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 arecollaborative and open projects, meaning they are created and maintained byvolunteers, whose contributions are backed by referrals. At the same time, institutionssuch as the British Museum have an important catalog of their collections onWikimedia Commons, which allows them to have a stable, external repository atno cost and, to the public, easy access to these materials. Therefore, underWikimedia's ideal of "empowering and encouraging people around the worldto collect and develop neutral educational content under a free content or publicdomain license and to disseminate it effectively and globally", the teambegan to generate different instances of public communication of science. Wefocused on the creation and improvement of content on Wikipedia and its sisterprojects (such as Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons), on topics related to NaturalSciences. For example, we improved and created articles related to La PlataMuseum paleontologists and collections, uploaded media content and improved thewikidata repository (wikimedia data repository). It is known that open datarepositories have a great debt with Spanish-speaking publications andresearchers, particularly in paleontology. In this context, the collaborationbetween academia and Wikimedia turns out to be mutually beneficial. For Wikimedia,it grows open data and its quality. For the academia, it enables innovativesteaching methods encouraging critical thinking, writing and reading, threeindispensable qualities for scientific research; development of citation,copyright and licensing expertise; diffusion of research results; use ofwikimedia to share and store audiovisual heritage in digital format; access toopen media; and finally, it helps to spread of academic publications andresearchers profiles thanks to the Wikidata repository.

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