CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

In this work we analyze the interconnections between the Wikimediaprojects and the University. Our experience stems from having formed the Equipode Wikimedistas del Museo de La Plata (La Plata Museum Wikimedians Team) during the first months of social isolation dueto the COVID-19 pandemic. La Plata Museum has been recognized worldwide for itspaleontological collections and research since its foundation. It is part ofthe Universidad Nacional de La Plata, which has worked along with the WikimediaFoundation for many years. Wikimedia Foundation is a nongovernmental organizationwhose most well-known and widespread project is the encyclopedia Wikipedia.Wikimedia includes a media library with more than 87 million multimedia files,a multilingual dictionary and a thesaurus; a catalog of species; a largecollaborative and multilingual database, among others. All of these are collaborativeand open projects, meaning they are created and maintained by volunteers, whosecontributions are backed by referrals. At the same time, institutions such asthe British Museum have an important catalog of their collections on Wikimedia Commons,which allows them to have a stable, external repository at no cost and, to thepublic, easy access to these materials. Therefore, under Wikimedia´s ideal of"empowering and encouraging people around the world to collect and developneutral educational content under a free content or public domain license andto disseminate it effectively and globally", the team began to generate differentinstances of public communication of science. We focused on the creation and improvementof content on Wikipedia and its sister projects (such as Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons),on topics related to Natural Sciences. For example, we improved and createdarticles related to La Plata Museum paleontologists and collections, uploadedmedia content and improved the wikidata repository (wikimedia data repository).It is known that open data repositories have a great debt with Spanish-speakingpublications and researchers, particularly in paleontology. In this context,the collaboration between academia and Wikimedia turns out to be mutuallybeneficial. For Wikimedia, it grows open data and its quality. For theacademia, it enables innovatives teaching methods encouraging criticalthinking, writing and reading, three indispensable qualities for scientificresearch; development of citation, copyright and licensing expertise; diffusionof research results; use of wikimedia to share and store audiovisual heritagein digital format; access to open media; and finally, it helps to spread ofacademic publications and researchers profiles thanks to the Wikidatarepository.

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