GLAM Booklet 2013/Something about us is wrong on the Internet

Something about us is wrong on the Internet

Lots of cultural institutions have asked how to correct incorrect or outdated information on Wikipedia.

Not everything we know to be true will till be true in the future, and Wikipedia has long experience of people changing dates and other details.

However we have learned from experience that not everyone who changes facts on Wikipedia does so in good faith, and those who do include some people who have a distinctly non-standard view of reality. So we are increasingly emphasising that wikipedia is a tertiary source summarising information published in primary and secondary sources.

Curators and archivists have an inherent advantage here in that when you want to correct a fact on wikipedia you can publish a blog post or similar on your institution's website and then cite that to support the change on Wikipedia. This is useful for factual changes such as improved C14 dating and reattribution of objects.

Best practice is not to edit articles about your institution or anywhere else where a reasonable person would consider you had a conflict of interest. However every article has a talkpage, and you are very welcome to post requests there such as "With effect from today we have just changed our name from "museum of *******" to "******* museum" Here is a link to the announcement. Please can someone without a conflict of interest rename the article and create a redirect from the old name. A volunteer will usually come by and make the necessary change. If after a week nobody has responded then add the 11 characters {{Help me}} to your request.

An exception to COI editing generally exists for adding media to articles which lack them, so if an article lacks a picture or video then it is usually OK for an institution to supply one. This is because Wikipedia would rather have a photograph of an actor performing in a particular role

Experts are of course more than welcome to edit Wikipedia articles that relate to matter within their professional expertise. However Wikipedia has a policy of Neutral Point of View, so if there are conflicting theories about something amongst mainstream academic sources please try to accommodate that in what you write.