Exploring collaborative digital heritage communities: A quantitative assessment of Wiki Loves Monuments in Italy

The debate on the digital transition of cultural heritage has often focused on the opportunities and challenges faced by cultural institutions, but in recent years a growing attention has been devoted to understanding the role of grassroots and collaborative initiatives in contributing to this process. In this article, we study the Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM) contest in Italy, one of the largest and most widespread collaborative projects contributing in documenting cultural heritage through open access tools. Using quantitative and qualitative evidence collected from ten editions of the initiative, the paper investigates the contribution of collaborative digital communities in the production and sharing of knowledge about cultural heritage on the Internet. In particular, our findings point out to systematic differences in the rate of documenting monuments across regions and types of municipalities, as well as peculiar patterns of the WLM community in the modes of contribution and re-use of images in Wikimedia projects. The analysis adds insights into the opportunities and challenges that collaborative projects through open access and re-use of digital content can offer for the enhancement of cultural heritage.