The Mixed Museum is delighted to be one of Wikimedia's first Connected Heritage partners! Learn about the project and follow our journey helping improve public knowledge on Britain's mixed race history via Wikimedia on this page.
Wikimedia UK is the national platform for open knowledge, bringing together practical and policy expertise about Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects. Delivering an impact of over 1 billion views each year and engaging thousands of people through advocacy, education, outreach and partnerships, Wikimedia UK demystifies and drives engagement in open access to information.
Since March 2022, The Mixed Museum has been working with Wikimedia as part of the 'Connected Heritage' project. This Wikimedia-led programme aims to share under-represented content through Wikimedia sites while also improving digital skills and ensuring digital preservation.
Connected Heritage is funded by DCMS and The National Lottery through The Heritage Fund's Digital Skills for Heritage initiative. Our Connected Heritage partnership team consists of Dr Chamion Caballero from The Mixed Museum and Leah Emary, Dr Lucy Hinnie, and Dr Richard Nevell from the Connected Heritage Wikimedia UK team.
For a deeper dive into the partnership's specific activities:
Click on our Wiki Interns link to learn about the work QMUL university students did to diversify Wiki content using material from our collections over a four week period in March 2022 and March 2023.
Coming soon: how our Wikimedian in Residence Leah Emary helped us develop a sustainable Wiki volunteer model.
The Mixed Museum was born from a desire to make scholarly research on the history of racial mixing in Britain more accessible, particularly to a non-academic audience. In 2018, our Director, Dr Chamion Caballero, discussed the benefits for scholars - and academia as a whole - of exploring non-traditional routes and platforms to share research. In particular, she pointed to the potential of Wikipedia as a highly beneficial 'pathway to impact', not least in terms of its public use and reach.
It is no surprise then that The Mixed Museum was greatly interested in the announcement of Wikimedia's Connected Heritage project. It was clear from general prior scoping during research for our museum Timeline and special exhibitions that many Wikipedia pages on Britain's longstanding multiracial history were shockingly patchy, dire or even non-existent! Data provided by Wikimedia highlighting the lack of diversity among Wiki editors partly suggested why this may be. Those uploading material to Wikipedia were a narrow grouping: 87% of English language Wiki editors are men, the majority of whom are from the Global North. As such, the public knowledge shared on Wikipedia is not representative of 'the public'.
As a heritage organisation with a large collection based on robust, scholarly knowledge, we felt that we would be in a great position to help contribute towards making Wikipedia's material more diverse, both in terms of content and editors. The Wiki team thought so too and invited us to be one of their first Connected Heritage partners.
Since March 2022, we have been working together to enhance Wikimedia's content on the history of racial mixing in Britain, and consequently Black and Asian British history more widely.
As a digital museum, data on who visits our site, where they come from, and what they are interested in is something we pay great attention to. While the vast majority of people find us through search engines or direct links, some of our visitors come through referral channel links.
Since the internships and residency began, Google Analytics has recorded Wiki websites as the top referral channel source of traffic to The Mixed Museum.
Referral channels are where websites provide a link out to another website. Some people find us after clicking on an external link to The Mixed Museum from other websites, including Wikipedia.
In the period before the Connected Heritage partnership, the Museum had very little traffic from Wiki sources. In fact, it was listed seventh of our referral channels, with only 25 visitors coming directly from Wiki links. The top referral site then was a National Archives blog post, with 117 visitors.
Since the Connected Heritage partnership, The National Archives referral rate has stayed relatively steady while the Wiki channel link has risen to over 420 visitors, a percentage increase of 5841!
While we love seeing spikes in visitor traffic, more important to us is our visitor engagement. One way to understand whether people find our work valuable is to see how long they spend on our site, and if this differs according to how they find us.
We were very interested to learn that those who find us via Wiki links are now spending an average of 3.44 minutes on the site, compared to before the Connected Heritage partnership when Wiki links visitors stayed for an average of 1.27 minutes.
The new engagement figure is closely catching up to that of The National Archives blog post visitors, which was 5.40 mins in the period preceding the Connected Heritage partnership but dropped to 4.58 mins during the partnership period.
Furthermore, as The National Archives blog post is now static – and buried underneath newer entries – it seems likely that over time, referrals from The National Archives will drop even further, while those from Wiki sources – which can continue to be added to – are only likely to increase.
Clearly, through the more sustained and targeted editing undertaken through our Wiki internships and Wikimedian-in-Residence activities, we have not only attracted more Wiki users to The Mixed Museum, but increased the engagement of these visitors with our work.
In 2023, team members took part in heritage and academic conferences to share news on the activities, outcomes and reflections arising from The Mixed Museum’s Connected Heritage partnership.
In March 2023, Chamion participated in a roundtable discussion alongside two other Connected Heritage partners, Dr Jane Secker and Dr Victoria Araj, at the Heritage Dot 2.0 conference hosted by the University of Lincoln. The discussion was moderated by Leah Emary and Dr Lucy Hinnie from the Connected Heritage team, and chaired by Hope Willard.
The discussion touched on how engagement with Wiki-based projects enabled these three cultural heritage organisations to improve the accessibility of their collections, while simultaneously empowering volunteers and members through embedded digital upskilling. The Mixed Museum’s Wikipedia edits were discussed as an example of ways that open knowledge can place overlooked cultural histories into the dominant narrative. Chamion also described the legacy the Residency will have on the Museum’s future projects.
It was wonderful to hear Josie Fraser from the National Lottery Heritage Fund mention the roundtable as a highlight of the conference during her closing remarks.
The work we did at the Residency around copyright and Wikimedia Commons (highlighted here) was the subject of a paper delivered by Leah to the Museum Ethnographers Conference in Cambridge in April 2023. Slides for Museum Ethnographers Group Conference presentation.
In the presentation, the example of the Brown Babies images sits alongside work done by Martin Poulter at the Khalli Collections and Lucy Moore’s recuperative work to enhance the representation of museums in Oceania on Wikimedia projects. The three projects engage in a conversation about what it is to edit Wiki in today’s context and how we can work together to best surmount these and create a more equitable digital space for open knowledge.
