Edit-a-thon at Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona

Viquimarató at Joan Miró Foundation. Kippelboy. CC-BY-SA-3.0

Today we have done an Edit-a-thon at the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona, ​​with the aim of creating or expanding articles related to the exhibition Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape, just finished at Tate Modern that will be seen in Barcelona in October 2011, before travelling to the National Gallery of Art, Washington in May 2012. Today we have given a big push to our Wikiproject, increasing referrals to specialized information from the Library of the Foundation. We also wanted to socialize the project. Edit-a-thons are a good place for museum professionals and Wikipedians to meet.

Amical Viquipèdia has reached an agreement with the Joan Miró Foundation whereby pasted QRpedia codes will be shown next to the most outstanding works of the temporary exhibition, one of the most importants about Joan Miro curated during the past 20 years.

This is a very important project in a tourist country as Catalonia, where the population is bilingual and any text displayed on the walls of the museum should be both in Catalan, Spanish and English, at least.

Using QRpedia is a new way of seeing, a new way of visiting museums, accessing to culture. Since mobile Internet is here, the desire to immediately satisfy our curiosity is here too. We cannot wait to get home to see what are the main features of an artistic movement or what it meant when an artist painted a particular work. We want to access to knowledge in our language, now, everywhere and for free.

Museums have the mission to preserve, study and disseminate their collections.The Miró Foundation understands these concepts well integrated into the twenty-first century, making a step forward, giving a vote of confidence in the free knowledge, very aware of what it means today.

The Wikipedians have answered them  with our greatest enthusiasm.

Over the next few days the articles will be translated into English and Spanish and we will ask the international community to get engaged and translate them into their own language. It depends on them that the future museum visitors can access to the knowledge in their mother tongue.

Roger Bamkin and Terence Eden, the creators of QRPedia, are revolutionizing the way to visit museums. Congratulations.