using Wikipedia in order to more effectively reach people with cultural heritage information.
The Swedish National Heritage Board hired two persons, “Wikipedians in residence”, one who instructed a group of ten officers from the National Heritage Board in editing Wikipedia, and one technical developer. The technical work provided a means to automatically create standardised info-boxes for ancient monuments and building information. In addition, we developed a basis for automatically finding links to the National Heritage Board’s information in Wikipedia and linking back from Kringla (a search engine for cultural heritage information from Swedish museums).
In 2013 the Department of Heritage Resources carried out a so-called ‘linkathon’ where officers of the Swedish National Heritage Board linked Wikipedia articles to cultural heritage information in the National Heritage Board’s databases.
The images produced and uploaded within the contest Wiki Loves Monuments (12,495 images in total) has been linked to information in the National Database of Built Heritage and The Archaeological Sites and Monuments Database. The images also appear in Kringla.