Chapter 5.5Wikimedia in a Québec Art Museum

Brief Review of the Literature and Conceptual Framework

In 2006, at a time when concern about the validity of Wikipedia content was dominating public and scientific debate, a research article proposed an argument and a method for increasing the visibility and promotion of memory institutions: It encouraged museums in detail to set up a Wikipedia entry (Bowen & Angus, 2006). It was a few years later, in 2008, that the open GLAM movement really emerged, following the Wikimania Conference held at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina: Holding the conference in this highly symbolic site provided a context where Liam Wyatt, an Australian Wikimedian, saw the potential for structuring long-term relations between the various cultural institutions and Wikipedia. In 2009, the GLAM-Wiki expression and community were forged together in Canberra, at a session organized by Wyatt and entitled “Finding the Common Ground,” which brought together players from libraries, museums, and archives (Lih, 2018). This event helped generate a conversation aimed at mutualizing the capabilities of cultural institutions while converging with the commons movement. Shortly afterward, in 2010, Liam Wyatt became the first Wikipedian in residence at a museum, the British Museum. He set about building the relationship and sharing expertise between the museum world and Wikimedians. At the British Museum, the benefits of this collaboration were quickly realized, given that the article devoted to the museum’s star attraction, the Rosetta Stone, was already being consulted five times more often on Wikipedia than on the museum’s own website (Cohen, 2010).

In the past, members of the public and particularly researchers visited museums, archives, and libraries in person so they could consult documents and images for their work. In the digital environment, the strategies of museums, archives, and libraries now aim to broaden access: They offer new online services and increasingly open practices (Klein & Cardin, 2018, p. 101). These strategies aim to create a more participatory environment; cultural institutions are exploring the possibilities of collaboration and possibly cocreation by renewing the way in which they traditionally ensure user and visitor access to their collections. The concept of the “participatory museum” is becoming a reference point for transformation, with Wikimedia projects regularly serving as a springboard (Simon, 2010). As a result, the concept and open rationalization of access are shifting from a physical dimension to an online presence. They also take into account the capacities for collaboration and participation that form part of the participatory, inclusive, open museum movement and also characterize open GLAM (Evans, 2024; Salgado & Marttila, 2013).

For a cultural institution, the sharing and opening up of collections and information in the digital environment give rise to a number of issues and challenges, with effects going beyond the management of change within the organization. The tradition of museums and especially national museums is characterized by the dimensions of governance, power, authority, and control. These dimensions continue to play a predominant role in the management of digital collections, although this culture of cultural institutions is tending to change little by little despite resistance (Fouseki, 2013). Moreover, it seems that apprehensions about a loss of control over collections or a possible reduction in the number of face-to-face visits, which would depend on the opening up of content and data, are unfounded (Kapsalis, 2016).

The gradual exploration of different Wikimedia platforms therefore provides an opportunity to rethink and update the ethical positioning of museums, particularly with respect to the issues of ownership and copyright on which this redesigned and expanded access for the public depends. More specifically, the Wikipedia experience is leading to debates and negotiations on the ownership of objects, images, and digital data; on the place of their commercial or public uses; or even on their use as commons. Collaboration within Wikipedia projects encourages these emerging uses, which will reflect “the participatory nature, philosophy, and ideology of each museum institution” and the state or degree of each institution’s transition (Fouseki, 2013). The three initiatives presented are part of this process and are indicative of the museum’s transitional identity in terms of openness and participation. The three initiatives serve as examples of strategies for opening up the museum’s collections, information, and data and for adapting professional practices in terms of participation, social inclusion, and openness to new uses.

Other observations are worth making in terms of the changing needs and uses of museum information. Firstly, the use of Wikimedia platforms and the more open licences they recommend for the content of digital cultural heritage are expanding the possibilities for researchers from different fields in the arts, humanities, and social sciences for both accessing and studying cultural heritage (Terras, 2015). Secondly, digital cultural consumption is also likely to extend the range of uses “outside of the expected art context, enabling new forms of hedonic and utilitarian consumption” (Navarrete & Villaespesa, 2020). In other words, the Wikimedian use supported by museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art leads to a new conceptualization of authentic taste that takes into account digital consumption, which in turn enhances the possibilities of more informative uses of a collection (Navarrete & Villaespesa, 2020).

