Museu Picasso releases text descriptions of the collection highlights

"If you take care of the press, take care of Wikipedians"  Kippelboy: CC-BY-SA

Is not only about releasing images. There are several ways for an institution for spreading their knowledge in a open way. Museu Picasso team understands culture this way and has decided to release the web texts of 39 artworks from their permanent collection, releasing some textual information about each artwork. This way it is much more easy for wikipedians to create almost 40 entries about the highlights of the museum.

Wikipedians are going to talk about you and about your collection, so why not help them somehow with your text and some book references? Museum's official text about one piece of their collection is a really good point of start to create a good article. Often the communication departments of the museum attach these kind of documents to their press clippings, to facilitate the work of journalists, so...why not facilitate the work of Wikipedians? 



Museu Picasso has taken a major step by releasing this work. In less than a week all its highlights have a Wikipedia article in Catalan, and they look like this one. As Pablo Picasso paintigs are not yet in Public Domain, we decided to create a external link to the images inside the template of the artwork, an imaginary solution to copyright issues. Soon we will create the entries in Spanish and English, and hopefully some other wikimedians will translate them to other languages. This is what I call the spread of knowledge, one of the cornerstones in the mission of many museums and institutions.




Wikipedia is one of the main doors of access to knowledge on the internet, possibly more accessible to the main public than several museum's web sections where the outstanding works are described. If museums are really interested in spreading the knowledge generated within its walls, they should promote the creation of these kinds of shortcuts to their collection.


Who's next?  Be bold.