Results tagged “wiki” from Birmingham Post - Lifestyle Blog

Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery used to have a local history room, there were old police uniforms and a button you could press to hear a snatch of "I can't find old Brummagem". That and the papier-mâché T-Rex is pretty much all I can remember of the museum from my childhood, which is odd because we went there a lot -- it was a cheap day out.

Since then the local history responsibility has been covered a bit by Thinktank, a bit by more local museums such as Soho House -- but that's about to change with a £300,000 grant which BMAG will use to create a new gallery showing the history of Brum from "medieval times to the present day".

A great opportunity. The museum has a wealth of artefacts that would suit this -- many at its collections centre that gets popular but infrequent open days -- and there are some pieces at Thinktank that could do with bringing back into context a little. There are also pieces such as the Baskerville collection at Central Library that it would be great to see in a proper setting.

I've been collecting ideas of what else the museum should have: some have been serious "A retrospective of the old adverts that encouraged families to move from Birmingham into the new towns.", some not so -- but interesting all the same -- "Camp Hill Flyover".

My best times at the old local history museum were when my old granddad would tell me more about (giving the human side) some of the things there. It's a fine line that has to be trod between the kind of interactive, but child-focussed, exhibits seen at Thinktank - and the dry exhibition of artifacts. A local museum has a perfect opportunity to create an experience that not only engages people, but draws on the experience of its potential visitors about the subject.

What price a sort of "wiki-museum" where the public could pop in and add/correct information and even drop off stuff that that they think contributes to the story?

On the face of it the Encyclopaedia Britannica's decision to open up free web access seems like the ultimate victory for Wikipedia, or at least for the free over the expensive, but neither are perfect. There's just not enough information in them.

In a way Britannica's shortcomings are more understandable, they can't cover everything for reasons of space and editorial costs. The restrictions of the paper format and having to pay the editors, although most contributors are unpaid, gave rise to decisions about the relative merits of different subjects - information you could infer rather than read (Birmingham's entry gets 1271 words, Manchester's 5257, hmm). Wikipedia has no such constraints, but while it (or rather the community that controls it) doesn't seem to stop huge long posts on obscure topics - 5875 words on Star Trek as a franchise, not counting pages on each series or film - it does seem to have a downer on which topics are included.

Add an entry on Mr Egg, the café rather than the Scottish Musician, and it will soon be deleted with a message something like " Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed". This is because, while it's often called an uncontrollable lawless place by its critics, Wikipedia has a whole wiki full of rules (don't think you'll be able to edit those either).

It's that gate-keeping of what's considered important that stops Wikipedia becoming the free sprawling Hitchhikers' Guide of geek imagination. Where as Britannica carries restrictions of size (and even the Hitchhikers' Guide To The Galaxy willont - that's why Earth was "mostly harmless" after all) Wikipedia doesn't have that excuse - which is sort of why, for the truly local interest there's Brum Guide.