Early in 2016 I volunteered to work with Andrew Woods, Curator of Numismatics, on a Wikipedia project. The idea was to search the online encyclopaedia for images of Roman emperors on their coins. I searched every emperor between Augustus to Honorius, highlighting those who had reigned long enough for coinage to be issued and where coins from the reign were known to be in the York Museums Trust collection. The idea was to upload images of these emperors to Wikimedia and Wikipedia where they would be visible around the world.

I had no experience of using Wikipedia or knowledge of Roman emperors but soon began to learn how to access and check the quality of images in each entry. Creating a spread sheet line for each emperor I reviewed the Wiki entries. If the images already online were poor or average, a subjective assessment, this was recorded and a list created to try and obtain better images of coins from the York Museums Trust collection.

The museum has a collection of 11,000 Roman coins, it was a thrilling experience to be able to look at and then handle these coins, under the supervision of Andrew. We spent a morning looking at coins from 33 emperors who could have improved images added to their Wikipedia page.

After choosing the best coins from the collection to photograph I proceeded to learn another new skill, photography using the advanced digital camera. I think, for me, this was the best part of the project as I felt privileged to be handling artefacts that were nearly 2000 years old.

The coins were of all denominations, from silver denarius to gold solidus.

After photographing the obverse and reverse sides of each coin the next stage was to create a template which could be used to upload the information to Wikimedia. I added a description of the image, the inscription and accession number using the museums’ ADLIB cataloguing system.

Once this was done and the images matched to the relevant template I proceeded to upload them via Wikimedia to the individual entry inserting them in the text at a suitable point, i.e. if currency was mentioned. You can see all of the files uploaded by clicking here. The links for each of the two coins can be found here and here. They can also be found on the Wikipedia pages for each emperor, Tiberius and Valentinian II.

This project has been enjoyable and fascinating, I have learned a lot about Roman emperors and coins not to mention improving my computer literacy. Since adding the information the York Museums Trust has recorded approximately 600,000 “hits” on the sites so it has made the project very worthwhile. I am now looking at doing the same thing for early medieval kings up to 1066 so watch this space.

Please visit the Yorkshire Museum website here to find out more about our numismatics collection.

If you are interested in joining York Museums Trust as a volunteer you can find more information here.