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Belgium report

DESINGEL arts centre and Wikimedia platforms

By Beireke1

Wikimedia platforms provide access to and enrich DESINGEL’s archive

DESINGEL arts centre opened in 1980 and has built up a rich archive over the past few decades, which continues to grow to this day. Many internationally renowned and lesser known (but not insignificant) names from the world of performing arts and music have presented and (co-)produced their work there. DESINGEL has digitised a wealth of archive content and made it accessible online. This includes posters, programmes and photos as well as audio recordings of introductions and post-performance discussions to provide more context for the work that's available. Programmes produced by DESINGEL often contain short biographies of the artists, which have also been published online. So visitors who click on a page for one of the people involved in a concert or performance can immediately also see their history at DESINGEL.

The number of people and organisations who have appeared at DE SINGEL since 1980 has grown too large to give them all up-to-date descriptions. The biographies that the DE SINGEL can offer are often the most recent ones written for the programmes, so for someone who last appeared at DE SINGEL twenty years ago, that's a twenty-year-old biography. But Wikipedia often has more up-to-date information, and the free licence for Wikipedia content (CC BY-SA 4.0) allows these texts to be re-used on DE SINGEL's website without express permission.

Links to Wikipedia have two main advantages:

  1. As an organisation, you can display good-quality information that you don't need to write yourself because someone else has already done it for you. As an encyclopaedia that lots of people contribute to, Wikipedia has the benefit that you're not the only person keeping the information up to date. And it's often available in several different languages, too. DE SINGEL has a website in three languages, for example, but the biographies there are mostly only in Dutch, whereas Wikipedia often has information about this same person also in English and/or French.
  2. You can add value to the archive you have published online by directing Wikipedia readers to it. Your archive is often a good-quality source of information about the subject in question, after all.

Want to know how DESINGEL approached this? Read more here.


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