Wikipedia

I had an idea to try and encourage museum patrons to try and help me
document some aspects of the sculptures on the grounds of my museum,
so I made a blog post about it.

    <URL:http://www.imamuseum.org/
        blog/2008-03-26/wikipedia-entries-its-just-lunch/>

I'm interested to know what fellow conservators think of the idea,
in particular about the question of "astroturfing."

That is to say, is it a conflict of interest for a conservator to
write a Wikipedia article about an artwork that they've worked.

I think that publicly sharing information about the treatments we've
done on artworks may work to answer some bit of James Beck's claim that
conservators make decisions in seclusion about the world's cultural
property.

In general I'd be interested to know if any other conservators have
considered writing Wikipedia articles.

Richard McCoy
Assistant Conservator of Objects
Indianapolis Museum of Art
317-923-1331 ext: 150


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                  Conservation DistList Instance 21:52
                  Distributed: Tuesday, April 1, 2008
                       Message Id: cdl-21-52-009
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