Moreover, the MNBAQ is exploring various collaborations in order to broaden access to the reuse of its data and content by other institutions, mainly of the GLAM type. These collaborations represent a significant challenge where an open and linked data strategy, through Wikidata, for example, appears to facilitate research by “enabling digital humanities researchers to establish links between (and make sense of) the multitude of digitized cultural heritages available on the web” (Alexiev, 2018). This exploration of the facets of Wikimedia as an open system has proved to be a timely, productive, and sustainable choice for the MNBAQ and one that is based on these various considerations, on the renewed missions of museums and their explicit democratization objectives, and on new individual, community, and institutional uses.

The Museum’s Transition to an Open Cultural Institution Model

The MNBAQ’s three initiatives required the contribution of a varied multidisciplinary team drawn from several sectors within the institution: legal affairs, information technology, conservation, collections management, preventive conservation, restoration, photography, archives, and documentation. As mentioned earlier, the initial aim was to make newly digitized cultural content accessible online to different audiences. It very quickly became apparent that the MNBAQ needed to disseminate synchronized, reliable, and verified data on the works and artists represented in its collections—namely, the permanent collection, the study collection, and the loan collection of works of art, not forgetting the vast section of private archives. The museum has a long-standing tradition of collaborating with its users. Each year, it responds to a growing number of requests for information from researchers, students, and the general public. All these people want access to images and descriptive data from national and public collections. Disseminating the entire heritage collection is a great way of bringing citizens closer to works that are less widely exhibited or have not necessarily been the subject of in-depth research. It is estimated that around 25% of works and objects have already been exhibited or reproduced in a publication. The online dissemination of content makes it possible to discover archived and often little-known elements.

In 2016, the inauguration of the Pierre Lassonde pavilion generated significant visitor numbers both on-site and online. At the same time that the MNBAQ got ready to unveil this pavilion, the museum rethought how its collections should be accessed online. As a result, the drive to broaden and open up access to our data and information coincided with the major architectural impetus represented by the new pavilion.

The MNBAQ is a Québec provincial museum that currently holds over 42,000 works of art and thousands of archival documents, objects, and rare books. Since it opened in June 1933, the museum collections have grown to the point where the catalogue now lists more than 4,500 artists, artists’ collectives, craftspeople, authors, and others. As a publisher, it has published more than 1,000 exhibition catalogues and books related to its acquisitions, exhibitions, and other dissemination activities. These publishing activities have generated a significant amount of content, data, texts, photographs, and archival documents to be preserved and shared in the future in accordance with current copyright legislation. The museum’s mission is to make known, promote, and preserve Québec art of all periods, from ancient art to contemporary art, and to ensure a place for international art through acquisitions, exhibitions, and other cultural activities.

The museum owns a number of works of art in the public domain and has a significant artistic and documentary heritage. This corpus is currently being digitized for future dissemination and direct online access. It seemed logical for the MNBAQ to explore web dissemination projects whose orientations and objectives would be compatible with the approach favouring reuse by citizens as well as the museum, artistic, and documentary community. We were aiming for digital projects that would enable information to be updated and synchronized almost in real time, and that would give MNBAQ teams the flexibility to manage and monitor processes. For several years now, the museum has been going through a period of organizational and technological transformation, like other cultural organizations. It wants to deploy information technologies and sciences in order to achieve digital maturity and efficiency through increased access. The museum must take into account documentary norms, interoperability standards, the development of the semantic web, and ontologies in order to exchange and aggregate information through the creation of federating platforms currently under review (Canadian Heritage Information Network, Société des musées du Québec, Répertoire sur le patrimoine culturel du Québec, Artists in Canada directory, etc.). We are therefore preparing the ground by exploring the potential of Wikimedia tools.

