Students and faculty from Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) have developed and launched the nation’s first organized effort to document public art information in Wikipedia.
Wikipedia Saves Public Art (WSPA), a growing collection of articles prepared for the online open access encyclopedia, makes monuments and outdoor sculpture – from the famous to the overlooked – accessible to all. It is a unique and major step toward sharing and preserving an often underappreciated segment of the world’s cultural heritage.
“No other university, museum or municipality has created a public art collection within Wikipedia—this is a first, even though Wikipedia has been around for almost a decade and now has over 3 million articles. Our effort is also unusual because we have included global positioning system (GPS) coordinates in all of our articles, which allows linkages via location-based computer applications like Google Maps,” said Jennifer Geigel Mikulay, Ph.D., assistant professor and public scholar of visual culture at IUPUI, who has spearheaded the project.
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That’s where IUPUI students and faculty from the School of Liberal Arts and Herron School of Art and Design come in. They are researching, cataloguing, photographing and writing articles on public art pieces in Indianapolis with the hope that the movement will expand exponentially across the nation and around the world. Dozens of Indianapolis public sculptures, many from the IUPUI campus (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IUPUI_Public_Art_Collection), have been documented through WSPA.
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“Wikipedia is open to covering all kinds of topics, including art, all the time, but this is the first coordinated effort to get public art information into Wikipiedia. This is truly making public art available to much wider publics,” she [Geigel Mikulay] added.
