Wiki Loves Art

Wiki Loves Art NL is an initiative of Creative Commons Netherlands, Wikimedia Netherlands and Stichting Museumnacht Amsterdam (n8). The project brought together lovers of photography, museums and heritage institutions to encourage online access to photos of art works from Dutch museums and archives under an open Creative Commons license (BY-SA). The captured pictures are used as illustrations for Wikipedia articles.

This project aimed to complement the online encyclopedia Wikipedia with freely available images of Dutch heritage objects. We support this because Wikipedia greatly lacks supporting imagery in their articles. Wiki Loves Art is based on an American initiative with the same name by the Brooklyn Museum.

Over 45 Dutch museums participated in the event. During the entire month of June 2009, visitors were allowed to take photos of collections of the participating museums. This is quite unique, as some of the participating museums usually strictly forbid photography of their collection. All the pictures were uploaded to Flickr and attributed with a Creative Commons license.

Many of the over 5000 pictures taken as part of the project are now used on Wikipedia.

• KL'ers involved
• Paul Keller pk@kl.nl