Following the discussions initiated in 2018 to develop the MNBAQ’s digital strategy and thanks to funding from Québec’s Digital Cultural Plan, the museum decided to explore and experiment with open-access content and open data projects, considering that it was a museum, documentary, and research player within Québec’s artistic and cultural ecosystem. The museum manages a library, a documentation centre, and private collections and archives, which it aims to disseminate and make available to as many users as possible. Before disseminating information on web platforms, the museum takes into account the legal and governmental framework in Québec and Canada regarding copyright, the respect for and protection of personal information, access to information, proactive disclosure, and so on. A major digitization project underway since 2018 has already resulted in thousands of images being made available on the MNBAQ’s collections website.

According to Christelle Molinié of the Musée de Bretagne in Rennes, France, “By opening up to the collaborative practices of Web 2.0, the work of documentary mediation takes on a new dimension that encourages interaction, appropriation and re-use of works by the public, while continuing to participate in the fundamental missions of museums in terms of study, accessibility and dissemination of collections in the public domain and cultural democratization” (Fraysse, 2015).

We have therefore taken into account the importance of free access and the possible reuse of certain data, public information, or royalty-free images in the digital approach to all these projects at the MNBAQ.

The recent experiences and digital innovations of the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ) and the Cinémathèque québécoise have strongly influenced the MNBAQ’s thinking about the documentary projects to be planned and tested within the organization and for the community on the web. This has in turn led to an approach of openness and the free sharing of information, which until now had only been accessible in the organization’s databases. As Jessica de Bideran and Romain Wenz point out,

For a cultural institution, a presence on Wikipedia is based on two movements that are a priori antagonistic: on the one hand, the desire to achieve tangible objectives (in terms of writing articles, enhancing the value of heritage holdings and raising the institution’s profile), and on the other, taking into account the collaborative and evolving construction of knowledge resulting from the choices of a free and autonomous community. (De Bideran & Wenz, 2020)

The various initiatives have helped develop new digital skills and raise awareness of the challenges of open culture, thereby facilitating better links between traditional and participatory approaches to museums.

First Project: Exploring Wikipedia Articles in French

In 2018, the MNBAQ explored the potential of Wikipedia in French by directly integrating existing articles on artists into the new version of its collections site. An overview of the collection sites of several art museums demonstrated the value of exploiting Wikipedia in different languages. The Tate Modern includes a link for each artist directly on its site, sending users to the relevant English-language Wikipedia article. The multilingual approach is a real advantage, as it allows us to display the names of artists in their original language—Innu, Japanese, and so on—in addition to French.

The trials and proof of concept involved testing a daily automated computer script. This script made it possible to update a selection of public data as contributors updated the French-language version of Wikipedia. In the summer of 2018, an initial experiment was carried out on a selection of 300 Québec and Canadian artists whose works of art are exhibited in the MNBAQ pavilions. We began by studying the number and quality of articles on Wikipedia in French. The follow-up, monitoring, and examination of these articles were conclusive in terms of access, script stability, monitoring for vandalism, and above all, reliability of the sources.

The project took off in autumn 2018. From the outset, we realized the importance of offering training to staff members about this collaborative project so we could find out about their apprehensions and perceptions and also pursue the project in line with certain priorities: the notoriety of artists, published sources, works exhibited in the museum’s pavilions, and so on. Since 2019, the museum has been adding draft articles as well as articles on emerging Québec and Canadian artists, with the complicity and collaboration of the French-speaking Wikipedian community around the world. To date, more than 1,000 articles in French have been linked directly to our collections site. These articles are constantly evolving and are consulted by hundreds of internet users every day. There are as many articles in English as in French on the artists in the MNBAQ’s collections. Some artists are represented in more than one language. In all, 128 languages are represented. This multilingual contribution is invaluable in promoting the visibility of Québec and Canadian artists.

