Does your genealogy society, historical society, or local museum want to share their holdings with the public? Wikimedia Commons has been available for some time for that purpose. Best of all, Wikimedia Commons is a free service for all: free to the organization that uploads information and free to anyone who visits. However, uploading holdings to Wikimedia Commons has been a somewhat complex task in the past, requiring a significant amount of technical expertise. That has now changed. Minimal technical expertise is now required, thanks to some new software tools available.
The GWToolset allows the organization to generate and upload a single XML file containing metadata (using arbitrary, even mixed, schemas, with some limitations) for all items in a batch upload, prompts for mappings between the vocabulary used by the organization and the vocabulary accepted by Mediawiki, and then pulls the files into the Commons.
You can read more by starting with a brief article in Slashdot at http://goo.gl/Kdd4sE. That short article contains links to a couple of longer articles that describe the operation of the GWToolset.
Recent Comments