We began organizing workshops on how to contribute to Wikipedia in 2019. As well as discussing the myths surrounding the encyclopedia, we wanted to make a range of reliable, published sources from the MNBAQ library accessible to the public, including books, periodicals, newspaper articles, and so on, as a way of documenting the subjects targeted by the participants. Unfortunately, the pandemic put a stop to this on-site component of the workshops. It may be repeated in the future with themes for each workshop. A project to write articles in French as part of a college course has been launched. As Marta Severo points out, “This trend is part of a phenomenon known as citizen science. This term has become particularly fashionable in recent years; it is intended to include all initiatives that facilitate the participation of non-professionals in scientific research and the construction of scientific knowledge” (Barbe & Severo, 2021, p. 88).

Second Project: Exploring Wikidata

In June 2019, a second project linked to the opening up of content was added, with a view to combining the Wikipedia project with the revision of certain public biographical data held by the MNBAQ in its collections management system as well as in its integrated library management system. The comparison, standardization, scrubbing, and updating of the data in these two systems required the collaboration of several colleagues so we could harmonize the data and compare it with data already accessible in the free Wikidata knowledge base. This database is published collaboratively and hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation.

The Wikidata element for each emerging artist has been integrated directly into one of the fields in the MNBAQ’s collection management system. This Wikidata identifier uses common reference systems so the data extracted and visible on the collections website can be linked directly and the artists can be identified efficiently. Each Wikidata element for an artist gathers and collates unique and perennial identifiers (Virtual International Authority File [VIAF], International Standard Name Identifier [ISNI]), perennial authorities from the Library of Congress, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Online Computer Library Center, the Union List of Artist Names, and so on, as well as direct links to the Répertoire du patrimoine culturel du Québec, the Dictionary of Canadian Biography identifier, each artist’s official website, their social networks, and so on.

This open, structured data from Wikidata is used bidirectionally by the MNBAQ, which imports and adds new data as it acquires works of art. A visualization tool in the form of a dashboard helps track the progress of the project. This tool makes it easy to add new artists’ authorities to be created as the weeks go by while keeping a history of the actions undertaken. This is a very important tool because it improves the management of the information disseminated, the traceability and logging of actions in terms of updating both external data contributors and MNBAQ staff. The museum has taken advantage of the recent creation of an ISNI agency within BAnQ to create ISNI identifiers for certain deceased artists, in collaboration with BAnQ. We are preparing the ground because this unique identifier with an international scope is proving to be extremely useful in interoperability platform projects to properly identify artists and communities and offer the possibility of a chain of monetary rewards in the not-so-distant future.

Information professionals, the registrar’s team, and the museum’s curators reviewed and approved the inclusion of thousands of items and properties in the Wikidata knowledge base under an open licence. This task was carried out with rigour and meticulousness and was needed so that the public data could be harmonized with published sources and up-to-date knowledge about the artists targeted by this Wikidata project. What’s more, there is considerable potential for this data to be reused by other organizations or individuals in the long term. To date, the data entered in Wikidata links the artists in the MNBAQ’s collections to more than 1,000 museums and collections around the world.

In addition, this project is exploring and clarifying the quality of data and the sharing of open-access content. The project has led to professional exchanges with other museums in Europe and the United States, and we have been able to confirm the authenticity of certain works of art by cross-referencing our data with that of international museums. The project provides daily monitoring of more than 7,000 items in Wikidata and makes it easier to update the data every day in our collection management and library systems. In addition, properties linked to the existence of archival fonds and documentary files on Québec and Canadian artists have been integrated into this Wikidata project, as well as mentions of Québec and Canadian museums, which hold works by artists represented at the MNBAQ. Finally, several elements have been created for art historians, museums, galleries, exhibitions, and so on in order to link the data described in Wikidata.

In June 2020, a Wikimedian contributor and the Wikidata community proposed and obtained the creation of a unique identifier for an MNBAQ artist. This property encompasses more than 4,000 elements and now enables the museum to effectively monitor data on the artists represented in its collections.

The MNBAQ thus joins a number of art museums interested in sharing content and proactively disclosing their data on Wikidata and Wikipedia, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smithsonian, the American Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and the Saint Louis Museum of Art, to name but a few.

The fact that the Wikimedia community is also getting involved in the projects has been a motivating factor for several colleagues. After 3 years of work, we can see the extent of the collaborative work carried out on French-language Wikipedia articles and Wikidata data by the MNBAQ. Every day, several additions, modifications, and adjustments are made to the data, properties, and texts.

The MNBAQ is also collaborating on the Wikidata project Sum of All Paintings, which lists more than 95,000 paintings from the collections of museums, public institutions, and private collections around the world. This project links data on artists to their paintings and sometimes constitutes the beginnings of a catalogue raisonné in which the data is sorted chronologically or by the theme or subject represented.

In December 2020, this project led to the use of a new identifier on Wikidata for the MNBAQ: the digital identifier of a work of art on the website of the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec. This identifier lists descriptive data, images, and so on for each painting held by the MNBAQ. Once again, it was the community that created this identifier and made it possible to reuse the data. Our role is to make adjustments and modifications based on research carried out by the conservation team. This specific project has made it possible to discover the images contributed to Wikimedia Commons over the years. Contributors show continuous interest in royalty-free images of certain works in our collections. We regularly upload new images in line with user needs and current research topics.

Third Project: Images in Wikimedia Commons

A third initiative relates to the potential for disseminating and reproducing images under a free licence. The museum has explored and targeted the possibility of placing certain images of works of art, archival documents, and so on in the public domain via the Wikimedia Commons media library. Allowing certain works to be downloaded, distributed, and reproduced without having to request permission from the MNBAQ is a major test for the institution. The selection of images for this project was based on the needs of the museum’s internal and external users. Prior to this integration project, the team had already contributed images of works of art taken during their exhibition or presented in the museum’s public spaces. The contributors to Wikimedia Commons are passionate photographers who devote their time to visiting public places and spaces and then sharing the fruits of their labour for the common good. As Simon Côté-Lapointe points out in his article “Les documents audiovisuels numériques d’archives,” “Everyone is potentially an expert, a creator and a collaborator thanks to the democratization of digital tools, as demonstrated by initiatives such as Wikipedia, YouTube and the Internet Archive. And this is particularly true of the audiovisual sector, thanks to the democratization of the means of manipulation” (2019, p. 46). In order to launch such information disclosure and sharing projects, we had to accept that the data shared would not be complete during the first iterations. The documentation and observation work has enabled us to acquire new skills in terms of data normalization and standardization. The museum team’s multidisciplinary approach made it easier to meet deadlines, take ownership of the projects, and integrate a new way of working. Certain fields in our database and their concordance with properties in Wikidata are still being explored: gender identity, sexual orientation, nationality versus citizenship, and membership of an ethnocultural group. The reflex is to turn to the artists concerned and respect their choices as to whether or not to disclose certain information.

The impact of these three projects is tangible given that a percentage of referencing comes from digital actions carried out on Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Wikimedia Commons. Queries and analysis tools show that a growing number of visits to the collections website stem directly from these projects.

Discussion and Conclusion

In short, these exploratory projects are putting in place a digital knowledge base among staff so they can learn how to edit content on the web. We need to plan for an alignment with the semantic web and the ontologies that will have to be implemented in the heritage and cultural sector over the next few years. Another notable benefit is that the conversation with internet users has been enriched since the collections were put online, as they participate directly in the documentation through their comments and exchanges with the museum. What’s more, some of the data contributed by the MNBAQ to Wikidata have already been incorporated into other projects underway within the cultural community in Québec and Canada, focusing on the performing arts and the literary arts, including a number of collaborative projects in the regions of Québec. This effort by the communities of practice demonstrates the desire to ensure that everyone—on the basis of their databases, documentation, and published sources—gains greater visibility of Québec’s cultural content while at the same time adopting the principles of standardization and future interoperability across different disciplines. Experiments such as the WikiProjects at the MNBAQ are gradually bringing users closer to a new pooling of resources, digital humanities, and the potential for viewing and editing their data and metadata. This type of open-content project can only enhance the value of information in a museum institution through the digital learning that takes place. These projects pave the way for collective and collaborative intelligence while enhancing the value of the knowledge held by an organization and consolidating its commitment to the open-access and open GLAM movements.

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